Andrew Greenlee (he/him) is a professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prof. Greenlee's research interests are at the intersection of housing policy, neighborhood change, and social equity in cities.
Prof. Greenlee's research uses housing and residential mobility as a way to explore a range of deeper questions about our cities including health, equity, and governance of change. As an urban planner, he uses a range of methods - both qualitative and quantitative - to explore these issues, oftentimes in partnership with community partners, institutional stakeholders, and researchers from other disciplines. His goal is to tell vivid stories about cities that have the power to transform how we plan and who we plan for.
Prof. Greenlee became a housing policy researcher due in part to his experience growing up in Chicago. Growing up, he observed the ways in which housing contributed to segregation and uneven development. He became an urban planner with the goal of addressing these types of issues, and focused his practice on housing and community development. He chose to become an academic researcher in order to bring new perspective and influence to our understanding of housing and neighborhoods.
With IHSI, Prof. Greenlee is an active collaborator, working with Research Scientist Brandi Barnes and community partners like Champaign-Urbana Public Health District (CUPHD) on local housing initiatives. He has also served as an application reviewer for the Community-Academic Scholars program.
Can you describe a goal you are currently pursuing?
I’m at the very beginning of a book project right now that is focused on providing a deeper diagnosis of the current crisis moment in housing in the United States. Most of the phenomena associated with current crisis narratives aren’t new, but these failures in our housing system are now being confronted by housing consumers who in the past have been served well. A range of housing consumers have confronted these very same problems for generations, and our policy approaches to addressing their needs have fallen short. We have also called upon housing interventions to address a range of structural problems related to poverty, health, education, environmental exposures, and other forms of persistent inequalities. This book project calls on us to more fully recognize the stakes tied up in the current crisis moment and to think carefully about what inclusive and holistic problem solving can look like.
How has the focus of your research changed or evolved since you first started in the field?
My background and training is in housing policy - 15 years ago when I started at Illinois my research was focused primarily on the equity implications of governance of federal low-income housing programs like the Housing Choice Voucher program. Doing work on housing equity has consistently underscored to me that the challenges I observe households confronting are never just around housing. Consequently, I’ve been called to partner with researchers in other fields to bring housing and housing policy dimensions into their work. For instance, during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, I partnered with epidemiologists and computational biologists to model the impact of evictions and the doubling up of households on the spread of covid - we found that as households doubled up with others due to eviction that there was an increased likelihood of covid spread, and that certain neighborhoods were likely to bear a much higher covid burden as a result of housing instability. This work became part of the evidence used by the CDC to enact a federal eviction moratorium, although that moratorium was ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court.
While my work is still rooted in housing policy, it now increasingly links the stakes associated with those policies to other areas including health. Amongst my active projects, I continue to work with health disparities researchers to examine housing and neighborhood location as a determinant of health, and also maintain active research that looks at federal low-income housing programs and neighborhood exposures for low-income tenants consuming housing with federal subsidies.
How is most of your research funded? How is your approach changing?
My work is funded from a variety of sources, most recently including NIH and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Recent shifts in the funding landscape have compelled me to take a step back and to think more about how to synthesize across my existing research and partnerships, and to more actively focus on communicating to a broader public and policy audience. I’m currently looking towards low-cost, high-impact projects, while of course also pursuing funding from a variety of sources. My goal right now is to think about having a direct impact on the policy debates and framing of problems related to housing and health equity. Where my work has largely focused on federal policy and cross-sectional studies, the recent changes have also compelled me to think more about the potential to inform and impact state and local policy debates while building evidence that I hope will remain relevant to federal and national policies.
What is something you want colleagues to know about you or your research?
Don’t be scared of engaging housing policy wonks! Because housing issues are frequently cross-cutting with other domains, “housers” tend to have an appreciation for the ways in which our knowledge intersects research questions in other disciplines, and an openness to drawing from diverse evidence in our own work. As a researcher, it’s my mission to help bring housing and housing policy as context to a range of interdisciplinary inquiries, particularly those with direct implications for structurally disadvantaged individuals and communities. Engaging knowledge, arguments, and methods coming from other disciplines inevitably helps me to identify new stakes and audiences for housing policy.
Are there new research areas you are interested in pursuing in the next 3–5 years?
This is a hard question! I feel like my work has really looked different every three to five years based in part on the evolution of debates around housing policy and our relationship to housing . I’m returning to some of the questions that I started to engage with 15 years ago when I started as Illinois faculty related to neighborhoods and residential location choice. Fifteen years later, I’m bringing new perspective and knowledge back to those questions. I remain interested in exploring the relationship between housing and health disparities both at the individual and at the neighborhood level. Given the national (and global) conversation around housing affordability, I’m also interested in thinking about how households trade off housing costs with other major expenses including healthcare. I’m constantly listening to the information needs of practitioners, policymakers, and fellow scholars, and allowing that to inform where my work needs to go.
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