Welcome! I am a quantitative sociologist studying the institutions, markets, and policies that generate and sustain racial and spatial inequality. Most of my current projects focus on the role of housing markets in this process. I am currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at NYU.

In one line of research, I examine how climate change is transforming housing markets and residential mobility. I show how racialized and classed patterns of residential mobility into and out of flood-prone neighborhoods are reshaping the geography of environmental inequality. One paper from this project is forthcoming in Demography and received an honorable mention from the ASA Race, Gender, and Class Section for best graduate student paper.

In another collaborative project, I study how federal mortgage programs shaped racial inequality in homeownership and neighborhood outcomes during the mid-twentieth century. I co-founded the Redlining Lab, a research group supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, National Science Foundation, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and other funders. We are building new archival datasets to document the lending patterns and long-term consequences of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) lending. Our first paper from this project is published in Nature.

Before NYU, I worked at the Urban Institute as a Research Analyst. I received my B.A. from Rice University in Statistics and Policy Studies.

My CV is available here.

I also go by Kate. You can contact me at katethomas@nyu.edu.