Award Recipient
Elora Lee Raymond (Wayne State University)
The Urban Affairs Association (UAA), the international professional association for urban scholars, researchers and public service professionals, convened its 47th Annual Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 19-22, 2017. More than 750 participants, representing universities, research institutions, non-profit organizations, and public and private organizations/institutions from around the world met to discuss 21st century issues impacting urban populations and places. Conference participants represented institutions from North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The University of Minnesota served as the local sponsor for the event.
During the conference, awards were presented in recognition of outstanding scholarship and service. Among those honored was Elora Lee Raymond (Georgia Institute of Technology). Raymond was awarded the Best Conference Paper Award (for a paper presented in 2016 at the UAA San Diego conference). Her paper was titled: “Race, Uneven Recovery and Persistent Negative Equity in the Southeastern United States.”
Award Committee Assessment
The paper is timely in that it helps planners, policy makers and researchers understand the uneven distribution of the housing recovery across the United States following the housing bubble and its crash approximately 9 years ago. The paper establishes that race remains a driving force in housing markets, reducing the wealth of black homeowners even after controlling for home conditions, the incidence of sub-prime lending and household income levels. The paper makes interesting use of the Zillow database which is relatively new to the literature. The paper joins the Zillow data with data from the Federal Reserve Bank to help us understand the geography of the housing market recovery. The conclusions state that the “recovery has not reached predominantly black residential areas…”
Award Committee
Chair Kirk McClure (University of Kansas); Renia Ehrenfeucht (University of New Mexico); Donald Rosdil; Deborah Sotto (Grupo de Pesquisa Meio Ambiente Urbano – GPMAU PUC/SP)
Award Winner Bio
Elora Lee Raymond is a PhD Candidate in the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Institute of Technology. She studies institutional change in real estate finance, segregation and inequality. Her research has examined the uneven housing market recovery, persistent negative equity, the development of single family rental securitizations, and evictions in single family rentals. Her dissertation situates rising housing wealth inequality in the urban process, and evaluates the impact of income inequality, segregation and risk-based mortgage pricing on the unequal distribution of housing wealth. Her work has been published by Urban Geography, Housing Studies, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Community and Economic Development Discussion Paper Series, Atlanta Studies, and other journals. She has a BA in History from Brown University and will join the faculty at Clemson University’s Department of City Planning and Real Estate Development in the Fall.
