Alex Ramiller

Ph.D. Candidate in City and Regional Planning

University of California, Berkeley

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and researcher at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. My current research focuses on the use of large administrative datasets to study the relationships between residential mobility, neighborhood change, and urban form. I have previously conducted work on topics ranging from the politics of urban sustainability in Denmark to the impacts of alternative homeownership programs on wealth-building. My work has been published in journals including Urban Studies, Housing Studies, and Urban Environment. I have authored reports for organizations including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

I have also provided data science consulting on a range of reports and dashboards related to housing policy and urban planning, including playing a leading role in the development of both a pandemic-related rent debt dashboard for PolicyLink and a residential displacement monitoring dashboard for the City of Seattle. I am currently working on projects related to the landscape of multifamily homeownership in the United States and the pursuit of Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) in California.

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Ramiller, A., Acolin, A., Walter, R. J., & Wang, R. (2024). Moving to shared equity: Locational outcomes for households in shared equity homeownership programs. Housing Studies, 39(5), 1239-1263.

Walter, R. J., Acolin, A., Wang, R. (Vince), Hess, C., Ramiller, A., Colburn, G., Foster, T. B., Garboden, P., & Crowder, K. (2024). Exploring the association between household compositional change and mobility of subsidized householders in the United States: A life course perspective. Journal of Urban Affairs, 1–23.

Schmahmann, L., Ramiller, A., & Fields, D. (2023). Platform Firms, Commercial Real Estate Cycles and San Francisco’s Growth as a Tech Cluster, 2008–2020. Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Walter, R. J., Tillyer, M. S., Ramiller, A., & Acolin, A. (2023). Scaling Down from the Neighborhood in Urban Planning Research and Practice: The Potential Benefits of a Micro-Scale Focus. Journal of Planning Education and Research.

Hess, C., Walter, R. J., Kennedy, I., Acolin, A., Ramiller, A., & Crowder, K. (2023). Segmented Information, Segregated Outcomes: Housing Affordability and Neighborhood Representation on a Voucher-Focused Online Housing Platform and Three Mainstream Alternatives. Housing Policy Debate.

Acolin, A., Ramiller, A., Walter, R. J., Thompson, S., & Wang, R. (2021). Transitioning to Homeownership: Asset Building for Low- and Moderate-Income Households. Housing Policy Debate, 31(6), 1032–1049.

Ramiller, A. (2022). Displacement through development? Property turnover and eviction risk in Seattle. Urban Studies, 59(6), 1148–1166.

Ramiller, A. (2019). Establishing the green neighbourhood: approaches to neighbourhood-scale sustainability certification in Portland, Oregon. Local Environment, 24(5), 428–441.

Ramiller, A., & Schmidt, P. (2019). Making Radical Change Real: Danish Sustainability, Adaptability, and the Reimagination of Architectural Utopias. Utopian Studies, 30(2), 279–299.

Ramiller, A., & Schmidt, P. (2018). Scale limits to sustainability: Transdisciplinary evidence from three Danish cases. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 27, 48-58.

Other Publications

Thomas, T., Ramiller, A., Ren, C., & Toomet, O. (2024). Toward a National Eviction Data Collection Strategy Using Natural Language Processing. Cityscape, 26(1), 241–259.

Ramiller, A. (2024). Introduction to Propensity Score Matching with MatchIt. UC Berkeley D-Lab Blog.

Ramiller, A. (2023). Mapping Census Data with tidycensus.UC Berkeley D-Lab Blog.

Costa, A., Sass, V., Kennedy, I., Roy, R., Walter, R. J., Acolin, A., Crowder, K., Hess, C., Ramiller, A., & Chasins, S. (2021). Toward a Cross-Platform Framework: Assessing the Comprehensiveness of Online Rental Listings. Cityscape, 23(2), 327–340.

Ramiller, A. (2018). “From the Neighborhood Up!”: Neighborhood Sustainability Certification Frameworks and the New Urban Politics of Scale. Macalester College Digital Commons.

Reports

Examining the Housing and Neighborhood Trajectories for Former HUD-Assisted Households with Children (2024).
HUD Office of Policy Development and Research.

California’s Missing Middle: Middle-Income California is Large, Diverse, and Left Out of the Housing Conversation (2024).
California Community Builders.

California’s Prohousing Designation Program: Rewarding City and County Policies that Boost Housing Supply‬ (2023).
Terner Center for Housing Innovation.

Understanding CDFI Financial Data: A Primer for New Investors (2023).
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Examining the Unintended Consequences of Climate Change Mitigation (2021).
Urban Displacement Project.

The State of Evictions: Results from the University of Washington Evictions Project (2020).
Eviction Research Network.

Dashboards

Rent Debt in America

This dashboard and accompanying analysis use experimental Census survey data to measure the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on household rent debt. Rent debt estimates are provided for states, counties, and cities throughout the United States. This dashboard was created for PolicyLink as part of the National Equity Atlas.

Tracking California's Rent Relief

This dashboard and accompanying anslysis use administrative data from the California Covid-19 Rent Relief Program to track the status of rent relief applications. This project was created for PolicyLink as part of the National Equity Atlas.

Housing Precarity Risk Model

The Housing Precarity Risk Model (HPRM) provided a national analysis of housing precarity, identifying vulnerable neighborhoods that were in particularly urgent need of assistance and resources from local, state, and federal agencies, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The project was created for the Urban Displacement Project.

Seattle Displacement Risk Indicators

This dashboard brings together demographic and market data to construct dynamic indicators of displacement risk across Seattle neighborhoods. The dashboard was constructed for the City of Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development's Equitable Development Monitoring Program.