That's so kind, thank you so much! I always appreciate your thoughts and would love to connect sometime about the joys and challenges of working at this intersection!

This paper originated in a class taught by Wright Kennedy, now my co-network chair, and I gratefully recognize his generative feedback and encouragement!

I find that while disease was indeed high in alley communities, this was explained mostly by higher disease burden among Black residents overall, not by alley conditions themselves. Reformers’ paternalistic racism led to the discursive production of Black space as pathological.

In the article, I examine how Progressive reformers in DC weaponized health disparities to urge clearance of Black inhabited alley communities, promoting a shift from micro- to neighborhood-level segregation.

Part of a special Journal of Urban Affairs issue edited by @lkb-pdx.bsky.social on “Stopping a Tsunami: learning from and beyond emergency tenant protections during the Covid-19 pandemic” - looking forward to the dialogue!

We look instead toward the transformative potential within tenants’ collective capacity and mobilization to challenge the exploitative rent relationship

Stories we heard from many tenants reflected the bounce back to the same conditions of housing insecurity once ERA funds dried up, even among tenants with the most positive ERA experiences

We build on @davidjmadden.bsky.social's argument on the urban process under “Covid capitalism": state policy responses prioritize protecting interests of property owners, with more tepid and temporary protections for renters

A profit-seeking, exploitative capitalist housing system, which produced crisis before Covid-19 and continues to do so after ERA has largely wound down.

We argue that ERA programs (although they did provide important short-term relief to many tenants!) ultimately lacked transformative potential. They failed to disrupt—or even meaningfully challenge—the root cause of the housing crisis:

...and that reform to address this crisis was possible within the structure of the current housing system

We interrogate how the framing of Covid-19 as an aberrant emergency moment of housing “crisis,” and the creation of solutions narrowly targeted toward addressing it, imply that the housing status quo before Covid-19 was not a crisis...

Most work on ERA to date focuses on evaluation and identifying opportunities for improvement (necessary and important questions!). But we wanted to ask: Was ERA the right kind of program in the first place?

514 state and local ERA programs helped low-income tenants pay rent during the Covid-19 pandemic. We explore how 3 Connecticut programs were designed, how they were rolled out, and how they were experienced by housing-insecure tenants

Also check out this response by @lwinling.bsky.social on the importance of recognizing intervening processes and mechanisms leading to the present day - ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/... 10/10

But it means that racial differentiation and exploitation structures housing markets and policies in fundamental ways that go beyond any one process or actor. 9/

All this does not mean that HOLC redlining wasn’t racist, that the federal govt wasn’t complicit in racism, or that the maps aren’t significant sources of information about disinvestment and discrimination! 8/

We offer suggestions for how researchers can align conceptual frameworks, research questions, and study design, including use of alternative data sources beyond HOLC grades 7/