Deirdre Pfeiffer
Biographic Data
| ID | 222513 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deirdre Pfeiffer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deirdre |
| FAMILY NAME | Pfeiffer |
| SIGNATURE | PFEIFFER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Arizona State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2786-2375 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 101 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
From social distancing to creative social engagement
Creative social engagement (CSE) – creative expression in the public realm for community engagement purposes – is one form of neighbourhood activity that surged during the pandemic, when many US residents relied on their neighbourhoods for daily activities. Using regression analysis, this study examines how the neighbourhood built and social environment affected Phoenix residents’ use of streets, sidewalks, and driveways for CSE. The results show…
Neighborhood Histories
Neighborhoods and the built environment play a vital role in determining our health. But the majority of studies uncovering this relationship are cross‐sectional, which can belie the fact that neighborhoods are shaped by historical processes over decades. In this study, we use white flight, the departure of white residents from an area, as our historical anchor to understand associations between current health outcomes and the histories of neighb…
In neighbors we trust
Neighborhood disorder and local community type shape neighborhood trust. • Trusting neighbors is associated with higher wellbeing and health. • Trust in neighbors relates to residents’ wellbeing in the Global North and South. Research shows that neighborhood social connectedness is important for wellbeing. However, these findings are mostly drawn from the Global North. We use the World Values Survey to examine the drivers of neighborhood social c…
Bring Zoning Back Into the Planning Curricula
Deconstructing racial code words
Racism has become more covert in post-civil rights America. Yet, measures to combat it are hindered by inadequate general knowledge on what "colorblind" race talk says and does and what makes it effective. We deepen understanding of covert racism by investigating one type of discourse - racial code words, which are (1) indirect signifiers of racial or ethnic groups that contain (2) at least one positive or negative value judgment and (3) contextu…
Coping and Connecting through Creativity in the Neighborhood Realm during Covid-19
This research addresses how the COVID-19 pandemic affected neighborhood engagement by exploring the use of streets, sidewalks, and driveways as sociable spaces for informal and uncoordinated creative expression. We assessed practices occurring in three diverse City of Phoenix neighborhoods before and during the pandemic through visual analysis. We show that residents used these spaces in novel and more intensive ways during the pandemic, includin…
Vulnerability and opportunity
The growth of single-family rentals (SFRs) in the wake of the US foreclosure crisis has recently begun attracting overdue scholarly attention. The transformation of millions of single-family homes from owner- to renter- occupied over the past decade raises numerous important questions about the vulnerabilities and opportunities created by this historic tenure shift for both households and neighbourhoods. This research reports on the demographics …
Are people in bigger cities less ethical human beings? Evidence on urban living and moral values
Capitalizing on Collapse
A well-documented consequence of the recent foreclosure crisis was a pronounced dislocation in the single-family home market. Large institutional buyers emerged to capitalize on this dislocation. These firms acquired hundreds of thousands of single-family homes to create a pool of single-family rentals (SFRs) in markets across the United States. Existing analyses of institutional investors focus on their aggregate characteristics and associated c…
Manturuk, Lindblad, and Quercia
"Manturuk, Lindblad, and Quercia: A Place Called Home: The Social Dimensions of Homeownership." Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(3), pp. 380–381
Do Neighborhood Walkability, Transit, and Parks Relate to Residents’ Life Satisfaction
Problem, research strategy, and findings: Planners lack clarity about how they can promote the subjective wellbeing (SWB) of the communities they serve. In this research we use descriptive and econometric methods to explore the interconnections between three aspects of the objective and perceived neighborhood built environment (NBE)—walkability, transit, and parks—and one aspect of SWB—life satisfaction—drawing on a survey of 496 people in the Ph…
Urban Science
Exploring the Relationship Between Housing Downturns and Partisan Elections
An understudied outcome of foreclosure crises is how their aftershocks affect partisan elections. Two hypotheses are that partisan shifts may occur in neighborhoods with concentrated foreclosures because of (1) declines in turnout among liberal leaning voters or (2) swells of anti-incumbency among all voters. This research explores these hypotheses in Maricopa County, Arizona, by using econometric modeling to uncover associations among neighborho…
Downtown revitalization in the era of millennials
Downtown Phoenix and Houston are changing. They are not dense, historic downtowns; instead, they reflect contemporary downtown growth in sprawling cities. Both cities have reimagined their downtowns, leveraging vacant land, new construction, and infill projects. Through this process, developers are shaping downtown in response to market demand. This research explores how developers in two Sun Belt cities are thinking about Millennials and cementi…
Housing Disinvestment and Crime in a Phoenix Suburb
External investment in neighborhoods can inhibit crime. However, during the housing crisis, many investors were foreclosed upon, triggering large-scale community disinvestment. Yet the impact of this type of disinvestment on crime is currently unknown. Combining data on crime incidents with foreclosure, home sales, and sociodemographic data, this research assesses whether the foreclosure of properties owned by investors has an effect on crime in …
Ethnically bounded homeownership
Immigrant homeowners’ function within ethnic boundaries in the housing market may have helped or hindered them during the recent U.S. Great Recession. This research explores this theme through interviews with immigrant and non-immigrant homeowners from four ethnic communities in Los Angeles County and the non-profit organizations that tried to assist them. Immigrant homeowners turned to co-ethnics for advice and support and formed multigeneration…
Planning for Happy Neighborhoods
Problem, research strategy, and findings: There is increasing interest in planning for healthy communities, but little is known about how planners can affect mental health and wellbeing in neighborhoods, although much is known about how planners can affect physical health through neighborhood design. In this review essay, we draw lessons from a cross-disciplinary set of studies to reveal how the neighborhood built environment may affect one aspec…
Who Really Bowls Alone? Cities, Suburbs, and Social Time in the United States
One potential consequence of suburbanization is weaker social connectedness. Based on data from the 2003 to 2013 American Time Use Surveys, this research uses difference of means t-tests, propensity score matching, and Tobit regression to assess whether suburban living is associated with less socializing than city living in mid-to-large American metropolitan areas. After controlling for personal characteristics, we find no meaningful difference i…
Racial equity in the post-civil rights suburbs? Evidence from US regions 2000–2012
Minority suburbanites in the US have historically lived in more disadvantaged neighbourhoods than Whites. Yet, those in suburbs that came of age after the 1960s civil rights era may be experiencing more equal outcomes. Using US Census data and descriptive statistics, this research tests whether post-civil rights suburbs had greater racial equity in neighbourhood poverty, college educated, and homeownership rates relative to central cities and old…
Sustainability Through Happiness
Happiness is commonly thought of as an individual characteristic for which each person is solely responsible. However, happiness is also a community characteristic influenced by factors external to the individual. This article offers an alternative sustainable community development framework that focuses on improved opportunities for happiness. Key components of the framework include happiness visioning, public participation, a happiness profit i…
An unexpected geography of opportunity in the wake of the foreclosure crisis
During the recent United States foreclosure crisis, investors purchased and leased thousands of homes nationwide, opening up formerly owner-occupied neighborhoods to renters. Yet, little is known about how this process affected regional patterns of residential segregation and inequality. In this study, we combine property-level data on real estate transactions and subsidized housing vouchers from 2004 to 2014 to assess whether the conversion of f…
Moving to Opportunity
Greater safety is a primary benefit garnered by black public housing residents participating in housing mobility programs. Whether similar outcomes are arising from the recent exurbanization of nonsubsidized families is unclear. Using the migration of 130,000 African Americans into the Los Angeles exurbs as a case study, this research combines evidence from mover interviews and crime and census data to show that the region has enabled families’ s…
Has Exurban Growth Enabled Greater Racial Equity in Neighborhood Quality? Evidence from the Los Angeles Region
A wealth of data drawn from cities and their nearby suburbs show that, consistent with place stratification theory, African Americans live in poorer quality communities than similarly affluent members of other racial groups. Yet, few have examined whether these trends are playing out in the rapidly growing exurbs, places that emerged in the post-Civil Rights era. Through a case study of African American migration to Los Angeles's exurban Inland E…
African Americans' Search for "More for Less" and "Peace of Mind" on the Exurban Frontier
African Americans increasingly are moving from inner cities and inner-ring suburbs to fast-growing exurbs on the urban fringe, trends that media reports attribute primarily to their desire to live affordably as homeowners in safer communities. Little empirical evidence exists to support these claims, although research on the drivers of postwar black suburbanization and a burgeoning exurban migration literature suggest that desires for ownership a…
Sustainability Through Happiness
Happiness is commonly thought of as an individual characteristic for which each person is solely responsible. However, happiness is also a community characteristic influenced by factors external to the individual. This article offers an alternative sustainable community development framework that focuses on improved opportunities for happiness. Key components of the framework include happiness visioning, public participation, a happiness profit i…
Capitalizing on Collapse
A well-documented consequence of the recent foreclosure crisis was a pronounced dislocation in the single-family home market. Large institutional buyers emerged to capitalize on this dislocation. These firms acquired hundreds of thousands of single-family homes to create a pool of single-family rentals (SFRs) in markets across the United States. Existing analyses of institutional investors focus on their aggregate characteristics and associated c…
African Americans' Search for "More for Less" and "Peace of Mind" on the Exurban Frontier
African Americans increasingly are moving from inner cities and inner-ring suburbs to fast-growing exurbs on the urban fringe, trends that media reports attribute primarily to their desire to live affordably as homeowners in safer communities. Little empirical evidence exists to support these claims, although research on the drivers of postwar black suburbanization and a burgeoning exurban migration literature suggest that desires for ownership a…
Has Exurban Growth Enabled Greater Racial Equity in Neighborhood Quality? Evidence from the Los Angeles Region
A wealth of data drawn from cities and their nearby suburbs show that, consistent with place stratification theory, African Americans live in poorer quality communities than similarly affluent members of other racial groups. Yet, few have examined whether these trends are playing out in the rapidly growing exurbs, places that emerged in the post-Civil Rights era. Through a case study of African American migration to Los Angeles's exurban Inland E…
An unexpected geography of opportunity in the wake of the foreclosure crisis
During the recent United States foreclosure crisis, investors purchased and leased thousands of homes nationwide, opening up formerly owner-occupied neighborhoods to renters. Yet, little is known about how this process affected regional patterns of residential segregation and inequality. In this study, we combine property-level data on real estate transactions and subsidized housing vouchers from 2004 to 2014 to assess whether the conversion of f…
Downtown revitalization in the era of millennials
Downtown Phoenix and Houston are changing. They are not dense, historic downtowns; instead, they reflect contemporary downtown growth in sprawling cities. Both cities have reimagined their downtowns, leveraging vacant land, new construction, and infill projects. Through this process, developers are shaping downtown in response to market demand. This research explores how developers in two Sun Belt cities are thinking about Millennials and cementi…
Housing Disinvestment and Crime in a Phoenix Suburb
External investment in neighborhoods can inhibit crime. However, during the housing crisis, many investors were foreclosed upon, triggering large-scale community disinvestment. Yet the impact of this type of disinvestment on crime is currently unknown. Combining data on crime incidents with foreclosure, home sales, and sociodemographic data, this research assesses whether the foreclosure of properties owned by investors has an effect on crime in …
Deconstructing racial code words
Racism has become more covert in post-civil rights America. Yet, measures to combat it are hindered by inadequate general knowledge on what "colorblind" race talk says and does and what makes it effective. We deepen understanding of covert racism by investigating one type of discourse - racial code words, which are (1) indirect signifiers of racial or ethnic groups that contain (2) at least one positive or negative value judgment and (3) contextu…
Vulnerability and opportunity
The growth of single-family rentals (SFRs) in the wake of the US foreclosure crisis has recently begun attracting overdue scholarly attention. The transformation of millions of single-family homes from owner- to renter- occupied over the past decade raises numerous important questions about the vulnerabilities and opportunities created by this historic tenure shift for both households and neighbourhoods. This research reports on the demographics …
Racial equity in the post-civil rights suburbs? Evidence from US regions 2000–2012
Minority suburbanites in the US have historically lived in more disadvantaged neighbourhoods than Whites. Yet, those in suburbs that came of age after the 1960s civil rights era may be experiencing more equal outcomes. Using US Census data and descriptive statistics, this research tests whether post-civil rights suburbs had greater racial equity in neighbourhood poverty, college educated, and homeownership rates relative to central cities and old…
Who Really Bowls Alone? Cities, Suburbs, and Social Time in the United States
One potential consequence of suburbanization is weaker social connectedness. Based on data from the 2003 to 2013 American Time Use Surveys, this research uses difference of means t-tests, propensity score matching, and Tobit regression to assess whether suburban living is associated with less socializing than city living in mid-to-large American metropolitan areas. After controlling for personal characteristics, we find no meaningful difference i…
Ethnically bounded homeownership
Immigrant homeowners’ function within ethnic boundaries in the housing market may have helped or hindered them during the recent U.S. Great Recession. This research explores this theme through interviews with immigrant and non-immigrant homeowners from four ethnic communities in Los Angeles County and the non-profit organizations that tried to assist them. Immigrant homeowners turned to co-ethnics for advice and support and formed multigeneration…
Coping and Connecting through Creativity in the Neighborhood Realm during Covid-19
This research addresses how the COVID-19 pandemic affected neighborhood engagement by exploring the use of streets, sidewalks, and driveways as sociable spaces for informal and uncoordinated creative expression. We assessed practices occurring in three diverse City of Phoenix neighborhoods before and during the pandemic through visual analysis. We show that residents used these spaces in novel and more intensive ways during the pandemic, includin…
Moving to Opportunity
Greater safety is a primary benefit garnered by black public housing residents participating in housing mobility programs. Whether similar outcomes are arising from the recent exurbanization of nonsubsidized families is unclear. Using the migration of 130,000 African Americans into the Los Angeles exurbs as a case study, this research combines evidence from mover interviews and crime and census data to show that the region has enabled families’ s…
Has Exurban Growth Enabled Greater Racial Equity in Neighborhood Quality? Evidence from the Los Angeles Region
A wealth of data drawn from cities and their nearby suburbs show that, consistent with place stratification theory, African Americans live in poorer quality communities than similarly affluent members of other racial groups. Yet, few have examined whether these trends are playing out in the rapidly growing exurbs, places that emerged in the post-Civil Rights era. Through a case study of African American migration to Los Angeles's exurban Inland E…
African Americans' Search for "More for Less" and "Peace of Mind" on the Exurban Frontier
African Americans increasingly are moving from inner cities and inner-ring suburbs to fast-growing exurbs on the urban fringe, trends that media reports attribute primarily to their desire to live affordably as homeowners in safer communities. Little empirical evidence exists to support these claims, although research on the drivers of postwar black suburbanization and a burgeoning exurban migration literature suggest that desires for ownership a…
Sustainability Through Happiness
Happiness is commonly thought of as an individual characteristic for which each person is solely responsible. However, happiness is also a community characteristic influenced by factors external to the individual. This article offers an alternative sustainable community development framework that focuses on improved opportunities for happiness. Key components of the framework include happiness visioning, public participation, a happiness profit i…
An unexpected geography of opportunity in the wake of the foreclosure crisis
During the recent United States foreclosure crisis, investors purchased and leased thousands of homes nationwide, opening up formerly owner-occupied neighborhoods to renters. Yet, little is known about how this process affected regional patterns of residential segregation and inequality. In this study, we combine property-level data on real estate transactions and subsidized housing vouchers from 2004 to 2014 to assess whether the conversion of f…
Planning for Happy Neighborhoods
Problem, research strategy, and findings: There is increasing interest in planning for healthy communities, but little is known about how planners can affect mental health and wellbeing in neighborhoods, although much is known about how planners can affect physical health through neighborhood design. In this review essay, we draw lessons from a cross-disciplinary set of studies to reveal how the neighborhood built environment may affect one aspec…
Who Really Bowls Alone? Cities, Suburbs, and Social Time in the United States
One potential consequence of suburbanization is weaker social connectedness. Based on data from the 2003 to 2013 American Time Use Surveys, this research uses difference of means t-tests, propensity score matching, and Tobit regression to assess whether suburban living is associated with less socializing than city living in mid-to-large American metropolitan areas. After controlling for personal characteristics, we find no meaningful difference i…
Racial equity in the post-civil rights suburbs? Evidence from US regions 2000–2012
Minority suburbanites in the US have historically lived in more disadvantaged neighbourhoods than Whites. Yet, those in suburbs that came of age after the 1960s civil rights era may be experiencing more equal outcomes. Using US Census data and descriptive statistics, this research tests whether post-civil rights suburbs had greater racial equity in neighbourhood poverty, college educated, and homeownership rates relative to central cities and old…
Ethnically bounded homeownership
Immigrant homeowners’ function within ethnic boundaries in the housing market may have helped or hindered them during the recent U.S. Great Recession. This research explores this theme through interviews with immigrant and non-immigrant homeowners from four ethnic communities in Los Angeles County and the non-profit organizations that tried to assist them. Immigrant homeowners turned to co-ethnics for advice and support and formed multigeneration…
Housing Disinvestment and Crime in a Phoenix Suburb
External investment in neighborhoods can inhibit crime. However, during the housing crisis, many investors were foreclosed upon, triggering large-scale community disinvestment. Yet the impact of this type of disinvestment on crime is currently unknown. Combining data on crime incidents with foreclosure, home sales, and sociodemographic data, this research assesses whether the foreclosure of properties owned by investors has an effect on crime in …
Exploring the Relationship Between Housing Downturns and Partisan Elections
An understudied outcome of foreclosure crises is how their aftershocks affect partisan elections. Two hypotheses are that partisan shifts may occur in neighborhoods with concentrated foreclosures because of (1) declines in turnout among liberal leaning voters or (2) swells of anti-incumbency among all voters. This research explores these hypotheses in Maricopa County, Arizona, by using econometric modeling to uncover associations among neighborho…
Downtown revitalization in the era of millennials
Downtown Phoenix and Houston are changing. They are not dense, historic downtowns; instead, they reflect contemporary downtown growth in sprawling cities. Both cities have reimagined their downtowns, leveraging vacant land, new construction, and infill projects. Through this process, developers are shaping downtown in response to market demand. This research explores how developers in two Sun Belt cities are thinking about Millennials and cementi…
Manturuk, Lindblad, and Quercia
"Manturuk, Lindblad, and Quercia: A Place Called Home: The Social Dimensions of Homeownership." Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(3), pp. 380–381
Do Neighborhood Walkability, Transit, and Parks Relate to Residents’ Life Satisfaction
Problem, research strategy, and findings: Planners lack clarity about how they can promote the subjective wellbeing (SWB) of the communities they serve. In this research we use descriptive and econometric methods to explore the interconnections between three aspects of the objective and perceived neighborhood built environment (NBE)—walkability, transit, and parks—and one aspect of SWB—life satisfaction—drawing on a survey of 496 people in the Ph…
Urban Science
Vulnerability and opportunity
The growth of single-family rentals (SFRs) in the wake of the US foreclosure crisis has recently begun attracting overdue scholarly attention. The transformation of millions of single-family homes from owner- to renter- occupied over the past decade raises numerous important questions about the vulnerabilities and opportunities created by this historic tenure shift for both households and neighbourhoods. This research reports on the demographics …
Are people in bigger cities less ethical human beings? Evidence on urban living and moral values
Capitalizing on Collapse
A well-documented consequence of the recent foreclosure crisis was a pronounced dislocation in the single-family home market. Large institutional buyers emerged to capitalize on this dislocation. These firms acquired hundreds of thousands of single-family homes to create a pool of single-family rentals (SFRs) in markets across the United States. Existing analyses of institutional investors focus on their aggregate characteristics and associated c…
Coping and Connecting through Creativity in the Neighborhood Realm during Covid-19
This research addresses how the COVID-19 pandemic affected neighborhood engagement by exploring the use of streets, sidewalks, and driveways as sociable spaces for informal and uncoordinated creative expression. We assessed practices occurring in three diverse City of Phoenix neighborhoods before and during the pandemic through visual analysis. We show that residents used these spaces in novel and more intensive ways during the pandemic, includin…
Deconstructing racial code words
Racism has become more covert in post-civil rights America. Yet, measures to combat it are hindered by inadequate general knowledge on what "colorblind" race talk says and does and what makes it effective. We deepen understanding of covert racism by investigating one type of discourse - racial code words, which are (1) indirect signifiers of racial or ethnic groups that contain (2) at least one positive or negative value judgment and (3) contextu…
Neighborhood Histories
Neighborhoods and the built environment play a vital role in determining our health. But the majority of studies uncovering this relationship are cross‐sectional, which can belie the fact that neighborhoods are shaped by historical processes over decades. In this study, we use white flight, the departure of white residents from an area, as our historical anchor to understand associations between current health outcomes and the histories of neighb…
In neighbors we trust
Neighborhood disorder and local community type shape neighborhood trust. • Trusting neighbors is associated with higher wellbeing and health. • Trust in neighbors relates to residents’ wellbeing in the Global North and South. Research shows that neighborhood social connectedness is important for wellbeing. However, these findings are mostly drawn from the Global North. We use the World Values Survey to examine the drivers of neighborhood social c…
Bring Zoning Back Into the Planning Curricula
From social distancing to creative social engagement
Creative social engagement (CSE) – creative expression in the public realm for community engagement purposes – is one form of neighbourhood activity that surged during the pandemic, when many US residents relied on their neighbourhoods for daily activities. Using regression analysis, this study examines how the neighbourhood built and social environment affected Phoenix residents’ use of streets, sidewalks, and driveways for CSE. The results show…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · Geography (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies (12 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Demography (8 works) · Economic growth (8 works) · Demographic economics (7 works)