Housing & Neighborhood Dynamics

Quality of Life / Community Reports

Early in my academic career, I was enlisted on behalf of a local nonprofit to be the lead geographic information systems (GIS) analyst for a ‘Quality-of-Life Report’ for several historically marginalized neighborhoods in Tampa. This early experience helped me to see the power that quantitative and qualitative methods can jointly wield, and it opened my eyes to several new avenues of research that I am now pursuing. The experience was formative, and I am excited to engage in similar community oriented projects in the future.

Associated work products:

Strom, E., Fernandez, S., Martyn, K., Venter, W. (2016). "Quality of Life Report for East Tampa/Sulpher Springs/East Lake-Orient Park." Corporation to Develop Communities of Tampa, Inc.

Predatory Lending & Foreclosures

While my preferred methods tend to be more qualitative in nature, I have continued to make use of quantitative methods as a powerful discursive vehicle. For example, after the project discussed above concluded, I became interested in studying the neighborhood effects of predatory lending activity in the pre-2007 period. Neighborhoods subjected to predatory lending activity are known to have experienced significantly worse outcomes in the post-2007 period, so I decided to explore the local context in Tampa.

Working with members of a team that I assembled, we are currently conducting a study that uses mortgage lending; foreclosure; and socioeconomic data to explain geographic concentrations of predatory lending activity in the City of Tampa. This work makes use of Manuel Aalbers provocative reinterpretation of "housing finance as harm" (2016) to investigate these predatory geographies. The project is currently in the analysis phase, and will be ready for submission to a journal by the end of this year.

Associated work products:

Martyn, K.P., Strom, E., Bosman, M.M., and Andel, S. (2019E). “Disparate Predation and Geographies of Financial Harm.” (in progress).