Winnie Van Dijk
Yale University, CT·Social Science
When governments rebuild neighborhoods, some families lose their homes and have to move. Past research has mostly asked what happened to local economies and property values afterward.
- Fields
Social Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
Computer Science
- Topics
neighborhood revitalization
urban renewal
residential displacement
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Build a comprehensive database of federal neighborhood revitalization project boundaries and timing by digitizing federal, state and municipal archives, project reports and historical newspapers, using large language models to summarize and classify the documents.
- Estimate long-run migration and mortality outcomes for people who lived in or near areas affected by neighborhood revitalization projects, using publicly available historical data.
- Measure long-run labor market, housing quality and health outcomes for displaced families by linking historical Census records to restricted Census microdata across multiple decades.
- Exploit historical variation in project timing, location and local policy context to identify whether the effects of neighborhood-level government interventions persist over decades.
More about the research
Much less is known about what happened to the displaced families themselves over the following decades. This project follows those families across their lifetimes to measure how large-scale, government-driven neighborhood change shaped health, work, housing and where people ended up living.
Why it matters
Place-based policies and infrastructure investments still displace families today. Evidence on what happened to households displaced decades ago could inform how federal, state and local governments design such projects and what mitigation they offer, affecting millions of urban and rural American families. The digitized database of project boundaries and timing also becomes a public resource for other researchers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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