Rental Market Concentration and its Implications for the Urban Poor

This project aims to understand the recent trend in concentration of rental property ownership in many major US cities and its consequences for the urban poor. First, we document recent changes in ownership of rental properties across US cities and market concentration in the urban housing markets. Second, we study the impacts of these changes on poor urban renters’ housing stability and housing costs. Third, we study how the movement towards larger corporate landlords affects eviction. The ultimate goal of this project is to understand how changes in the urban rental market structure and regulations in this market affect the lives of low-income urban residents.

I am looking for students to help with web scraping as well as to work directly with the the authors on the cleaning and analysis of multiple large proprietary data sets and have an opportunity for learning important research skills such as working with big data, data visualization, data analysis, and machine learning.