Research

- “Charting/Recharting decolonization-based housing movements in Seattle and Los Angeles”:

Through my research I am exploring two development landscapes: Africatown Community Land Trust and Wa Na Wari in the Central Area in Seattle and Liberty Ecosystem in the Crenshaw neighborhood in Los Angeles. And the present day fights ensuing therein to address displacement and dispossession of Black families in the context of state led growth and development. While the specific threats that the two urban Black communities face vary, the paper, relying on eight years of practitioner experience, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and secondary research, will raise several questions. How are these communities, under the leadership of visionaries—K. Wyking Garrett and Inye Wokoma in Seattle and Damien Goodmon in Los Angeles, mapping new terrains for housing and land tenure and how are these similar to and/or evolved from the decolonization and liberation movements in the African history? What results and outcomes have/will become possible and how can they be attributed to the different leadership styles of the two icons? What methods, tools, and tactics have been specifically deployed and to what levels of success? Also, what lessons do these specific instances of Black leadership offer to our understanding of the broader “housing sphere deeply structured by Racial Capitalism” (Hilary Malson, 2022, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, 2020)?

Forthcoming Presentation: American Association of Geographers’ Conference, Detroit, March 2025

- “Negotiating Displacement and Centering Agency in New Development: Towards Empathy as Stimulus in Planning”:

Community-based efforts around advancing shared equity housing that includes community land trusts and limited equity cooperatives, rooted in permanent affordability and democratic control, underrepresented in the grand bargain initiatives of CASA (Bay Area) and HALA (Seattle), are radical alternatives emerging in these regions also. Here, ownership of property is building people’s power and alliances and adding new dimensions (within the contemporary struggle for inhabitation) to traditional forms of tenant organizing and resistance. 

Looking at the social and political landscape of shared equity housing and other progressive housing solutions emerging in Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco (in the San Francisco Bay Area) and Seattle—the different urban contexts where I have both lived and worked--and comparing it to the context of state led solutions in the 1970s and in 1980s, the paper, following the positionality of my own lived experience, explores the contradictions within a progressive state and theorizes an evolution of an empathetic state and society overall. 

In the latter regard, the research attempts to layer Cahen’s, Schneider’s, and Saegart’s concepts (2019) of ‘invented’ and ‘invited spaces’ of collective action with ideas on empathy, thereby expanding invented spaces to include broader grassroots movement building spaces. 

 “In the US urban context, we argue that invitations from the state and allied institutions are rarely received outright: the invited spaces in which gains can be made must first be invented by the grassroots. Conversely, inventive organizing must find its invitations, the material conditions allowing for new creations”. 

For the convergence to happen, for victories to be secured, following the “formulations and counter formulations” between the invented and invited spaces, my hypothesis states that the invited spaces are evolving and progressing from a state of “Empathy as Charity” to “Empathy as Stimulus”. 

Finally layering with my own current work, now in direct transit democracy (through San Francisco Transit Riders), the research concludes with the third space of “Empathy as Patience” to stoke community resistance in communities like Bayview-Hunters Point in San Francisco based on my knowledge and directive at hand.

Presentation: Royal Geographical Society Conference, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK, August 2022

-“Housing Alternatives at the Intersection of People Power and Political Will in Silicon Valley”: Discussed piloting and scaling shared equity housing models (in conjunction with my role at Silicon Valley Community Foundation).

Presentation: Planners Network Conference, Pratt Institute, New York, June 2019

-“Creative Placemaking in San Francisco and Seattle. Inclusive and/or Democratic?”: Analyzed the inclusion of the unhoused population in the design of public spaces in San Francisco and Seattle.

Presentations: RC-21 Conference, University of Leeds, UK, September 2017; American Association of Geographers Conference, Boston, April 2017

Publications: Progressive City, 2019; Institute of Place Management Blog, 2018

-“The socio-political economy of ‘heritage conservation’ in India and the (un)realized claims of its inclusivity”: Discussed and analyzed India’s infrastructure policy landscape involving transformation of heritage sites. (2015 - 2016)

-“Defining social relations in contested spaces”: In the context of hyper-gentrification in San Francisco, discussed the role that citizens can play based on the Solitude and Indifference framework from Fran Tonkiss, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.

Presentation: Planners Network Conference, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, June 2014