Noah Durst

Biography

Noah J. Durst is an assistant professor in SPDC’s Urban & Regional Planning Program. He joined the program in 2017, after earning a PhD in public policy from the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also completed masters degrees in public affairs and Latin American studies. Durst employs mixed methods--both quantitative and qualitative--to examine the intended and unintended effects of planning and policy-making on issues of social equity. Much of his research to date has examined the challenges and implications of informality in U.S. housing markets.

Industry Expertise (6)

Social Services

Public Policy

Education/Learning

Research

Writing and Editing

Housing

Areas of Expertise (5)

Institutional Discrimination

Residential Segregation

Housing

Land Use Regulation

Urban Informality

Education (1)

Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin: Ph.D., Public Policy

Links (1)

• ResearchGate Citations

Journal Articles (3)

Informal and ubiquitous: Colonias , premature subdivisions and other unplanned suburbs on America’s urban fringe

Urban Studies

Noah J. Durst

2018 Along the US border with Mexico there are thousands of communities designated by the federal government as colonias, a name that highlights the large numbers of low-income, Hispanic immigrants that live in these communities. These subdivisions have been studied extensively in recent years, often using insights from the concept of urban informality. This research has highlighted the challenges posed by exploitative land sales practices, poor-quality or non-existent infrastructure and poor-quality housing in these communities. However, similar informal subdivisions exist along the urban fringe elsewhere across the US, though they are not designated as colonias by the federal government and scholars rarely consider their similarities to colonias in the border region. This study uses data on Census Designated Places from the American Community Survey, satellite imagery and county property records to examine the extent and nature of these subdivisions. The results illustrate that informal land development of the sort described here is not restricted only to the border region, to immigrant enclaves or to Hispanic communities. Instead, it is demonstrated that informal subdivisions exist in large numbers across Southern and Western states and, though their numbers are smaller, they are present even in the Midwest and Northeast. Moreover, these subdivisions are home to diverse populations and they provide important benefits such as expanded opportunities of homeownership for minorities and the poor.

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Racial Gerrymandering of Municipal Borders: Direct Democracy, Participatory Democracy, and Voting Rights in the United States

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Noah J. Durst

2018 As cities expand their jurisdictional borders via the process of municipal annexation, they sometimes leave low-income and minority enclaves perpetually excluded on the urban fringe, a process known as municipal underbounding. Despite a number of small-scale studies documenting the gerrymandering of municipal borders, robust empirical evidence of its extent is limited and little is known about the institutional factors that facilitate or stymie efforts to underbound poor and minority communities. In this article, a metropolitan area matching design is used to measure the effect of state annexation laws and federal protection of voting rights under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act on municipal underbounding between 1990 and 2010 in the United States. The analysis finds that laws that facilitate participation by city residents in annexation decisions lead to the underbounding of black neighborhoods, whereas those that provide third-party oversight of annexation decisions or expand opportunities for participation by residents living on the fringe lead to the inclusion of black neighborhoods. There is little evidence that such patterns of underbounding are driven by economic or fiscal considerations. In light of the 2013 invalidation by the Supreme Court of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, there is likely a nascent return to racial gerrymandering of municipal borders occurring in the South, particularly in states where city residents are granted some measure of influence over annexation. The results suggest the need for renewed attention to local government boundary changes and their role in facilitating and exacerbating racial discrimination.

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Informal Housing in the United States

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Noah J. Durst, Jake Wegmann

2017 Research on informal housing tends to focus overwhelmingly on less developed countries, downplaying or ignoring entirely the presence of informality in United States housing markets. In actuality, a longstanding and widespread tradition of informal housing exists in the United States but is typically disregarded by scholars. In this article we draw on three definitions of informality—as non-compliant, non-enforced, or deregulated economic activity—to characterize examples of informality in US housing markets, focusing in particular on five institutions that govern housing market activity in this country: property rights law, property transfer law, land-use and zoning, subdivision regulations, and building codes. The cases presented here challenge the notion that informality is absent from US housing markets and highlight the unique nature of informal housing, US style—namely, that informal housing in the US is geographically uneven, largely hidden and typically interwoven within formal markets. We conclude with a discussion of how research on informal housing in the US can inform research in the global South.

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