The Washington Post and the Seattle Times recently quoted CSDE Affiliate Gregg Colburn regarding Washington’s housing crises and rising homelessness.  In the Washington Post story, Working Americans struggle with homeless crisis amid lack of affordable housing, and the Seattle Times story, How WA governor candidates want to tackle housing, homelessness, Colburn notes how the homeless crisis has been growing across the U.S. It is the “unfortunate but predictable result of ongoing rent increases,” says Dr. Colburn. Washington State has been dealing with this issue for quite some time. Homelessness rose as rent prices soared over the past decade, along with a shortage of housing or affordable housing for those with a median income. This issue has always ranked high among issues that Washington voters want to tackle, and now there is an upcoming election for governor. An expert in housing and the state of Washington’s challenges in this area, Colburn worries that if “elected leaders don’t understand the forces driving homelessness and housing affordability, then ‘most policy prescriptions will keep us in this situation for longer.’” Colburn is Associate Professor in UW’s Runstad Department of Real Estate and co-author of the book Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns. To learn more, read the Washington Post article and the Seattle Times article.

Recently CSDE Affiliate Dr. Kam Wing Chan was interviewed by Switzerland’s largest daily newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung on China’s recent household registration reforms. An English translation is here. In July, he and former CSDE trainee Dr. Xiaxia Yang (postdoc at King’s College, London) also published a commentary in Caixin Weekly, a major economics weekly in China. In the commentary “To Stay or to Go Home? they provide estimates about the degree of settlement of China’s internal migrants by comparing migrants’ age profiles in 2010 and 2020 based on census data. Their commentary draws on an analysis published in Eurasian Geography and Economics earlier and is an extension of their research featured on CSDE website last year.

CSDE Affiliates Kathryn McConnell and Jack DeWaard co-authored articles in Nature Communications (Rare and Highly Destructive Wildfires Drive Human Migration in the U.S.) and Population Research and Policy Review (Population Change in Wildfire-Affected Areas in the United States: Evidence from U.S. Postal Service Residential Address Data). They report that wildfire impact is growing across built environments and will continue to grow due to the rising average of global temperatures. Wildfires appear to cause human migration and population change in certain U.S. areas. McConnell, DeWaard, and co-authors sought to “investigate whether and at what destruction threshold wildfires have influenced human mobility patterns by examining the migration effects of the most destructive wildfires in the contiguous U.S. between 1999 and 2020.” They also examine “the utility of data on active and vacant residential addresses to help inform local and timely monitoring and assessments of how areas impacted by wildfires and extreme weather events more broadly lose (or not) and subsequently recover (or not) their populations.” Data on addresses is provided by the U.S. Postal Service to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

CSDE Affiliates Mahesh Somashekhar, Chris Hess, Ian Kennedy, and Kyle Crowder recently published article in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World examines how real estate owners use home security discourse to affect property values. In “How Do Real Estate Actors Advertise in Mixed-Income Neighborhoods? The Importance of Home Security,” they discuss the history and current state of housing advertisements and how it impacts U.S. neighborhoods. Historically, then real estate industry emphasized privacy and exclusion in their property listings, which helped entrench patterns of residential segregation. However, recently some neighborhoods are becoming more rather than less diverse, as indicated by the growing number of mixed-income neighborhoods. The authors sought to investigate whether this increase in diversity means that advertisers are cutting back on their “exclusionary rhetoric when marketing homes in mixed-income communities?” To answer this question, the authors analyze over one million Craigslist rental listings posted in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas in July and August of 2019.