Hi, my name is Taesoo! 👋🏻

About

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at University of California, Berkeley.

I am currently a Graduate Student Researcher at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, a Hildebrand Research Fellow at the Berkeley Canadian Studies Program, and a Doctoral Fellow at the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies. I have 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.

Research Areas

I have two sets of closely related research areas.

First, I study the nexus between local housing policies, neighborhood change, and residential outcomes of low-income and minority households, particularly in high-cost metropolitan areas. My recent and ongoing projects have explored:

• How gentrification impacts housing choices of low-income households in the New York and San Francisco metropolitan areas (published in Urban Studies, co-authored with Karen Chapple)
• How housing construction impacts displacement and exclusion of low- and moderate-income households in Los Angeles and San Francisco (published in Journal of American Planning Association, co-authored with Karen Chapple)
• Whether novel big data sources can help us research household residential mobility more closely (submitted to a journal)
• Whether there are increasing investor purchases of naturally occurring affordable housing (NOAH) stocks in California and how they relate to neighborhood change (co-authored with Carolina Reid)

Second, I am also deeply interested in the profound demographic shift towards greater ethnic diversity in American and Canadian cities, driven by the immigration of Asian and Hispanic populations. This growing trend requires an updated understanding of how policy and planning impact patterns of housing access and segregation beyond the white-black binary paradigm. Recent projects that examine this issue include:

• How provincial foreign buyer taxes, in response to international capital inflows into housing markets, impact rental market affordability in British Columbia and Ontario in Canada (submitted to a journal)
• My dissertation research, outlined below.

Dissertation

My dissertation research seeks to reassess the prevailing narrative that Asian Americans encounter minimal barriers in the housing market. Specifically, I hypothesize that Asian Americans face both conventional resource-based housing constraints and distinct forms of housing discrimination, which could potentially be underestimated when their vast internal diversity and unique experiences of racism are disregarded in research. I answer three questions using both quantitative and qualitative methods:

• Have Asian Americans experienced unequal levels of homeownership and housing burden by ethnic groups, and if so, what factors explain these disparities?
• How do restrictive land use regulations affect segregation among Asian Americans?
• Do recent property purchase restrictions targeting foreigners, particularly the Chinese, reflect exclusionary motives against the housing access of Chinese/Asian Americans?