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2025 Impact Award

The Arc Institute is pleased to announce that Dr. Andrew Barnes from the School of Multidisciplinary Social Sciences & Humanities and Dr. Tiffany Taylor from the Department of Sociology and Criminology are the recipients of the 2025 Impact Award for their proposal, “Understanding and Interrupting Housing Inequities: A Pilot Study of Two Community Development Corporations in Akron, Ohio”.

Despite the centrality of housing access to individual and community health, such access is precarious in many places across the country, including in our own backyard, where Akron is the city with the highest eviction rate in Ohio. Pre-existing patterns of wealth distribution, continued informal practices of “steering” buyers to certain neighborhoods, and disparate access to credit combine to perpetuate past patterns of housing access—even as the macroeconomic climate has raised obstacles across the board.  In response to these conditions, multiple community organizations work to increase access to safe, stable housing using a variety of approaches.

Using the grant to support student researchers, we will work with two such organizations in Akron during Spring and Summer 2025 to (1) study their approaches in action; (2) learn how those efforts affect housing access; and (3) provide an analysis of the effectiveness of the approaches, as well as a list of best practices generated from our observations. Based on that work, we will submit a grant application to the Russell Sage Foundation to conduct a systematic analysis of both non-profit and government efforts to improve housing access in Summit and Portage Counties.