Research Overview

My research focuses on American cities that have lost a large share of their peak population and employment and now face major issues with property disinvestment.  These cities include most of the past manufacturing centers of the Midwest and many of those in the Northeast.  Cities in the South that have lost their past industrial base have also experienced considerable decline.  I am fascinated by what such cities become, and I aim to contribute to strengthening urban planning’s capacity to improve the conditions for people who live and work in them.  The focus of urban planning has traditionally been to revitalize, rebuild, and redevelop disinvested areas, but such renewal is no longer possible in many areas of these cities.  Therefore, urban planners need to reframe the way they work in such places. 

Further, I want to know how research on such cities can change the questions we ask and the answers we discover in many areas of urban studies.  Detroit is the premier example of a city that has experienced extreme decline.  Therefore, my research focuses on Detroit with the aim of contributing to varied issues in urban studies.

(See Margaret Dewar, Matthew Weber, Eric Seymour, Meagan Elliott, and Patrick Cooper-McCann, “Learning from Detroit:  How Research on a Declining City Enriches Urban Studies,” in Michael Peter Smith and L. Owen Kirkpatrick, eds., Reinventing Detroit (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2015). 

Creating homeownership in the context of tax foreclosure  

With Roshanak Mehdipanah (School of Public Health), Alexa Eisenberg, and the United Community Housing Coalition, I have been evaluating the effectiveness of a pilot program in Detroit to transition renters to homeownership after their landlords allowed property to go into tax foreclosure.  Such programs might offer hope for greater housing stability for low-income households and protection of properties and neighborhoods from further disinvestment.  Rocket Community Fund and UM Poverty Solutions have supported this work.

With the Detroit Land Bank Authority's Buy Back Program and several student research assistants, I have studied the stability of low-income homeownership in properties that have gone through tax foreclosure and failed to sell at tax auctions.  Programs like this one have been noted as possibly increasing housing stability and preserving properties that may otherwise be subject to further disinvestment.  UM Poverty Solutions funded this project.

Saving Detroit’s neighborhoods from mortgage foreclosures

With June Manning Thomas, I am completing a study of how residents and community-based organizations have worked to prevent disinvestment in Detroit’s middle-class neighborhoods.  Between 2006 and 2014, more than one-third of the houses in these neighborhoods experienced mortgage foreclosures, and housing values fell more than 80 percent.  Much of the research on community capacity treats connections to institutions and governmental entities outside the neighborhood as a black box.  We focus on how such connections and specific neighborhood initiatives helped or hindered neighborhood recovery.