Overview

At a broad level, my research explores how institutions create and perpetuate inequalities in the United States, and how power and property translate into material and status inequalities. I am focused especially on housing, as well as settler colonization, as social phenomena where power, inequality, and space collide.

My research areas include race-class inequality, housing, American political institutions, American political development, law & policy, urban studies, settler colonial studies, and contemporary political theory.

Publications

“Private Government at Home: Landlord Power and Rental Residential Domination in the United States,” Politics & Society 53, no. 2 (2025): 167-209, doi: 10.1177/00323292241285289

Abstract: What if we think of landlords as petty tyrants? I argue that this specifically political question has been missing in analyses and diagnoses of the crisis in housing. Approaching the political conditions within landlord-tenant relations, I argue that rental housing is a sphere where people are subject to substantial unaccountable power in ways that drastically limit their autonomy, i.e. domination. First, I develop a theoretical analysis through Elizabeth Anderson’s concept of private government, extended by radical republican and feminist interventions. Then, drawing on interdisciplinary housing literatures, I build the case for understanding landlords’ dominative power at both structural and interpersonal levels. I look to institutional dynamics and landlord practices to unpack the details of private government in rental housing. I conclude with a critical discussion of current approaches to housing policy in terms of domination and a suggestion for an alternate strategy around the concept of countervailing power. 

“Performing Social Control: Poverty Governance, Public Finance, and the Politics of Visibility” (with John N. Robinson III and Spencer Headworth)
Sociological Theory 42, no. 1: 23–48. doi: 10.1177/07352751231222476

Abstract: The visibility of populations, policies, and the state matters greatly for questions of power, inequality, and democratic life. This article builds on existing scholarship by examining how visibility operates as a lever and effect of social control in a racially and economically stratified society. By doing so, the article identifies a paradox. Race- and class-empowered groups often pressure state actors to implement punitive policies or otherwise visibly contain and control disadvantaged populations. But they also tend to decry and disavow the necessary public costs of these disciplinary interventions. This creates a conundrum for authorities: how to satisfy popular demands for social control while concealing resource commitments. We use the term disciplinary tensions to describe the contradictory political desires that state actors must navigate to maintain legitimacy with privileged constituents. We examine two state projects that, in different ways, crystallize this dilemma: the expansion of low-income housing development in New York in the 1960s and 1970s and state prison construction in California in the 1980s and 1990s. In both episodes, officials responded to disciplinary tensions by turning to covert public finance options: specifically, revenue bonds, which seemingly detach policy from conventional tax-and-spend public finance. We argue that these cases shed light on the shifting nature of power as finance has come to pervade all aspects of government and covert governing tactics supplement and supplant society’s more direct practices of social control. Revenue bonds, in particular, allow governing actors to appease and placate the populace by reconfiguring the state’s disciplinary power so that social control appears to pay for itself.

Dissertation Project

“Leasing Democracy: Private Power and Public Policy in American Rental Housing”

My dissertation project examines how housing tenure (i.e., renting versus owning) manifests as political inequality in the US. I argue that early policy developments delegating housing provision to private actors depoliticized rental housing, demobilized renters, and set up a durable system of housing tenure inequality. In making this argument, I develop a new conceptual toolkit to approach the study of rental housing as a site of political contestation.

First, I draw on contemporary political theory to conceptualize rental housing as a sphere of “private government” where political terms like power, rule, and conflict should be as analytically central as cost. Second, I use comparative-historical analysis and process tracing to explain how housing policy conflicts in the 1920s–1940s formed a path-dependent trajectory that excludes renters from the American state’s material, symbolic, and participatory housing benefits. In doing so, I introduce and develop the concept of an “anti-renter regime” as a durable arrangement of ideas, interests, and institutions in American housing policy that produces and reproduces race-class stratification. Third, I draw on 38 in-depth qualitative interviews with Chicago renters to develop my theoretical and historical arguments. I show how race-class inequality shapes experiences of private government in rental housing, and how the state’s delegation of rental housing policy to private actors creates barriers to collective action among renters.