Writing

Academic articles

Who owns our homes?

Who owns our homes? Unmasking the anonymous corporate owner and identifying market concentration

A short research paper about methods of connecting related anonymous corporate owners into one single owner and understanding concentration of ownership in the single-family housing market of Jacksonville, Florida. Published in Cityscape, March 2024.

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Writing I significantly contributed to

Corporate Buyouts: How investors and large corporations that are buying more single-family homes are putting a pinch on homeowners and renters across the greater Tampa Bay region by Gabriella Paul

A four-part series published with NPR affiliate WUSF detailing the buyout of single-family homes in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area. The series covers many different stakeholders, tenants, landlords - huge REITs and asset managers, and local small fry - and the housing they live in. My contribution to the series was the data pieces - using scrappy data methods like one from Who owns our homes - I mapped out each property owner in the Tampa Bay region and what they owned, how their ownership is clustered in the metro, and mapped build to rent neighborhoods. These were all done in a combination of R and SQL, and Plotly and Leaflet for visualization.

View each part of the series here:

I am @'d

Upzoning is necessary, but won't produce an equitable Gainesville on its own

Upzoning needs to happen, but inequitable effects need to be mitigated.
Keeping Gainesville mostly single-family zoned will not work for anyone but the affluent in the long term, as housing prices and rent continue to increase and current housing dilapidates. Upzoning must be combined with other devices to achieve an equitable city that protects owners and renters (eviction and foreclosure prevention, stronger tenant laws), produces permanently affordable housing (community land trusts, limited equity cooperatives, investment in public housing) and prevents gentrification (inclusive community master plans and Black/Brown collective ownership of blocks and neighborhoods).

A nationwide housing crisis hits locally

Who do we blame [for the housing crisis]? We blame corporate landlords. We blame sprawling firms that have transformed the home into an asset and have taken the majority of the rental housing stock captive... We blame our government. We blame a legal system that lacks affordable housing and adequate tenants rights protections as well as the teeth to proactively enforce the protections that do exist. We also blame our elected officials for not doing enough to combat these issues... So what can we do to get out of this crisis? We have to assert our rights to housing, both for ourselves and for our communities...

Hey Gainesville! Enforce your housing discrimination ordinance!

One major problem with Ordinance #190814 is the City’s lack of enforcement. For example, the Emergency Rental Assistance Program is structured so that the landlord has to consent to participating in the program. In other words, a landlord’s “no” can mean someone is on the street. Even with the Ordinance’s precedent to make landlords accept ERAP, lease non-renewals continue to be served...

Geopolitics and the Search for Home

Capitalism finds its power in the geopolitical. Capitalism needs land bases, property lines drawn and enforced by law and police – it needs entire mountainsides of pines to destroy for the timber market, it needs a chemical-pumping factory to process its raw materials, it needs a warehouse from which to trade... But just like capitalism, we and our radical movements find strength in the geopolitical, in the construction and fostering of defiantly autonomous spaces. We need spaces to grow our food, spaces to live and relax, spaces to congregate.