2024 USC Lusk Center for Real Estate Research Applications
The USC Lusk Center for Real Estate is pleased to announce the availability of research stipends to become available in July 2024. The stipends will facilitate high-quality research that will eventually get published in the leading scientific journals. The broad topics should be related to real estate and urban issues.
The Lusk Center is especially interested in proposals that focus on housing and real estate finance, non-residential real estate, urban entrepreneurship, transportation and land use, urban poverty and segregation, neighborhood change, and local taxes and housing regulation. Studies can focus on the U.S. or any other country. Faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, and Ph.D. students at USC are eligible to apply.
Applications are now closed.
Please check back in late spring 2025 for the next round of submissions.
Resources
Call for Proposals PDF | Application Appendices PDF
Research Award Spotlight
Annette Kim, Sol Price School of Public Policy
The Price of Crowding: Modeling the Rental Market for Overcrowded Housing in Shanghai
One coping strategy that lower-income people around the world, especially im(migrants), use to survive in major urban centers is to rent a bed in a crowded apartment. We propose to create and analyze original data about Shanghai’s crowded rental housing market, where our preliminary data shows an average of 24 people living in 3 bedrooms, with 8 beds in a room.
Our study will help lay groundwork for studying this sub-market through our novel dataset and modeling techniques. We have developed and tested a methodology for scraping data from the internet of this live market before the ads disappear within a few months time. Our data source provides us unique variables so that we will be able to price gender differentials in this housing market. Furthermore, we will develop metrics proposing how to frame this phenomenon: a pricing structure for the level of crowding in a bedroom.
Our findings will be valuable for informing housing policy debates that are currently seeking to monitor housing overcrowding. Previous studies have been primarily qualitative and focused on health impacts but have not studied the market and its revealed preference structures and pricing.
Research cited in the CityLab feature When Affordable Housing in Shanghai Is a Bed in the Kitchen by Linda Poon
About the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate
The USC Lusk Center for Real Estate seeks to advance real estate knowledge, inform business practice, and address timely issues that affect the real estate industry, the urban economy, and public policy.
The Lusk Center produces relevant real estate research, supports educational programs, and convenes professional forums that bring together academics, students, business executives, and community leaders.
The USC Lusk Center for Real Estate:
- Advances real estate knowledge through innovative and pertinent multidisciplinary research on real estate and urban economics.
- Addresses critical and timely issues of markets, institutions, and policy.
- Convenes industry leaders, students, and faculty in seminars, workshops, symposia, and forums to examine the current state of the industry and to anticipate future industry opportunities and challenges.
- Supports the highest quality real estate degree and executive education programs that prepare both students and industry professionals alike for tomorrow's real estate environment.
Educational Programs:
- Price School of Public Policy degrees include the Master of Real Estate Development (MRED) and the undergraduate Real Estate Development track.
- Marshall School of Business degrees include the Master in Business Administration (MBA) with a concentration in real estate and the undergraduate Program in Real Estate
- Executive education programs include the Ross Minority Program in Real Estate (RMPIRE).