Homeownership and the Sociology of Housing

Following the publication of my first book, No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community and the Politics of Homeownership, I began a series of follow-up papers to explore key topics that emerged from the research. In a paper in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, I advance scholarship at the intersection of race and homeownership by investigating the ways that homeownership preferences are stratified by race and ethnicity.  Despite substantial research investigating stratification in homeownership attainment, including the structural constraints to buying a home and building wealth through housing, sociologists know little about the reasons that Americans prefer ownership to renting, or the way these preferences differ across social groups.  Drawing on the National Housing Survey, I find that African-Americans and Latinos are more likely than whites to identify the social status of ownership and the importance of building wealth as reasons to buy a home. 

Drawing on data from the National Housing Survey, I published a paper in Sociological Science showing that the experience of mortgage default has a significant social life. While falling behind on a mortgage loan has significant personal consequences, including negative health outcomes and financial costs, I show that the experience of delinquency or default influences the housing market experiences of other people in the defaulter’s social networks.  Network exposure to people who have experienced mortgage delinquency is associated with more negative expectations for the housing market and more permissive attitudes toward the default behaviors of other households.  Homeowners who know others that defaulted on their mortgage loans are more likely to prefer rental housing when they next move. 

Finally, in a paper published in Housing Policy Debate, I use original data collected through an the Amazon M-Turk experiment to test whether support for the mortgage interest deduction is sensitive to critiques about the cost, inefficiency or distribution of benefits.  I find that support among Republicans is more sensitive to information about costs while support among Democrats is more sensitive to information about the distribution of benefits; however, support declines the most when respondents are presented with evidence that the policy fails to promote homeownership to households on the margins. 

In 2019, Eva Rosen and I organized a conference at Georgetown University on the Sociology of Housing. Following the conference, we secured an advanced contract with the University of Chicago Press for an edited volume on the Sociology of Housing.