Valerie E. Stahl

Explores how residents of San Francisco public housing experienced the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), a major redevelopment program, showing that while many welcomed safer buildings and repairs, they also worried about displacement, loss of community ties, and whether longtime residents would truly benefit from neighborhood change. 

Investigates the connection between land use, zoning patterns, and breast cancer rates in California, highlighting how neighborhood design and environmental conditions may shape long-term public health outcomes.

Compares how California and Texas have approached state control over local housing and zoning decisions, showing that debates over affordable housing often become larger fights about property rights, government power, and who gets included in growing communities.

Explores how housing instability and neighborhood displacement affect vulnerable residents, showing how broader housing market pressures can push people out of their communities and into precarious living situations.

Examines how rising eviction rates, poverty, and racial inequality in New York City neighborhoods contribute to homelessness, showing that evictions are one of the strongest predictors of families entering the shelter system.

Examines resistance to a public housing redevelopment process in New York City. Finds that while the housing authority and residents had the same objective of preserving existing public housing, their desired paths to achieving that goal dramatically differed.

Examines zoning as both a technical tool and a politicized regulatory mechanism, focusing on its implications for urban equity and sustainability. Approaches zoning from a social science and planning perspective in order to engage students of urban planning, policy, and design with several key questions relevant to the realities of zoning and land regulation they encounter in practice.