Whether you’re listening to the radio or scrolling through the latest news, Bryant’s Brad Martin, Ph.D., says you’ll likely find something about the housing crisis and affordable housing issues daily. According to The New York Times, home prices have increased approximately 60 percent over the past decade and approximately 25 percent of renters spend more than half their income on housing; the recommended amount is 30 percent.
The History professor, who teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences’ History, Literature, and the Arts department, recently presented his research on the friction and traction of housing and homelessness in New York’s Westchester County from 1983 to 1992 at the Transdisciplinary Conference on Suburban Studies in the Czech Republic. The conference — featuring researchers from the host country, the United States, Germany, and France — explored the intersection between various scholarly fields and the suburban experience as well as how literature and other media portrayed, shaped, and reflected suburban life and its evolution.
Martin’s fair housing research began in 2020. Coming across an infamous 2009 case where Civil Rights advocacy groups sued Westchester for taking federal housing funding without having met fair housing regulations, he published a paper in the Journal of Contemporary History that found patterns in the reasons people opposed desegregation in Westchester.
Traveling to Westchester County Archives in Elmsford, New York, Martin obtained archival documents from local newspapers and The New York Times; many of the articles centered on Westchester’s wealth increase and, in the wake of the scandal, the county’s involvement in finding affordable housing solutions.
“Some of the interesting documents I uncovered were from the 80s and early 90s and connected to some of the larger ideas I talked about in my book, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan,” says Martin, who used this connection as inspiration for the paper he presented in the Czech Republic. “During this period, there were definitely opponents to affordable housing and providing transitional housing for the homeless in their communities, but there were a lot of faith-based and secular advocacy groups that got involved and helped the issue gain traction by creating institutions and working with local governments to provide housing and other important services for low-income people.”
Studying housing debacles from the past is important to understanding the current housing crisis. As someone whose research informs his teaching, Martin often brings his insights to the classroom where students can make connections between the past and present while also learning about what’s going on around them.
“That's the holy grail of faculty research — what you're doing in the classroom is fresh and has currency,” says Martin, whose latest paper will appear in a book project connected to the conference.
