Hi, my name is Taesoo! 👋🏻

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at University of California, Berkeley. I am on the 2025-2026 job market.

My research examines how housing and land-use governance structure inequality at the intersections of race, immigration, and class. Across my projects, I employ quantitative, geospatial, and qualitative approaches—from large-scale analysis of census and administrative data to interview-based and discourse analyses—to explain the reproduction of housing stratification across scales.

My research advances the scholarship in two key ways.

First, I focus on how the increasingly multiracial and multiethnic urban landscapes of the United States and Canada, among other Global North countries, is complicating the conventional models of racial housing stratification and exclusion. My dissertation studies homeownership and racial segregation among Asian Americans—a diverse and rapidly growing population often presumed to have overcome structural barriers to housing access—to uncover how policy contexts continue to shape unequal outcomes in nuanced ways. My dissertation is supported by the Russell Sage Foundation’s Dissertation Research Grant and UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and Michael B. Teitz Fellowship, among others. One chapter is forthcoming in the Journal of Urban Affairs, with additional chapters under review or in preparation.

Second, I integrate novel big data sources (e.g., consumer reference data, assessor records, local zoning and housing database) and computational methods to track residential mobility at a fine spatial scale, providing a more granular understanding of neighborhood change. These methodological innovations help illuminate whether market forces and interventions—such as gentrification, new housing construction, upzoning, and apartment turnover—promote more equitable outcomes or further marginalize vulnerable populations. My work has been published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Urban Studies, and Cityscape.

My current affiliations include:

• 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

I also worked as a Graduate Student Researcher at the Urban Displacement Project. Prior to my doctoral program, I was a researcher at the Seoul Institute, studying commercial gentrification and urban industries in downtown Seoul.

Please refer to my Curriculum Vitae for more information.