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2025 Equity Award

AREI is pleased to announce that Dr. Andrew Barnes from the School of Multidisciplinary Social Sciences & Humanities and Dr. Tiffany Taylor from the Department of Sociology and Criminology are the recipients of the 2025 Equity Award for their proposal, “Understanding and Interrupting Housing Inequities: A Pilot Study of Two Community Development Corporations in Akron, Ohio”.

Despite the centrality of housing access to individual and community health, such access is precarious in many places across the country, including in our own backyard, where Akron is the city with the highest eviction rate in Ohio. Across the nation and here in Northeast Ohio, access to housing is inequitably distributed across racialized groups, as people of color have less access to affordable, secure, and safe housing. Historically, this inequitable access resulted from policies that were explicitly racist, deficit-oriented, punitive, and/or focused on the single issue of available housing stock. These ideas frequently employed the language of “revitalizing” neighborhoods—homes, streets, businesses, and public spaces—which often meant removing people from those areas. We see these understandings manifested in programs against “urban blight”; “development” projects that isolate poor, usually Black, populations from the rest of a city; exclusionary zoning; differential policing; concentrated public housing; gentrification; and other patterns. All of those “solutions” are focused on the alleged deficits of people who cannot afford stable, quality housing and aim to make those people—not their inability to afford
somewhere desirable to live—disappear. 

Today, pre-existing patterns of wealth distribution, continued informal practices of “steering” buyers to certain neighborhoods, and disparate access to credit combine to perpetuate past patterns of housing access—even as the macroeconomic climate has raised obstacles across the board.  In response to these conditions, multiple community organizations work to increase access to safe, stable housing using a variety of approaches. 

Using the AREI grant to support student researchers, we will work with two such organizations in Akron during Spring and Summer 2025 to (1) study their approaches in action; (2) learn how those efforts affect housing access and the racial equity/inequity of such access; and (3) provide an analysis of the effectiveness of the approaches, as well as a list of best practices generated from our observations. Based on that work, we will submit a grant application to the Russell Sage Foundation to conduct a systematic analysis of both non-profit and government efforts to improve housing access in Summit and Portage Counties.