The Redlining Lab is a research collaboration between researchers at NYU, Cornell University, and the University of Virginia. 

Founders and Directors

Jacob William Faber is an Associate Professor at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service and holds a joint appointment in NYU’s Sociology Department. His research and teaching focuses on spatial inequality. He leverages observational and experimental methods to study the mechanisms responsible for sorting individuals across space and how the distribution of people by race and class interacts with political, social, and ecological systems to create and sustain economic disparities. While there is a rich literature exploring the geography of opportunity, there remain many unsettled questions about the causes of segregation and its effects on the residents of urban ghettos, wealthy suburbs, and the diverse set of places in between.

Wenfei Xu is an Assistant Professor in Cornell University's City and Regional Planning Department in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Her research questions how housing policies, practices, institutions, and technologies have shaped urban inequality, with an orientation towards methods in urban analytics. She works on topics in social-spatial stratification, segregation, race and ethnicity, data science, mapping, and neighborhood change in the United States. Her work has ranged from an interest in the historical legacies of structural housing discrimination and its contemporary spatial-temporal manifestations to exploring the uses of big data in characterizing human activity for urban social science research. She is the Director of the Urban Data Research Lab.



Thomas Storrs is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on urban and financial history in the 20th century US. The intersection, beginning in the 1930s, of home mortgages and the federal government forms the core of his research. Through a blend of land records, quantitative methods, and archival work, he seeks to uncover the extent and consequences of racial inequality attributable to the federal government's selective credit programs such as the FHA and VA. He enjoys collaborating with scholars from a variety of disciplines.

Kate Thomas

Katherine (Kate) Thomas is a PhD student in Sociology at New York University. Kate’s work uses quantitative and computational methods to address the causes and consequences of spatial inequality. Two of her current research projects address how residential sorting patterns respond to natural hazards and the impacts of discrimination in historical mortgage lending on contemporary racial inequality and segregation. Prior to graduate school, Kate was a Research Analyst at the Urban Institute. Kate received her B.A. in Statistics and Sociology from Rice University. 

Research Staff

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