Christine Jang-Trettien is an Assistant Professor at CUNY-Queens College. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and received her Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University. She is a qualitative and mixed methods researcher with interests in housing, health, poverty, spatial inequality and social policy.

Christine’s book (under contract at Oxford University Press) looks at the evolution of expansive, unregulated housing markets in Black neighborhoods in Baltimore from 1980 to 2015. Racial segregation, coupled with the interacting policies of financial and government institutions, steered capital investments into mostly white neighborhoods. This resulted in the creation of markets that were bifurcated by race. This book looks at money that circulates outside of financial institutions and is exchanged within what are often dismissed as “non-markets” or informal markets. It also looks at investor practices that emerge in Black neighborhoods in the absence of institutionalized credit. She has published papers about residential mobility (City & Community), real estate investors (Social Forces) (Journal of Urban Affairs), homeownership (Social Problems) and the geographic clustering of disability assistance (Social Service Review).

She previously managed a qualitative project that evaluated the impact of different place-based initiatives in Baltimore, conducting over 400 interviews with various stakeholders in the city. She was part of a study that evaluated a housing mobility program in Seattle and King County, Washington. Finally, she has conducted interviews in South Texas and Eastern Kentucky as part of the Understanding Communities of Deep Disadvantage project.

Her work has been funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Office of the President, Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, and the Princeton Alliance for Collaborative Research and Innovation. Her papers have received awards from the Urban Affairs Association and the American Sociological Association’s Community and Urban Sociology Section.