Over the summer, I would like to focus on the affordable housing programs in the Austin area and come up with a guide to help people locate the available resources to them in our community. During the past several years Austin has been one of the fastest growing cities with a housing market that is becoming increasingly hard to access with the housing market price in the city jumping 42% in just the past year alone which is also causing rental prices to jump. The main reason for the research is when looking for affordable housing it can be difficult to find all the resources or be aware of what resources are available to them or how to locate them. By doing the research and putting all the resources provided by different programs into one guide it should make finding somewhere to stay a lot easier and affordable to those who struggle to find housing. I want to focus on government backed programs such as housing choice vouchers and income restricted units as well as non government programs in the community set up to help lower income residents in the city. I plan on using the internet and doing interviews with professionals who work at the various organizations to get a real idea of what each does and their purpose to the community. My end goal would be to create a guide or list showing people the resources available to them when attempting to find housing in Austin.

Gentrification has been a topic of some time, especially in recent decades. In this research, I will be exploring how this phenomenon affects the community itself. Although, the process of gentrification is intended to renovate neighborhoods with long histories of disinvestment, it often displaced minority residents and shifts the culture of the area. Ultimately, my goal is to research policies and initiatives that have been put in place to reduce displacement in gentrified areas. From this research I aim to create a solution kit that would help to tackle the issue of displacement and cultural influx in terms of gentrification. Furthermore, the main area of focus includes gentrification in Hingetown of Ohio City, Cleveland, during the past decade (2010-2020). I plan to examine past case studies on gentrification in Hingetown of Ohio City to gain some knowledge on procedures that work best in evaluating the issue. In addition, I will be conducting interviews with practitioners engaged in the community and local residents. Information from these interviews surrounding procedures to tackle displacement will be collected and interpreted for the utilization in the solution kit. Expected solutions include initiatives that increase the access to capital and space so that minorities have control over their own displacement. As well as, local reinvestment in the area to keep property and living conditions affordable for previous residents.

The research that I will be conducting seeks to examine the impact COVID-19 has had on the experience and entrepreneurship of immigrant Latinas in DTLA. More specifically, it will analyze how processes of gentrification and neighborhood change have been expedited by the pandemic. The research pertaining to the gentrification of the greater LA area seldomly focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender which highlights the importance of filling these gaps within the existing literature and it is why I will be approaching this study through Critical Race and Feminist Theory Frameworks. Gentrification and neighborhood change continues to displace and ravage the most vulnerable communities of DTLA and with a pandemic looming overhead, minority women owned businesses are shuttering at exponential rates. In my preliminary findings and initial interviews, I have discovered that many of these women have faced displacement in some form whether it be from loss of business due to social distancing guidelines, forced closure due to financial loss, or the necessity to seek work in other informal labor sectors that have not been impacted by the pandemic. This project is a significant contribution because it highlights some of the many inequalities that minoritized and underrepresented communities have faced due to the pandemic. Furthermore, my research offers a perspective that is grounded in the community that is facing these issues due to it being my experiential knowledge.