Research


My first line of research examines how housing supply policies affect residential segregation and mobility patterns. Housing programs play a role in the reproduction of segregation, including the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), which is the largest source of federal funding for the development of affordable housing in the U.S. and has historically been used to develop affordable housing in high-poverty areas. In one of my dissertation chapters, I ask: To what degree does LIHTC reduce racial disparities in residential attainment? Another exclusionary housing process is restrictive zoning where municipalities enact land use policies that constrain the housing supply. There has been a recent push to “upzone” or reform these restrictive policies to allow for the development of more housing. In another chapter of my dissertation, I test the implicit theory underpinning the process of upzoning.


My second line of research focuses on how social processes, population change, and power inequalities influence local policymaking. Bringing together literatures on zoning and rural political consciousness, I conduct a case study of a small town in upstate New York as it enacts a zoning law for the first time. In this mixed-methods paper, I use critical discourse analysis of public meeting transcripts and semi-structured interviews with town residents and officials to learn how the process of enacting zoning laws unfolds in this small town. Through the qualitative analysis, I find that spillover from the nearby city has shifted the demographics and political majority in this small town, which has led to conflict between longtime landowners and newcomers over views on property rights and the town’s character. Informed by these findings, I then descriptively analyze demographic change in the town using Census data, voting records, and property sales.


In the future, I plan to develop my research agenda at the intersection of these two lines of research. I plan to advance our understanding of LIHTC tenant mobility by comparing LIHTC in California with different states. This work would build to a national study using changes in state-level Qualified Allocation Plans (QAPs) in an event study design to examine what influences the siting of LIHTC developments and the effects on LIHTC tenant mobility. I have also begun to develop my research agenda around upzoning and neighborhood change. Building off of my “chain of inclusion” paper, I seek to examine this complex relationship between upzoning and residential mobility in New York City using individual-level residential mobility data.


Publications


Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles


Sullivan, Laura R. 2025. “Testing the Chain of Inclusion: Examining if Upzoning Changes the Housing Supply and Demographics of Places Using National Data.” Journal of Urban Affairs, 1-22. JUA 


Zoning policies have contributed to segregation in the U.S., and recent government initiatives have aimed to reform these policies through upzoning—increasing allowable housing density. In theory, upzoning should reduce segregation by increasing housing density, leading to greater affordability and accessibility to marginalized groups. I use zoning data from the 2003-2019 National Longitudinal Land Use Survey to test the theory underpinning the process of upzoning, asking: (1) Does upzoning increase housing density? (2) Does an increase in housing density change the demographics of a place? I find that increasing the maximum allowable residential density in a municipality alone is not associated with significant increases in housing density. However, increases in housing density—regardless of zoning changes—are associated with an increase in non-Hispanic Black residents and a decrease in non-Hispanic White residents. These results suggest that there is a break in the chain of inclusion: while increasing the maximum allowable residential density alone is not sufficient to promote racial inclusion, building housing is. Removing this barrier may be a necessary first step to increasing the housing supply, but it must be accompanied by additional efforts to promote housing development to realize its inclusionary goals.


Manuscripts Under Review

  

Sullivan, Laura R., Scott W. Allard, Maria V. Wathen, and Lucie Kalousová. “Capacity, Need, and Location: Emergency Food Programs in the Detroit Metropolitan Area.” Revise & Resubmit.


Nonprofit food pantries provide critical assistance to families experiencing food insecurity, but little is known about food assistance provision across metropolitan areas. We combine unique data on food pantries to examine differential access to food assistance providers in the Detroit metro area. Our data allow us to construct service capacity measures that reflect the realities of the emergency food assistance environment and link these measures to receipt of assistance. We find that urban neighborhoods have access to significantly more pantries and pantries with higher levels of service capacity than suburban neighborhoods when controlling for a neighborhood’s poverty rate. Additionally, households in poverty in urban areas were significantly more likely to receive resources from a food pantry than those in suburban areas. These insights into patterns of access to emergency assistance contribute to a deeper understanding of resource availability in evolving metropolitan areas, with implications for equitable food assistance provision. 

 

Sullivan, Laura R. “Examining Racial Disparities in Residential Attainment among Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Tenants.” Under Review.


Subsidized housing programs play a role in the reproduction of spatial inequality, including the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Prior work has shown that LIHTC tenants achieve lower levels of residential attainment, but it is unclear if these experiences differ by race and ethnicity. I use unique residential history data to address the following research questions: (1) Does LIHTC improve access to higher resource areas compared to the private market? (2) To what degree does LIHTC reduce racial disparities in residential attainment? I find that LIHTC tenants have lower probabilities of moving to higher resource areas than low-income private market tenants; however, these aggregated probabilities mask differences by race. White LIHTC tenants are more likely to have higher levels of residential attainment compared to non-White LIHTC tenants. LIHTC does marginally reduce White-Black disparities in moving to opportunity, suggesting that LIHTC has the potential to reduce racial disparities in residential attainment. 


Manuscripts in Preparation

 

Sullivan, Laura R. “Rural YIMBYism: Enacting a zoning law in a small town."

 

Sullivan, Laura R. “Upzoning and displacement: Examining upzoning’s role in residential sorting.”

 

Sullivan, Laura R. and Matthew Mleczko. “Address-level analysis of neighborhood integration dynamics.”

 

Sullivan, Laura R., Lydia Homandberg, and Matt Hall. “Using consumer trace data to study internal migration in the U.S.”

 

Bischoff, Kendra, Lind Shi, Laura R. Sullivan, and Laura Tach. “Risk and Refuge: Exploring Compounding Environmental Vulnerabilities and Climate Migration in California Neighborhoods”

 

Tach, Laura and Laura R. Sullivan. “The Effects of Federal Place-Based Policies on Child Development & Wellbeing in Disadvantaged Neighborhoods.”