Prentiss A. Dantzler, Ph.D.

Housing Assistance Programs & Neighborhood Dynamics: Lessons Learned from the U.S. & Canada

Lecture by Prentiss A. Dantzler, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Urban Studies, Georgia State University

Housing costs are consistently the biggest expense for individuals and families. As a result, many countries have tried to address housing affordability by providing housing assistance directly to those who cannot pay their monthly housing expenses on their own. However, many have questioned whether or not the government should supply assistance for those who cannot afford it given the neoliberal turn of state intervention. This neoliberal turn is argued to be seen locally in the case of housing vouchers and social mixing initiatives encouraged by agencies undertaking public housing restructuring across the U.S., since the 1970s, and Canada, in the 1990s. Within North America, the two largest housing authorities are located in New York, NY and Toronto, ON, respectively. And while there is a lot of literature on housing assistance in New York and other large U.S. cities, there is little research on the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Given the increasingly unaffordable nature of the GTA, this lecture focused on the relationships between housing assistance programs and neighborhood dynamics.

Prentiss A. Dantzler, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University (GSU). His research sits at the nexus of urban poverty, housing policy, neighborhood change and community development practices. His work examines how and why neighborhoods change and how communities and policymakers create and react to those changes. Prentiss’ research has appeared in a number of academic venues including Urban Studies, Housing Studies, Urban Affairs Review, and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity as well as popular media outlets such as The Huffington Post. He is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also served as a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He currently sits on the editorial board for City and Community and on the governing board of the Urban Affairs Association. Before joining GSU, he was an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Mellon Faculty Fellow at Colorado College. He received his Ph.D. in Public Affairs with a concentration in Community Development from Rutgers University-Camden. He also holds a MPA from West Chester University and a B.S. in Energy, Business and Finance from Penn State University.