August 2024

NSF Grant: Measuring Integration in Affordable Housing with Location Data

Bernadette Baird-Zars and I were awarded a $400,000 NSF grant to test whether affordable housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods actually produces the integration policy assumes.

Bernadette Baird-Zars and I were awarded a $400,000 NSF grant (2024–2026) for "Measuring Integration in Affordable Housing with Location Data." A lot of housing policy is built around the assumption that if you can move lower-income residents to "better" neighborhoods, integration and access to opportunity will follow. We wanted to test that empirically at national scale, using anonymized mobility data to measure who residents of subsidized housing actually encounter, how far they travel, and what kinds of places they visit — compared to matched controls.