Population Studies and Training Center

Lillian Leung is a mixed methods sociologist. Her research highlights the rental housing market as an increasingly important institution reifying and exacerbating social inequalities, especially in the context of today’s affordability crisis. Her current projects examine how immigration has contributed to stratification in the rental housing market. Drawing on restricted-use Census data and ownership records, her research aims to understand how immigrant housing markets—with a focus on property ownership characteristics—shape residential and other integration outcomes. Her earlier work combines in-depth interviews and administrative data to study how local legal contexts and neighborhood ethnoracial characteristics influence landlord decisions about evictions. 

Dr. Leung's research has appeared in PNAS, Social Forces, Social Service Review, and City and Community and is supported by the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University. She previously served as a research specialist at the Eviction Lab and helped develop the most comprehensive national database of evictions in the United States.