I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at The University of Southern California. I received a PhD in Sociology and Social Policy with a certificate in Demography from Princeton University in July, 2024.

My research examines how powerful groups contribute to and benefit from inequality and poverty, with a primary focus on how landlords, speculators, and developers shape urban life. How has the ownership of American housing changed over the past quarter-century, and how do eviction rates, crime patterns, and levels of disinvestment differ when a neighborhood is owned by local real estate companies, national financial entities, or a sea of small, amateur landlords? These questions are particularly important today, as American housing markets undergo a historic process of financialization and organizational restructuring, but they are also particularly difficult to answer, because the growing use of shell companies obfuscates owners’ true identities.

In my dissertation, I developed a methodology that overcomes this problem, drawing on widely available public records to trace through complex corporate structures and identify the true owners of urban land. Over the past year I have led a project to expand that work, creating what is, to my knowledge, the largest and most comprehensive dataset describing landowners available to social scientists. I have used these data to answer simple but previously inaccessible questions about aggregate landlord composition and behavior as well as conduct fine-grained investigations of the largest owners and the networks they inhabit. The ongoing expansion of this work will allow me to examine these patterns on a national scale and produce the first comprehensive picture of landowner variation.