Lan Deng-IACP Faculty Highlight

Professor Lan Deng, Urban & Regional Planning Program, A.Alfred Tabuman College of Architecture & Urban Planning at the University of Michigan

Short biography

Lan Deng (邓岚) is an Associate Professor of Urban & Regional Planning at the University of Michigan.  She received her B.S. (1996) and M.S. (1999) from Peking University and a Ph.D. in City & Regional Planning (2004) from the University of California, Berkeley. She then began as an Assistant Professor of Urban & Regional Planning at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2012. In addition to her appointment in urban planning, she is also a Faculty Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.  From 2011 to 2013, she was the interim director for the campus-wide Real Estate Development Certificate Program at the Rackham Graduate School. She will direct the real estate certificate program again starting from Fall 2016.    

Research

Lan Deng’s main research and teaching interests are in the area of housing, real estate, and local public finance. She is an expert on affordable housing policies and finance and has conducted extensive research in this area. In her U.S. research she has assessed the performance of the Low-income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) Program, the country’s largest affordable housing production program, with the housing choice vouchers, the country’s largest demand-based housing subsidy program. Her research engages the central debates on housing and community development, such as the cost-effectiveness of the supply versus demand-based strategies for affordable housing, the link between affordable housing provision and school quality, and the impacts of affordable housing developments on nearby properties and neighborhoods.  Her research combines theoretical depth and empirical rigor to address important housing policy questions. The cumulative work she has produced on LIHTC has established her as a leading scholar on this program. Her work was published in top journals and was widely adopted as class readings in many U.S. housing policy courses. Her recent research examines housing and neighborhood dynamics in the city of Detroit after the recent housing crisis. Detroit was not only the poster child of deindustrialization that suffers from decades of population loss, but also the epicenter of the subprime mortgage crisis, which led to the largest municipal bankruptcy in the U.S. history. Together with her colleagues at the University of Michigan, their work examines how grassroots actions taken by residents and community development corporation can help save neighborhoods from the destruction of mortgage foreclosures in a city where little government capacity exists.

In parallel to her research in the U.S., Prof. Deng has also studied housing policy and housing finance issues in China.  Her research seeks to reveal the underlying dynamics shaping China’s housing policy development and housing market outcomes. Her China work is often in collaboration with Chinese colleagues such as Prof. Lin Wang (王林) from Chongqing University in a study of China’s emerging housing policy framework, and Prof. Jie Chen (陈杰) from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in a study of China’s Housing Provident Fund program (HPF: 住房公积金). Other ongoing work includes a continuous study of the HPF program and an update of a study on the dynamics of new housing investment in China.

With IACP

Prof. Deng has been actively engaged with many IACP activities since its beginning and has made important contribution to the organization’s development. She served on the IACP board from 2011 to 2013 and was recognized with an Excellent Service Award. In addition to her duty as treasurer, she worked hard to promote IACP to the larger international community by organizing two high-profile IACP roundtables at the annual ACSP conferences, including a president session on Learning from China and a session on Planning Educations in China and the U.S. that brought prominent planning educators from China to ACSP to discuss important issues facing planning education and practices. In her current role as ACSP track chair on housing and community development, she continues to help IACP organize sessions and roundtables in this subject area.  Prof. Deng serves on the management board for the journal Housing Studies.

Contact Information

Email: landeng@umich.edu
Personal website: https://taubmancollege.umich.edu/urbanplanning/faculty/directory/lan-deng