Seongmoon Cho

About Me

Welcome. I am a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning and Development at the University of Southern California and a 2024-2025 Haynes-Lindley Doctoral Dissertation Fellow at the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation. My research investigates housing shortages, residential mobility, and spatial inequality  in U.S. metropolitan areas. I use large-scale demographic and spatial data to examine how market failures in housing supply affect neighborhood change, access to opportunity, and social integration.

I approach housing as both a demographic and spatial phenomenon. My work examines how structural undersupply influences residential mobility, overcrowding, and intergenrational co-residence, particularly among millennials and aging populations. Across disciplines, I aim to inform equitable, data-driven housing strategies by linking traditional sources like Census microdata with spatial infrastructure such as street networks and parcel patterns.

My dissertation analyzes the extent of housing shortages in the U.S. by developing alternative metrics of shortage. I also examine how these metrics are affected by the key factors across metropolitan areas. Furthermore, I explore the implications of historical built environments—like FHA-era street layouts—on contemporary segregation and housing crisis. My research has been published in Housing Studies.

Other projects I participated in include developing a Python-based algorithm to reduce U.S. street networks to explore the commuting patterns, mapping urbanization in a developing world, and conducting hotspot analysis to detect commercial ethnic enclaves in Los Angeles County. Prior to USC, I held an Asan Young fellowship at Asan Institute for Policy Studies. I earned a Master of City and Regional Planning from Seoul National University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Yonsei University. 

[Email] seongmoc[at]usc[dot]edu

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