CSDE Affiliates Vince Wang (Real Estate), Arthur Acolin (Real Estate), Rebecca Walter (Real Estate) examined employment status and wage trajectories of recipients of the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program from 2005 to 2018 in a recent article in Housing Policy Debate. Drawing on a national dataset containing 22.5 million householder-year observations, the study shows most housing voucher recipients did not work while in the program, and those who did earned relatively low wages despite some growth. These results highlight that the Housing Choice Voucher program is primarily a housing stability policy for people outside the labor force. Efforts to encourage program exit should focus on the smaller group of recipients in the workforce, supporting their employment goals.

CSDE Affiliate Patricia Louie (Sociology) examined the implications of multiracial status for health by examining specific multiracial groups (Black-White, Black-Asian, and Asian-White adults) versus their monoracial counterparts in an article published in Race and Social Problems. Louie and her co-author draw on an 11-year pooled sample of the nationally representative Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (2002–2012) and find that different hypotheses fit the health risk status of different multiracial groups. The upward assimilation hypothesis applies to Asian-White adults (closer to White adults than Asian adults), the minority status hypothesis applies to Black-Asian adults (closer to Black adults than to Asian adults), and Black-White adults have profiles that differ depending on the outcome under study.  The results provide insights into how specific combinations of multiracial status fit into the racialized social structure as well as the analytic benefits of disaggregating multiracial people into their component groups.

CSDE External Affiliate Ethan Raker (University of British Columbia) and co-authors recently published an article in Demography on “Severe Tornadoes and Infant Birth Weight in the United States”. The authors merged 1991 – 2017 county-month data on singleton births with block-group-level monthly data on the paths of severe tornadoes and block-group data on the distribution of the population at risk of a birth, and then estimated difference-in-differences models in which the treatment variable is equal to the percentage of the population at risk of a birth affected by the tornado. Exposure to a tornado during pregnancy reduced birth weight for Black mothers.

When: Friday, January 9, 2025 at 12:30 pm

Where: 360 Parrington Hall and on Zoom

We are looking forward to hosting CSDE Affiliate Andrew Messamore from the University of Washington for the first seminar of Winter 2026 Quarter on Friday, January 9 in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative. Seminar posters are available here or can be picked up during seminar.  You can also subscribe to our Trumba Events to receive regular announcements about CSDE-sponsored events.

Declining sole proprietorship rates among landlords are viewed as indicators of growing corporate control of rental housing. However, declines in sole proprietorship may reflect the popularization of investment vehicles across amateur landlords, causing studies to overestimate the ownership share of firms. Moving beyond political economy, this presentation conceptualizes landed capitalism as a complex and adaptive housing system, and proposes declines in sole proprietorship reflect the emergence of ownership opacity across the landlord population. Evaluating this perspective through an enumeration of landownership in Austin, Texas, results from longitudinal analysis show that the ownership share of small landlords is stable, but that processes of portfolio consolidation, investor adaptation, and regulatory evasion are encouraging opaque ownership structures across landlords of nearly all sizes. These findings suggest ownership opacity is a form of emergent complexity created by population evolution among landlords, and demonstrate the utility of housing systems theory for both the field of comparative landownership studies and policies that aim to address disparities in housing ownership and tenure.

Dr. Andrew Messamore is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington. Messamore’s research examines the rising popularity and formalization of rental landlording in the United States, as well as how a new generation of urban housing movements are confronting urban inequalities. He has also published widely on the use of quantitative and computational methodologies in social science. You can find his work in Social Problems, Social Networks, Urban Studies, Social Currents, Social Psychology Quarterly, Administration & Society, and Socius. Messamore earned his BA in Sociology form the University of Texas Austin, his MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, his PhD in Philosophy and Sociology from University of Texas at Austin