Justin Steil

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Urban Studies and Planning, Faculty Member

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Justin Steil is an Assistant Professor of Law and Urban Planning. Broadly interested in social stratification and spatial dimensions of inequality, his research examines the intersection of urban policy with property, land use, and civil rights law.

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Expanding the Boundaries of Justice in Urban Greening Scholarship: Toward an Emancipatory, Antisubordination, Intersectional, and Relational Approach

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Changing Technology, Durable Segregation, and Household Residential Decisionmaking

SSRN Electronic Journal

Contested Values: How Jim Crow Segregation Ordinances Redefined Property Rights

SSRN Electronic Journal

Affordable Housing, Disasters, and Social Equity

Journal of the American Planning Association

Eviction Dynamics in Market-Rate Multifamily Rental Housing

Housing Policy Debate

Planning beyond Mass Incarceration

Journal of Planning Education and Research

The policing and penal systems play an oversized role in shaping the built environment and budget... more The policing and penal systems play an oversized role in shaping the built environment and budgets of cities, alongside the lives of urban residents. Law enforcement systems are also deeply inequitable with poor residents, and communities of color disproportionately harmed by the violences of the system. Planning’s contribution to the creation of durable spatial stratification in the built environment implicates planning in the class and race disparities in law enforcement systems. Planning research and theory has also supported this inequity by largely neglecting the relationships between policing and penal systems and planning. The articles in this volume address this neglect and employ a wide variety of core theories, methods, and methodologies from planning to engage with the relationships between planning and law enforcement. The articles are connected through attention to racial justice including analyzing moments where planning supported and produced injustice, and identifyin...

Varieties of Urbanism: A Comparative View of Inequality and the Dual Dimensions of Metropolitan Fragmentation

Politics & Society

A large literature on urban politics documents the connection between metropolitan fragmentation ... more A large literature on urban politics documents the connection between metropolitan fragmentation and inequality. This article situates the United States comparatively to explore the structural features of local governance that underpin this connection. Examining five metropolitan areas in North America and Europe, the article identifies two distinct dimensions of fragmentation: (a) fragmentation through jurisdictional proliferation (dividing regions into increasing numbers of governments) and (b) fragmentation through resource hoarding (via exclusion, municipal parochialism, and fiscal competition). This research reveals how distinctive the United States is in the ways it combines institutional arrangements that facilitate metropolitan fragmentation (through jurisdictional proliferation) and those that reward such fragmentation (through resource-hoarding opportunities). Non-US cases furnish examples of policies that reduce jurisdictional proliferation or remove resource-hoarding opp...

Mapping gentrification and displacement pressure: An exploration of four distinct methodologies

Urban Studies

As housing costs continue to increase across many cities in North America and Europe, local gover... more As housing costs continue to increase across many cities in North America and Europe, local governments face pressure to understand how housing’s rising cost is changing neighbourhoods and to ensure that everyone can access a home they can afford. To confront displacement concerns, cities are adapting models developed within academia to identify neighbourhoods that may be susceptible to gentrification and displacement. We compare four gentrification and displacement risk models developed by and for the US cities of Seattle, Washington; Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and apply all four methodologies to one city, Boston. We identify the geographic areas of agreement and disagreement among the methods. The comparison reveals striking differences between the models, both in inputs and outputs. Of the 18 variables considered among the four models, only two variables appear in all four models. In the resulting maps, the four methods identified b...

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Does Condominium Development Lead to Gentrification?

Survival of the Fairest: Examining HUD Reviews of Assessments of Fair Housing

Housing Policy Debate

Limits of diversity: Jane Jacobs, the Just City, and anti-subordination

Cities

Diversity is a concept that Jane Jacobs places at the heart of her work and that Susan Fainstein ... more Diversity is a concept that Jane Jacobs places at the heart of her work and that Susan Fainstein similarly identifies as central to the definition of a just city. But what is the relationship between the diversity in the built environment that Jacobs emphasizes and the socio-economic diversity that Fainstein notes is so important? Drawing on Jacobs and Fainstein to analyze a case study of an affordable housing development in Boston, Massachusetts, we argue that planning with a just city in mind requires more than a commitment to diversity in urban form or demographic composition. Instead of setting out diversity as a goal that may help dominant individuals overcome irrational prejudices through the free flow of ideas when exposed to diverse peers, we argue for policies that identify and address historical inequalities and relations of domination along the lines of sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, national origin, or other ascriptive characteristics.

The Fairest of Them All: Analyzing Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Compliance

Housing Policy Debate

Does segregation matter for Latinos?

Journal of Housing Economics

Antisubordination Planning

Journal of Planning Education and Research

Desvinculado y Desigual

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Despite the high levels of metropolitan-area segregation that Latinos experience, there is a lack... more Despite the high levels of metropolitan-area segregation that Latinos experience, there is a lack of research examining the effects of segregation on Latino socioeconomic outcomes and whether those effects differ from the negative effects documented for African Americans. We find that segregation is consistently associated with lower levels of educational attainment and labor market success for both African American and Latino young adults compared with whites, with associations of similar magnitudes for both groups. One mechanism through which segregation may influence outcomes is the difference in the levels of neighborhood human capital to which whites, Latinos, and African Americans are exposed. We find that higher levels of segregation are associated with lower black and Latino neighborhood exposure to residents with college degrees, relative to whites. We also find support for other commonly discussed mechanisms, such as exposure to neighborhood violent crime and the relative ...

format_quoteA one standard deviation increase in segregation correlates with a 1.4 percentage point decrease in black high school completion rates.format_quote

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The rise and fall of urban economies: lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles

Journal of Economic Geography

Book Review: A Review of 'Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America' by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Innovative Responses to Foreclosures: Paths to Neighborhood Stability and Housing Opportunity

Columbia Journal of Race and Law, 2011

This Article argues that the current foreclosure crisis illustrates how economic stability and ra... more This Article argues that the current foreclosure crisis illustrates how economic stability and racial justice are intertwined. Recent research has found that the more racially segregated a metropolitan region is, the higher the number and rate of its foreclosures. Indeed, the high levels of racial residential segregation in the U.S. facilitated discriminatory and abusive lending practices and contributed to instability in regional housing markets. The Article contends that current fair housing laws alone are insufficient to dismantle the economic and political structures that continue to produce segregation, particularly the architecture of fragmented and unequal local governments competing with each other for resources. Responses to foreclosures provide an opportunity to chip away at these incentives for segregation by encouraging regional collaboration and shared-equity homeownership structures. Two promising examples of such collaboration are examined: first, a partnership between local governments and non-profits conducting targeted redevelopment through the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program; and, second, a joint effort by a community development financial institution and a community development corporation to buy portfolios of distressed notes at a discount in order to rehabilitate scatteredsite properties as affordable housing. Building on these examples, the Article proposes that the next significant step toward creating durable solutions is for municipalities to

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State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods in 2014

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

book review: Gentrification. By Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly. New York and London: Routledge. 2007. xxvii + 310 pp. $31.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780415950374

Cultural Geographies, 2010

Justin Steil

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