Research

My dissertation is a three-paper study of the politics of land use in Chicago. Several Chicago wards have introduced a process for adjudicating zoning changes called Community-Driven Zoning and Development, making for an ideal site to discover what happens when communities are assigned greater control over zoning governance. I was drawn to this question because sprawling patterns of urban growth are a central obstacle to climate change mitigation. Yet American cities cannot shift to denser urban forms that can relieve cost of living crises and support walkability and transit unless residents become more supportive of infill development “in their backyards.” The leading expectation in the literature is that participatory planning processes provide a platform for nearby residents to obstruct dense and affordable residential development, whether out of concerns for negative impacts on home values or the threat of displacement through gentrification. 

My first dissertation paper provides a theoretical analysis of this prevailing view, arguing that resident attitudes may be more variable than has been assumed. I theorize four orientations that residents may have towards infill development to establish a conceptual framework for my subsequent empirical studies (see below left).

My second paper conducts a quantitative analysis of how zoning governance in Chicago is transformed when participatory planning processes are adopted. I draw on an original database of zoning changes that I constructed from zoning change applications and spatially joined to Census tract-level data (shown left). The study uses a difference-in-difference design with propensity score matching to select and weight the appropriate comparison wards. Results show that the wards which implemented community-driven zoning did not slow down their approvals of dense and affordable residential development compared to similar districts that maintained conventional procedures. Rather, adopting participatory planning was associated with a shift towards allowing certain kinds of proposals to move forward—namely those that minimized the demolition of naturally occurring affordable dwellings, that had large portions of affordable housing units, and that promoted “gentle densification.” 

If strengthening community control over local land use does not always lead to the obstruction of dense and affordable housing construction, then how do we explain why residents sometimes support and sometimes oppose infill development? My third paper shifts to qualitative methods to understand the meaning that residents attach to development and how that affects their participation in the community-driven zoning process. Performing in-depth semi-structured interviews with members of local civil society organizations, I ask respondents about the characteristics of development projects that elicit their support or opposition, such as aspects of their scale and environmental impact. I then seek to understand how these attitudes are connected to their experiences of gentrification and neighborhood change, to their identity as renters or as homeowners, to their political ideology, and to their socioeconomic and ethnoracial identities.

Prior to focusing on American urban development, my earlier work studied the environmental dimensions of economic development in the Global South. My master’s thesis examines the revival of Brazilian industrial policy by the BNDES, the national development bank. While the bank’s subsidized credit has been legitimately criticized for its support of heavily polluting industries, I found that their use of domestic content requirements also effectively supported the establishment of a domestic wind energy industry. I also published a chapter on participatory budgeting in The Cambridge Handbook of Community Empowerment that surveyed these democratic experiments around the world and compared their practice in the United States and Brazil.