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; law & public policy; housing; American political institutions; American political development; urban studies; contemporary political theory; and qualitative methods.

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.

Book Project

The Anti-Renter Regime in American Housing Policy

My first book project, “The Anti-Renter Regime in American Housing Policy,” examines how housing tenure (i.e., renting versus owning) manifests as political inequality in the US. I argue that early legal and policy developments delegating housing provision to private actors depoliticized rental housing, demobilized renters, and set up a durable system of housing tenure inequality. I use historical-institutionalist methods to explain how renters were excluded from state-provided housing benefits during policy developments approximately 1916–1954, with enduring consequences for renters through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I begin by introducing the concept of an “anti-renter regime” to conceptualize the durable alignment of ideas, interests, and institutions that privileges homeowners and developers at the expense of renters. I explain how the anti-renter regime entrenched and advanced spatial systems of race-class inequality by mapping housing tenure inequality onto race- and class- based inequality. The expansion of homeownership benefits for the white middle class thereby advanced race-class tenure inequality and disadvantaged renters as a whole. I further explain how disadvantage here is not only material, but also symbolic and participatory. The disadvantages embedded in tenure inequality involve the construction of a culture that denigrates renting at the expense of owning. Additionally the anti-renter regime entails that American housing policy creates incentives and pathways for owners to participate in politics at multiple levels while foreclosing bases for collective action among renters.

My historical analysis tracks the generative events and reproductive mechanisms that formed this durable policy regime. I show how key decisions made by Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department in the 1920s and New Deal Democrats after WWII created path-dependent processes that favored the nascent real-estate industry and reproduced anti-renter ideas. Archival documents illustrate the key role of the real estate industry as a partner to the state in this process. These early decisions foreclosed an alternative pathway when a proposal for a transformative public housing system failed in the 1930s. By the 1940s, the foundations of the anti-renter regime were largely set, but there was a last gasp of an alternative in the form of federal rent control beginning during WWII and lasting a surprisingly long time until 1953. I argue that by 1954, the essential structure of tenure inequality in American housing policy was cemented in place. These developments created a durable policy regime that denies material and symbolic housing benefits to renters and creates barriers to renters’ political identification and group formation.