Michael Lens, assistant professor of urban planning in the Luskin School of Public Affairs, has received awards from both the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA) and Housing Policy Debate for research papers in housing policy.
Lens’ JAPA paper, selected as one of the journal’s two “Best Papers of 2013,” focuses on the relationship between crime and subsidized housing in New York City. Although the crime rate in the city has decreased over the years, Lens found that the cause could not be directly attributed to the city’s substantial investments in subsidized housing. While his findings suggest that subsidized housing neither increases nor decreases crime rates in neighborhoods, Lens still encourages the development of housing subsidies in less distressed neighborhoods, particularly in cities with tight rental markets such as New York and Los Angeles. Lens suggests, however, that these cities need to find ways to expand housing options in higher-income, less-distressed neighborhoods, or they risk exacerbating concentrated poverty and further subjecting low-income households to unsafe living environments.
Lens’ winning paper for the Housing Policy Debate competition, titled "Employment Accessibility Among Housing Subsidy Recipients," analyzes how the location of subsidized housing affects housing recipients’ employment opportunities. Using a new measure for job accessibility that he developed, which provides each housing census tract with a spatially-weighted job accessibility index, Lens found that those living in public housing are closer than any other group of housing subsidy recipients to employment opportunities. However, they are also highly concentrated among the low-skilled unemployed individuals that serve as their competition for most jobs.
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