Introduction
Housing markets are where exclusion mechanisms become visible and measurable. Some are prejudice-driven, such as landlords and agents screening by name, photograph, or biographical detail. Some are economically rational at the individual level but produce identical group-level effects, as when incumbents protect a scarce local resource from outsiders. Some operate through the housing supply itself such as planning constraints, greenbelt rules, the gap between elastic in-migration and inelastic stock. My work treats housing as the test ground on which these mechanisms can be measured and compared, and asks how their spatial pattern turns individual-level decisions into population-level inequality. Discrimination is one mechanism of exclusion in this frame, not the frame itself.
A first cluster of work develops a tripartite framework for distinguishing race-based, symbolic-stigma, and foreignness-based screening in housing markets. The framework separates prejudice-driven gatekeeping from rational in-group resource protection — the latter often produces the same observed gap but responds to different policy levers. A meta-analysis of 54 correspondence-test studies across 22 countries shows that the standard “ethnic-minority” discrimination penalty decomposes meaningfully into these three components, and that anti-discrimination interventions (warning letters, sanctions, customer-side norm-shifting) perform differently across them in randomised field-experimental designs.
A second, newer cluster is a UK programme on housing search, supply, and the spatial incidence of remote work. It builds a family of revealed-demand indices from search-listing data; joins demand to supply to produce a spatial-tightness index; validates the demand signal as a leading indicator of realised prices; and then estimates the housing-cost incidence of remote work, which is a regressive cross-group externality in which high-wage teleworkers’ relocation raises housing costs for non-teleworking locals where supply is inelastic. The capstone integrates these elasticities into a quantitative spatial general-equilibrium model with explicit efficiency-versus-equity accounting; housing-supply elasticity is the policy lever connecting the two halves.
The two clusters converge on a common question: how spatial constraints turn individual-level decisions (a landlord’s screening, a teleworker’s relocation) into population-level inequality, using complementary data and methods.
Research Grants
- Mapping and Studying Global Housing Discrimination
- Spatial Governance, Behavioural Interventions and Regional Inequality
Collaboration network
To be added.
Events
- International Symposium on Spatial Governance, Behavioural Interventions and Regional Inequality (Cambridge, 4–6 August 2026). A three-day symposium hosted by the Department of Land Economy and LISA on how spatial governance and behavioural intervention can be combined to address regional inequality across UK and Chinese contexts, with tracks on AI for spatial modelling, housing discrimination, and institutional reform.
- Annual Workshop of the European Network for Housing Research (Cambridge, 4–5 June 2026). The ENHR annual workshop, hosted by LISA at Newnham College and chaired by Justin Kadi with Richard Ronald (University of Amsterdam), bringing together housing scholars from the Department and partner institutions.
Publications
- Good jobs, good tenants? Understanding racial and gender discrimination in the housing market
- The gender dimension of homeownership: Evidence from China
- Is hiding my first name enough? Using behavioural interventions to mitigate racial and gender discrimination in the rental housing market
- Housing wealth distribution, inequality and residential satisfaction
Working papers
- Foreignness, Ethnicity, and Housing Discrimination: Evidence from Singapore
- Race, symbolic stigma and foreignness: decomposing the housing-discrimination penalty
- What’s in a Name? Disagreement about Discrimination in Tokyo’s Rental Housing Market