Faculty Spotlight: Jamaal Green

Jamaal Green joined Penn Weitzman as a postdoctoral fellow in 2020, was named an assistant professor in July 2022, and became a Penn IUR fellow this fall. He is a planner and geographer interested in the ways that the organization of our built environments exacerbate or inhibit social inequality. His research interests include exploring the connections between land use and economic development planning, specifically concerning the role of industrial lands in urban labor markets and greater labor market restructuring, and the application of spatial analysis to policy problems. For the Department of City and Regional Planning, he has taught Land Use & Environmental Modeling and Modeling Geographical Objects, an introductory course on geographic information systems (GIS).

Your research explores the intersection of housing, land use, and economic development policy and the ways that planning affects social inequalities. What drew to this work?

I've always been interested in wrong and right, in justice. I grew up in the Washington, D.C. metro area where my parents were physicians dedicated to getting the best quality care to Black patients, in particular patients who lacked resources or had been mistreated in other institutions. So I was raised in a household where I was aware of the life and death consequences of racial inequalities. 

When I came into college, I was really concerned about job access and decided to major in economics. But questions about job access were not treated as important questions in formal economics. Those kinds of questions were being asked in the planning department.  

It sounds like the standard economics approach may not be as helpful to answering these questions. You're teaching a course on GIS. What role do spatial analytical tools and techniques play in addressing social inequalities? 

Any set of tools can be used to attack these questions, it's about what questions are being asked, right? There have been Black economists and Black social scientists who for over a century have been raising up these questions, but it's only very recently that the rest of the field of economics has decided to listen to them and care about discrimination and racism. It's not that no one was asking these questions on the margins, but that the field was generally indifferent to them. 

In other words, to address topics of social and racial inequality, the tools matter less than the questions you're asking.

Exactly. You can attack these questions using any variety of tools. I love spatial analysis and making maps. I think they're very informative for trying to better understand the world around you. But you don't need a map to discuss racism. 

In addition to being a fellow at Penn IUR, you are a fellow at the Housing Initiative at Penn. Tell us a bit about your work researching housing conditions in Philadelphia. 

In Philadelphia, there is a program called the Basic Systems Repair Program (BSRP), which gives out grants to low-income homeowners to repair electrical, plumbing, and heating systems. There are 12,000 households who have participated in the program that can be studied over 10 years. The city has spent nearly $100 million on this, but still has miles-long waitlists. There seems to be a really large demand for this program, yet we still don't know the extent of that demand or how safe or adequate Philadelphia’s housing is. 

The American Housing Survey estimates that 2 to 4 percent of housing needs work, but I suspect it’s more than that. In Philadelphia, the average repair cost in Philadelphia is $8,500. For low-income households, it's just not possible to spend three-quarters of a household’s yearly income on home repairs. 

The argument [Housing Iniative at Penn Faculty Director Vincent Reina and I] are trying to make in our paper is that there's tremendous demand for home repairs, particularly in weak-market or rust belt cities that may have higher proportions of homeowners with lower income and years of deferred maintenance. Thinking about our housing policy and thinking about how we keep people in their homes: How do we help people maintain their own homes over time as opposed to primarily focusing on getting people to buy homes? 

Do you aspire to have your research inform policy making?

Planning is an applied profession. I think all planners want to have a positive impact on the built environment itself. Philadelphia and other cities should proactively do a survey to try and figure out what the actual burden of deferred maintenance is. They shouldn’t assume their housing is ok based on the data from the American Housing Survey.

A survey like that could inform not just housing, but other policy areas like education. If you're too cold or too hot, you can't think properly. So if children are living in an unheated house, it's going to affect their ability to learn. For many low-income homeowners, they can't afford to make repairs and it starts a vicious cycle of degradation. The city or the state could actually step in and address that cycle of degradation either through loans or grant programs like BSRP. 

You became an Assistant Professor in July 2022. What kinds of teaching or mentorship have you experienced that you hope to emulate as a professor?

My thesis advisor Professor Lisa Bates [at Portland State University] was formative in shaping and discipling my thinking around equity planning and research design. She always had sharp questions and attention to issues of construct validity and argumentation, linked with a strong passion for people who have traditionally been ignored. People who care about others can be caricatured as unserious, whereas Prof. Bates is very rigorous by anyone's measure, while also asking very trenchant and important questions. That to me is one of the highest examples of how you can be an academic.

Finally, Associate Professor Nichola Lowe [at UNC-Chapel Hill] said this thing that has stuck with me ever since: You let the question guide the method. When people introduce themselves, they say: I'm an ethnographer, or I'm a spatial analyst. When you do that, you limit the kind of questions you allow yourself to explore. Ideally, there should be some openness to working across disciplines or finding people who are experts and collaborating with them to try and answer the questions that you think about.