STEM Shoutout: Dr. Elizabeth Korver-Glenn

Dr. Elizabeth Korver-Glenn named a 2019 Women in STEM award winner 

UNM Assistant Professor Dr. Elizabeth Korver-Glenn of the Department of Sociology has been recognized as a 2019 Women in STEM award winner for her research proposal “Experiences of Rental Housing and Property Management in Albuquerque.”

According to Korver-Glenn, this research will bring to light how historically understudied groups, such as Native Americans and the Latinx community, access rental housing and experience property management in Albuquerque.

“My research is important because it pays attention to understudied individuals and groups, foregrounding their perceptions and experiences. My research is also important because it illuminates how things like neighborhood inequality, conflict management, and even discrimination happen, and points to policies that can mitigate inequality and conflict,” Korver-Glenn said. 

Korver-Glenn’s proposal was granted $8,990 through the Women in STEM awards as well as a grant for $9,270 from theUNM Research Allocations Committee. The project, she says, will be guided by two broad goals. 

The first goal aims to understand the experience of property management from the perspective of both property managers and renters. This will involve conducting interviews with a broad assortment of Albuquerque’s diverse urban renter population, including low-income and middle-class Native American, Latinx, and White Albuquerque residents. Interviews and ethnographic observation of property managers will also be conducted to understand how property managers approach their profession and how their management strategies affect renter quality of life, Korver-Glenn said.

“To that end, I will examine how renters navigate the process of securing rental housing and, once they’ve found a place to rent, how they experience property management and navigate interactions with property managers and other renters,” Korver-Glenn said.

The second goal is to understand national patterns in property management practices.

“To do so, I will access restricted versions of the Rental Housing Finance Survey and the American Housing Survey at the Pennsylvania State University Research Data Center. Because these data are geocoded, they can be merged with U.S. Census data on neighborhood and city racial and income characteristics,” Korver-Glenn said.

Once merged, she will run statistical models that will show whether there are differences in property management based on neighborhood and metropolitan area racial and income characteristics. For example, Korver-Glenn will be able to test whether property managers and landlords spend the same amount of money on property maintenance in racially distinct neighborhoods.

“The WIS award has been an incredible personal and professional boost. I feel elated that the award committee saw the merit in my project and that they are providing tangible support for it. I am also grateful that the grant included a budget line for childcare costs. Data gathering and access can be difficult if not impossible to do with young children or babies alongside, yet depending on their stage (e.g. newborns) or other circumstances they may need to be close by. Because I have two young children, including one baby, this grant makes me feel as though I do not need to choose between research and family,” Korver-Glenn said. 

To learn more about Korver-Glenn’s research, visit her website.