Hi, my name is Taesoo! 👋🏻
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the 2025–2026 academic job market. My research examines how housing and land use governance structure inequality at the intersections of race, immigration, and class, integrating quantitative and geospatial analysis with qualitative approaches to explain how institutions reproduce housing stratification across regions and communities.
For more information about my research and publications, please see my Curriculum Vitae.
Research Overview
My research advances scholarship on how housing and land use governance shape urban inequality through two main lines of inquiry.
First, I examine how increasingly multiracial city-regions in the United States and Canada, among other Global North countries, complicate traditional models of racial stratification and exclusion in housing. My dissertation analyzes homeownership and segregation among Asian Americans—a diverse and rapidly growing population often presumed to have overcome structural barriers to housing access—to reveal how policy contexts continue to shape unequal outcomes. This research is supported by the Russell Sage Foundation’s Dissertation Research Grant, UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, and the Michael B. Teitz Fellowship. One chapter is published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, with additional chapters under review and in preparation.
Second, I integrate new data sources—such as consumer reference data, property assessor records, and local housing and zoning databases—with computational and geospatial methods to track residential mobility and neighborhood change at fine geographic and temporal scales. These analyses clarify how processes like gentrification, new housing construction, and upzoning shape access to housing and opportunity. My work has appeared in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Urban Studies, and Cityscape.
Affiliations
My research and teaching are grounded in interdisciplinary collaborations across housing, data science, and urban studies.
- Graduate Student Researcher, Terner Center for Housing Innovation
- Senior Data Science & AI Fellow, UC Berkeley D-Lab
- Graduate Fellow, UC Berkeley Asian American Research Center
Previously, I worked with the Urban Displacement Project and the Seoul Institute, where I studied commercial gentrification and urban industry transformation in downtown Seoul.