The future of cities
Jackelyn Hwang is an expert on the social dynamics of cities.
In one line of research, she combines AI and Google Street View to measure quality-of-life factors – such as trash, blight, new construction, and the pace of recovery from climate disasters – to analyze gentrification, racial equity, and overall resident well-being. Her work has shown, for instance, that predominantly Black neighborhoods are last and slowest to gentrify and that displaced Black residents often end up in worse neighborhoods. She recently worked with policymakers at the housing department of Oakland, California, on anti-displacement and anti-homelessness programs and is now working with policymakers across the Bay Area to strengthen neighborhoods. We are clearing a path to more stable communities for everyone, Hwang tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. Since we started this show eight years ago, it's become an archive of amazing and impactful work by my Stanford colleagues. Research is not something that just happens in the lab, and as you'll hear on this show, the research at Stanford can impact areas like health, technology, law, and business, and many other topics that can affect everyday life.
[00:00:23] We hope you'll tune in to learn more about how research has the potential to help your life and to help the lives of people you care about in your family and your community.
[00:00:32] Jackie Hwang: If we can better measure neighborhood, like the physical, visible conditions, and identify how that relates to individual wellbeing, affect, stress, and also just life chances overall, then maybe we can manipulate things about the neighborhood environments in a very tangible way. So, I just feel like this area of research has clear pathways to intervention that I hope would help create these safe, quality, stable neighborhoods that we envision.
[00:01:08] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, and I'm your host Russ Altman. If someone pops into your head today as you listen to this episode, why don't you tell them about the show? Word of mouth is a great way to spread The Future of Everything.
[00:01:22] Today, Jackie Hwang will tell us that cities in America are changing rapidly, and this is impacting the residents, of course. Unfortunately, it's impacting some residents, the poor and the marginalized, in adverse ways that need to be addressed. It's The Future of Cities.
[00:01:37] Today we're continuing our feature called The Future in a Minute. At the end of my conversation with Jackie, I will ask her some rapid questions, and she'll give me some hopefully rapid answers. Also, before we get started, a reminder to please share the show with friends, neighbors, and relatives who you think might enjoy it. Word of mouth is a great way to spread word about The Future of Everything
[00:02:03] Cities are changing in the United States, and it's for multiple reasons. We're seeing gentrification in some areas. We're seeing immigration. Demographics are changing. Climate change has effects on buildings and the built environment. There's issues in crime, which is going down in the cities, education, schools, and the financial underpinnings of real estate in major metropolitan locations. All of this is changing how cities look and how cities work, and unfortunately, it's having effects on marginalized and poor communities who are often left squeezed.
[00:02:39] Well, Jackie Hwang is a professor of sociology at Stanford University, and she's an expert on cities, neighborhoods, gentrification, and how this is affecting especially the poor and marginalized communities in the cities.
[00:02:53] So Jackie, how did you decide to focus on cities and the social dynamics within neighborhoods and cities as a major thrust in your research?
[00:03:02] Jackie Hwang: Sure. So, I think my interest in this area really stems from just my experience growing up. I grew up in a suburb right outside of Philadelphia, and when I was growing up, my sisters were much older, and they lived in the city. And I think I was just always just kind of interested in the discourse around the city and how terrible it was and how people tried to avoid it, even though we lived five miles from it. And then a very different experience when I would visit my sisters, and you know, that it was just kind of cool and, like, there was a lot of interesting things going on.
[00:03:35] And then when I came, I actually went to Stanford as an undergrad, and was a math major, but then I soon discovered sociology later in my years. And, you know, a lot of the discourse in sociology was about urban poverty, segregation, and sort of just this stark contrast to my experience, but also kind of helped make sense for, what I heard people talk about when I was growing up in the suburbs.
[00:04:00] And so, I actually wrote my senior thesis, on a gentrifying neighborhood in Philadelphia because I was just interested in understanding how this change was happening while we also have this picture of stark segregation and disinvestment in, in urban neighborhoods. So that's where I started getting interested in it.
[00:04:19] After college, I worked in a high poverty neighborhood in Philadelphia for a couple years and just really just driven to understand why we have this stark difference in places, and why some places are changing and, and others aren't. And that's sort of how I got into this area, and I've been doing it for a couple decades now.
[00:04:42] Russ Altman: Great. Well, I had a very similar, relationship to New York City growing up. we, we were 13 miles or eight miles away from New York, and I went to high school there in the '70s, which, as you probably know, was a tumultuous time for New York City. So great.
[00:04:56] Okay, so, when you write about cities, one of the things you start out with is, like, a review of all the things that are changing. And it's really breathtaking, and I think many of us know that there was some dynamics around COVID, but it's way beyond that. So, could you give us kind of a little sense of where are cities now and what are the changes that they're undergoing that kind of fuel a lot of the things that you then study?
[00:05:18] Jackie Hwang: Yeah, sure. So, I think I frame a lot of my work around the 21st century American city, and just how rapidly it's been changing, how different and radically different it is from the past. And as I mentioned, a lot of what I study, a lot of what our urban sociology has been based on, is just this idea of persistent and durable neighborhood inequality and segregation.
[00:05:40] And today, cities are just incredibly different, right? So, we have widespread gentrification. When I was doing this project in the early 2000s and telling people about gentrification, a lot of people had no idea what I was talking about, and now it's just a common household word.
[00:05:55] Immigration has increased rapidly since the '90s, and so cities are incredibly diverse. Changing attitudes, changing class composition, so just diversity both racially and socioeconomically has changed a lot. There's been a major decline in crime. So, as you're kind of referencing, the cities in the '70s, '80s, '90s were just very high crime, and crime is just below half in a lot of cities. It's very, you know, its cities are a lot safer.
[00:06:24] And then I think education reform. I worked in education, prior to going to graduate school, and, and during that time, there were big pushes for school choice, and I think that's really disentangled how neighborhoods and schools are tied together, and that's shaped how people move to different places and choose where to live.
[00:06:42] And then I think today, I mean, we, you know, post-recession, there's been the financial foreclosure crisis, subprime lending crisis has really shaped where people live. and now we're in an affordable housing crisis, right? And that's the new housing crisis that people talk about. Homelessness has skyrocketed.
[00:07:00] I think something that comes out of the wake of the, the Great Recession is what people talk about as financialization of the housing market. And so, this is just the influx of financial actors, in shaping the housing market and financial practices. So really house- homes are now financial assets and commodities more than homes for people. And so, this has led to an increase in corporations owning homes and just increase, capital among corporations and, and these large-scale entities and decrease power among the people living in it.
[00:07:35] Another thing that's on my mind is just climate change, right? So that's been increasingly happening, climate disasters, climate change, and so I think risks are really reshaping housing markets themselves. Climate disasters are more frequent and more intense, and, and that's really changing cities as well and how people think about where to live.
[00:07:56] Russ Altman: So, okay, so thank you. So, that really is a very helpful kind of almost on every front, there's been evolution, and it's been very rapid.
[00:08:03] So, you've mentioned the word gentrification a couple of times, and I know you write about it a lot. So, as a starting point, tell me about gentrification. You, you mentioned it as even one of the kind of inspirational things that you saw even, in your, undergraduate work and, and even maybe growing up in near Philadelphia. So, tell me about gentrification and how we can think about it and what kind of effects it has on cities and on neighborhoods.
[00:08:28] Jackie Hwang: So, I guess maybe a good place to start is how people, how I'm talking about gentrification, how I'm defining it,
[00:08:35] Russ Altman: Yeah
[00:08:35] Jackie Hwang: ... when I talk about it, because it means a lot of different things to different people, and it's really evolved in its meaning over time.
[00:08:42] So, when I talk about it, I kind of, I'm thinking of classic conceptions in sociology, urban geography, that really think about it as a class-based transformation of urban neighborhoods. So, the idea here is that there's an influx of middle- and upper-class residents into previously disinvested neighborhoods. And a lot of the early writings in the 60s and 70s were about urban neighborhoods, you know, central core neighborhoods that were abandoned. And we see this influx of people into these neighborhoods, and then an increase in the valuation of these places.
[00:09:16] Since then, gentrification, you know, even defining it, has become a, a very contentious topic within scholarship. You know, we see it in the suburbs, in tourist towns, and we see it globally, and it's not just about middle- and upper-class people coming in, but a lot of it is about the influx of state capital and investment and money by these larger actors.
[00:09:41] And so, it can look very different. It can happen in different paces, at different places nowadays, and I, I think that's sort of been the evolution of gentrification itself as a process. And I think that brings a lot of questions on what the consequences of it are, which is where a lot of my research has focused, lately.
[00:10:02] Russ Altman: Yeah. So okay, so what, what have you found? I mean, I, I have a, I have a rough sense because I've, of course, before each guest comes, I stalk them and read all of their papers, or at least the titles and abstracts.
[00:10:12] So, how do you study gentrification? Given, given your, your definition, which, you said is based in kind of traditional early definitions of city-based displacement and, and repopulation, are there surprising dynamics that people might not realize or happen? Because I think many people say, "Well, you know, the neighborhood was falling apart, and then we moved in a bunch of people who have a more resources, and now the neighborhood looks much better. What's not to love?"
[00:10:37] Jackie Hwang: Yeah. okay. I could go on and on about from this.
[00:10:41] Russ Altman: Yes ...
[00:10:41] Jackie Hwang: I mean, so-
[00:10:44] Russ Altman: I thought you might.
[00:10:44] Jackie Hwang: Yeah. I guess a starting point is something that when I first started, or, you know, in the early years during my dissertation when I was researching this, is that the discourse, and, and this definition is really class-based. But when you talk to someone about gentrification, it's, it's, a lot of it is about White people moving into predominantly minority neighborhoods. This kind of contradicts this idea that segregation is persistent, that neighborhood inequality has been persistent and durable for decades. And so, one of my studies goes and tries to look at, is this persistence real? Are minority neighborhoods gentrifying?
[00:11:21] And I think something that's surprising is that, maybe to some people, is that predominantly Black neighborhoods are the last to gentrify, least likely to gentrify, and then also gentrify at a slower pace when they do. And this really does fit into what our understandings of segregation and this racial hierarchy in neighborhoods that has been persistent for decades. So, it's sort of that research is kind of showing how these same processes that produce segregation are still operating within gentrification as gentrification unfolds.
[00:11:50] Another, I think, surprising perhaps finding is about displacement. So, a worry that a lot of us have is that when neighborhoods gentrify, it leads to the displacement of poor residents or the long-term residents or, minority residents. And when I started studying this, a lot of the research finds that there is not displacement, that people are not more likely, poor people, minority residents, long-term residents, are not more likely to be displaced from neighborhoods that gentrify versus those that don't.
[00:12:24] And so, at the time, there's, there was generally limited data in which this was based on. And so, one of my studies looks at, at the time, was large scale data. Now there's even larger scale data, but it was look, using consumer credit records. And so, this was a 5% sample of adults in Philadelphia, so it was 50,000 residents that we could follow over time. And similarly, we don't find that there's higher rates of displacement, or movement among poor residents in gentrifying neighborhoods compared to those that don't gentrify.
[00:12:53] Russ Altman: So, if I could ask, 'cause that's surprising because it seems like there's just a certain number of units in the, in the neighborhood, and so how could that even be? So, could you explain a little bit more about how it's possible for there to be a gentrification, some influx of new people, but that the previous residents are still there in some sense?
[00:13:11] Jackie Hwang: Yeah. So, it's, it's not necessarily that they're still there, it's that they're still there at the same rate as those in poor neighborhoods that don't gentrify. And actually, I think the main explanation is that just poor people are highly unstable residentially, and so they move a lot, and they act. In our study in Philadelphia, they moved the most in poor Black non-gentrifying neighborhoods. And so-
[00:13:35] Russ Altman: I see.
[00:13:35] Jackie Hwang: It's really a story of poverty and financial instability. Residential instability is experienced among the poor at greater levels, in poor Black neighborhoods. And, and a lot of the research on evictions finds that this is more common in these neighborhoods instead.
[00:13:51] The other thing is that in gentrifying neighborhoods, there is more investment, right? So, there are new units that are being built, and so in some, you know, there are buildings that people can fill or units that incomers can fill without necessarily displacing long-term residents.
[00:14:08] However, this research, a lot of the work that I've been trying to do is to shift the attention from whether or not someone moves to thinking about where people move, and the destinations.
[00:14:19] Russ Altman: Yeah.
[00:14:20] Jackie Hwang: And so, when we think about it that way, and these are like the longer-term consequences of gentrification, even if people are moving at similar rates, what we find in the research is that when poor people move, or when poor minorities move, they end up in much worse neighborhoods than others. And so, what this implies is that poor white folks are actually maybe benefiting or cashing out or able to save money and move to better neighborhoods when their neighborhoods gentrify.
[00:14:48] Russ Altman: Yes. And I can; okay, so that's a very clear and, and concerning trend, which is that the, the original residents are being squeezed into, as you characterize it, less good neighborhoods, which I, I assume means worse infrastructure, worse schools, probably higher crime.
[00:15:04] Jackie Hwang: Exactly.
[00:15:04] Russ Altman: And, and so, so do the cities watch this? Do they read your work, and do policymakers try to make things better?
[00:15:14] Jackie Hwang: I can speak to this in a couple different ways.
[00:15:16] So, I think- You know, people can read the work, and have read the other work, that predated this and think about and say, "Oh, gentrification doesn't cause displacement. Let's keep building." I have tried to do a lot of work, specifically with local practitioners and policymakers to think about it a little more deeply 'cause I'm trying to add more nuance to this.
[00:15:40] Russ Altman: Yeah.
[00:15:40] Jackie Hwang: So, I've done a lot of work in Philadelphia, and a lot of that work has been more around, changing tax policies around keeping long-term homeowners in. I would hope that people; at that time, I didn't do as much engaged work, with, directly with policymakers. I hope that my work is read. I've done some podcasts and-
[00:16:00] Russ Altman: Yeah
[00:16:00] Jackie Hwang: ... and panels around that. And so, I just think in general there's, one, more awareness around the potential implications of gentrification and displacement.
[00:16:10] I mean, I think with Matt Desmond's work around evictions, there's just been a broader attention to displacement and efforts around that. And again, I think related to my work, displacement's not just something for gentrifying neighborhoods, it's something happening across the board. And so, I think there's been a lot of efforts there.
[00:16:27] One thing that I think my more recent work has turned to, especially 'cause it's been focused on the Bay Area, is that actually poor people move very little here in gentrifying neighborhoods and in not gentrifying neighborhoods. So, so I kind of, something, I replicated that work in Philadelphia in the Bay Area, and what we found was that there's actually just very little movement among the same group of, of poor residents that we were looking at here. And that led to an interview study that we did in the city of Oakland, and I've done a lot of work with Oakland's Housing Department.
[00:16:59] And what we find there is actually people are being squeezed and, and living in very unstable, unsustainable conditions. And so, with policymakers there, I've worked with the Department of Housing and Community Development and their staff there, and we've really done; they've, I, I think our policy brief around our findings from the interviews and the quantitative data have really informed their strategic action plans around anti-displacement efforts. And then this led to a, a homelessness prevention program that, launched a couple years ago that we, helped with the evaluation on.
[00:17:33] And so, there's just been a real big push on anti-displacement as a key pillar of housing and community development, and homelessness prevention. So, there has been a lot of great work in the homelessness space, and I think there's been increasingly more attention around homelessness prevention. So, not just people who are already unhoused and then you know, trying to house them and keep them unhoused, but people who are housed but on the brink of becoming unhoused. And so, that's been such a great experience just working with Oakland and really seeing our work go into how they think about policy making and programs.
[00:18:10] Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with Jackie Hwang from Stanford University. In the last segment, we thought about cities and how they're changing, and how that change can lead to some people benefiting, but lots of other people being squeezed in many ways. In this segment, we wanna talk a little bit about the use of technology to make measurements that can then fuel your research.
[00:18:32] And I know you've done some really exciting things with Google Street View. We'll get to that in a second, but first I wanna remind everybody that at the end of our conversation I'm gonna ask Jackie about the future in a minute, a few quick questions followed by a few quick answers, and that's gonna be a lot of fun. So, Jackie, tell me about how Google Street View could possibly be useful for studying cities and neighborhoods.
[00:18:55] Jackie Hwang: Yeah. So, this has been another line of my research. Google Street View came out when I was in graduate school. and at the time I was trying to come up with my second-year paper and figure out how to measure gentrification, which turned out to be very difficult, there wasn't really consensus in the literature.
[00:19:14] And so, I think something about gentrification had been hard to define with the census variables that people generally use. And so, a lot of the qualitative research or, you know, theories about gentrification would just talk about how you know it when you see it.
[00:19:30] And so, Google Street View comes out, and this really provides public access to videotaping and seeing neighborhoods and cities across the world, really virtually every block. My advisor in graduate school, one of his famous projects in the '90s was holding a camcorder out of a window of an SUV and driving up and down streets in Chicago, and then they would have these-
[00:19:55] Russ Altman: Oh, so this was part of a tradition in, in the lab?
[00:19:58] Jackie Hwang: Yeah. Yeah, actually. And so, yeah, there's a tradition in sociology called systematic social observation, also in criminology, where people would walk around neighborhoods and fill out these surveys for different indicators. And, you know, think of it now versus sitting at your desk and, and looking at Google Street View, that's very, you know, costly, labor-intensive. You need a team of researchers to go out and fill out these surveys.
[00:20:22] And so, in graduate school, I did this with Google Street View, which saved some time, but still took up a lot of time. So, I created these surveys on, on what to look for different indicators. Spent a lot of time going up and down streets and filling them out.
[00:20:36] But then, you know, the last 10, 15 years, AI has just really changed what you can do. So, I've been spending a lot of my energy on using computer vision technology to try to look at neighborhoods at scale. It's, it hasn't been such a quick and easy solution as I thought it would be when I started working on this probably 10 years ago at this point. But we-
[00:21:00] Russ Altman: Right
[00:21:00] Jackie Hwang: ... you know, we've been training neural network, you know, with the evolu- with the evolution of AI and computer vision models. We've been working on trying to use, convolutional neural networks to read images at scale. And now with vision language models, I think that just creates a whole new frontier on, on what we could potentially do. Some of the bottlenecks with the traditional AI way of doing things, has been really generating high-quality training data. A lot of the things-
[00:21:29] Russ Altman: Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:30] Jackie Hwang: ...I'm interested in, that sociologists are interested in are not just like objects on sidewalks and buildings, which are generally easier models to train, but really the conditions of neighborhoods. And so, trying to get those conditions, which has some perception, you know, subjective, elements to it, and try to-
[00:21:50] Russ Altman: Right. Right.
[00:21:50] Jackie Hwang: ... put some objectivity to it has been challenging.
[00:21:53] Russ Altman: So, can I ask... this is, this is fascinating, and I know it's complicated, but can you give me a feeling of the types of things that, like, a Google Street View image might have that would tip you off to the conditions in the, in the neighborhood? I'm, I'm just try- Is it, like, I'm thinking maybe uncollected garbage or, buildings, a lot of buildings that are shuttered. I mean, what are the kinds of things you look for?
[00:22:14] Jackie Hwang: Yeah. So, I think a lot of trash has been the easiest, but it's taken a long time to do. So yeah, not just uncollected garbage, but really scattered litter has been a sign. It, in sociology, it's considered a classic sign of disorder. And so, when you think about gentrifying neighborhoods, it might be the lack of disorder or the absence of these elements over time that sign-
[00:22:38] Russ Altman: Right
[00:22:38] Jackie Hwang: ... as a signal. Also looking for blight, how kept vacant lots are. So, you might think of gentrifying neighborhoods, people might take vacant lots and turn them into community gardens or clean them up. And so, that's sort of another sign.
[00:22:53] And then in other work, we've just been basically looking at new construction or rehabbed buildings, which we've, we've shown, highlights, like, more using the computer vision models, highlights more things than just building permit data, for example.
[00:23:06] Russ Altman: Yeah.
[00:23:06] Jackie Hwang: And so, you can-
[00:23:07] Russ Altman: Yeah
[00:23:07] Jackie Hwang: ... it's, there's a lot you can see.
[00:23:10] Russ Altman: Speaking of seeing, I, I saw that you wrote a paper about eye tracking. When somebody goes into a neighborhood, what do they actually look at? Is, is that, is that, am I getting it right?
[00:23:18] Jackie Hwang: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, part of what, I think something that has come up as we've been having, you know, building the training data is, like, what are people actually seeing? Are they looking at trash, or is it something else that is causing them to say that there's trash? And so, I've become more interested in just, like, what drives these perceptions of, of cleanliness around neighborhoods.
[00:23:41] And so, with some folks in the engineering school, at Stanford, Sarah Billington and Hae Young Noh, we did an eye tracking study to explore how the visibility of trash or RVs or construction sites change how people perceive neighborhoods and how it affected their stress levels and affect. And it's actually pretty poignant. people really do focus, and trash was the most, had the most effect, among those different indicators.
[00:24:09] Russ Altman: Yeah. Really fascinating. I know you've also written and studied a lot of the effects of climate change, which like many other things I'm guessing, are not equally distributed and are, are affecting some folks much more. So, what have you found in, for climate change and its relationship to cities, neighborhoods, and these issues that we've been discussing?
[00:24:28] Jackie Hwang: Yeah. So, with, some folks, again, in the civil and engineering department at and environmental engineering department at Stanford, one of my PhDs, former PhD students, Tianyuan Huang, and I, and another, and a group of other collaborators use Google Street View to be able to track building recoveries after disasters and just see. So, this is kind of a novel data set in that we're able to trace the recovery of buildings following a disaster.
[00:24:55] And essentially, in this study, we find that there's stark inequality. So previously low-income neighborhoods are more likely to be abandoned, higher income neighborhoods are more likely to be rebuilt. And this, you know, has longer term implications for growing inequality of neighborhoods.
[00:25:12] And in more, in work that I'm doing right now with a PhD student, Ray Lin, we're looking at the racialized differences in these recoveries. So, we're looking if, at the prior racial composition and how that matters after controlling for income, how surrounding neighborhoods and their racial geography shapes which neighborhoods get reinvested in and, and which ones don't.
[00:25:34] Russ Altman: Just out of curiosity, which regions have you studied and, and which, which disaster, scenarios?
[00:25:40] Jackie Hwang: So, the, these studies actually take all of the, major climate disasters, from 2010 to-
[00:25:46] Russ Altman: Wow
[00:25:47] Jackie Hwang: ... 20- I can't remember the end date, but,
[00:25:50] Russ Altman: Yeah
[00:25:50] Jackie Hwang: ... any of the major climate disasters. So, I think there's maybe, I'm not remembering off the top of my head, 13 to 16, yeah, like FEMA declared major disasters. And this is actually a huge, I think, contribution to the literature, which has generally only been able to focus on single disasters and data from single, you know, single disasters and not on the, the actual physical buildings.
[00:26:14] Russ Altman: Right. Right. No, that, that period that you just described, I'm just thinking of Katrina and Sandy, and many named disasters that, affected, many millions of people. So, I'm struck in, in your work that underlying a lot of this work is a, a focus on the wellbeing of the people in the neighborhoods.
[00:26:31] And, and I just wanted to end our conversation just asking you about, like, you must have a, a ton of data and also impressions about how all of the things combine to kind of create either good circumstances and, and healthy circumstances, both physical and emotional and cognitive, and when it's a problematic situation. So, I just wanted to ask you about that aspect of your work.
[00:26:54] Jackie Hwang: Yeah, sure. So, I think what drives my overarching research agenda is really how we can think about building safe, stable, high-quality neighborhoods and housing for all. and that means just resources and opportunities, all these things that we know contribute to the wellbeing of individuals.
[00:27:13] And so I think a lot of what we're talking about ties together, in that thinking about the physical, visible neighborhood, and how that affects wellbeing is actually something that we can tangibly... Seems like a, a place we can intervene on, right? So, if we can better measure neighborhood, like the physical, visible conditions, and identify how that relates to individual wellbeing, affect, stress, and also just life chances overall, then maybe we can manipulate things about the neighborhood environments in a very tangible way.
[00:27:46] So, I just feel like this area of research has clear pathways to intervention, that I, I hope would help create these safe, quality, stable neighborhoods that we envision.
[00:28:00] Russ Altman: Hey, Jackie, now it's time for The Future in a Minute. This is a feature at The Future of Everything where I ask you some rapid-fire questions and you give me some quick answers. Are you ready to go?
[00:28:09] Jackie Hwang: Yes, I'm ready.
[00:28:11] Russ Altman: Great. Okay, so here we go. What is one thing that gives you the most hope about the future?
[00:28:16] Jackie Hwang: I just think the public awareness and attention to these issues, like the affordable housing crisis, homelessness, structural racism, and I see a lot of movement for progressive policies, at least in some circles.
[00:28:29] Russ Altman: What is one thing you want people to walk away from this episode remembering?
[00:28:33] Jackie Hwang: That cities are changing, and it can be good in many ways, but its benefits need to be shared, so just voting locally, and valuing people over profit.
[00:28:45] Russ Altman: Speaking of that, aside from money, what is one thing you need to succeed in your research?
[00:28:50] Jackie Hwang: Aside from time, which I think we all probably need, I think better data that's rich and longitudinal, on neighborhood conditions and residential mobility, immobility experiences.
[00:29:01] Russ Altman: If all goes well, what does the future look like?
[00:29:03] Jackie Hwang: As I said, I think safe, stable, high-quality neighborhoods and housing for all.
[00:29:09] Russ Altman: If you were starting over again and you needed to get your degree or certification in another discipline, what would it be?
[00:29:16] Jackie Hwang: I think probably computer science. It would be nice to be even more hands-on on this computer vision research and be able to keep up with something with, with all the changes. I really value my students who have really helped keep this agenda moving forward.
[00:29:32] Russ Altman: Thanks to Jackie Hwang. That was the Future of Cities. Thank you for listening. Don't forget we have an archive of old episodes, so you can really spend quite a bit of time listening to the future of anything. Thank you for listening, and of course, please rate and review. If you're enjoying the show, give us a 5.0, give us some comments. We read them all, and your input definitely affects the future of everything.
[00:29:55] You can connect with me on many social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, @RBAltman or @RussBAltman. You can also follow the Stanford School of Engineering @StanfordSchoolOfEngineering or @StanfordENG.
