Inaugural DSE MS thesis successfully defended by Steve Garcia
On April 10 2024, Steve Garcia successfully defended his DSE thesis titled ‘Rurality and Robustness: Rural Communities and Housing Insecurity Risk‘. He was advised by Dr. Matt Dube.
Congratulations, Steve!
Thesis abstract:
This thesis explores rural housing insecurity through Swope and Hernandez’s (2019) 4
Cs of housing insecurity framework. Little attention has been paid to rural ares in the
conversation on housing insecurity and houselessness. To facilitate further discussion on
this understudied issue, this exploratory study used unsupervised machine learning to
group census tracts into risk levels across 7 axes of data from the American Community
Survey. These were based on housing insecurity factors found in the literature.
Multinomial logistic regression was used to determine the variation between U.S. states
based on how well state risk levels could be predicted with the national dataset.
Furthermore, spatial autocorrelation was used to gauge the extent of spatial clustering
within the identified risk levels and housing insecurity factors. The results indicate that
many rural census tracts have a medium risk of housing insecurity, and the risk levels
are hard to predict. The spatial autocorrelation results show that the housing insecurity
variables are not as highly spatially clustered as expected.