Publications - Ángel Mendiola Ross

My research has been published in both peer-reviewed journals and public outlets. Selected publications listed below, see my CV for a full list.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Winner, Graduate Student Paper Award (2021) in the Community and Urban Sociology Section (CUSS) of the American Sociological Association (ASA)
This study connects ideas about race, housing, and policing with the growing research on inequality in suburbs. There are two main findings: first, the factors that predict police budgets in big cities differ from those in suburbs. Second, in outer suburbs farther away from the urban core, the more renters, the more money those places spend on police. Homeowners in these suburbs, still recovering from the Great Recession, may rely more on police to protect property values. These findings problematize conventional ideas of suburbs as high-opportunity places for low-income residents and people of color.

In preparation with co-authors Alison Post and Ishana Ratan
This study explores adoption of “smart city” policing technologies like drones and automated license plate readers across California cities and suburbs. We examine the extent to which municipal partisan leanings, recent shifts in community racial composition, and underlying crime rates help explain variation in technology adoption. We find that despite the recent politicization of policing, the strongest predictor of adoption across technology type is the number of sworn officers in a municipality. Our findings suggests that agency prerogatives and capacity—and particularly the lobbying power of unionized officers—may be an important driver of technology adoption, and more broadly that the bureaucracy may deserve more attention in studies of local and urban politics.

In this analysis for the Bay Area Equity Atlas, I compute and map the Index of Concentration at the Extremes (ICE index), a measure of segregation, in the nine-county Bay Area. I find that concentrated white wealth is a major driver of the region’s socioeconomic segregation: there are six times as many neighborhoods of concentrated white wealth than there are neighborhoods of concentrated Black, Latinx, or AAPI poverty.
Media coverage by the Mercury News, KRON4, NBC Bay Area, and the Daily Journal

In this analysis for the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, I compiled police spending data for all local jurisdictions in the Inland Empire of Southern California. I find that cities have dedicated a growing share of their budgets to policing since the Great Recession of 2008-2009, while largely overlooking rising poverty and housing insecurity. By 2018, IE cities were spending over $1 billion annually on police.
Media coverage by the Southern California News Group

In this op ed for NextCity, I describe how if no renter households paid more than 30 percent of their income on rent (e.g., if we reduced rent burdens to zero), they would collectively have an extra $124 billion, or $6,200 per rent-burdened household, to spend on other necessities. I describe the disproportionate toll that the housing crisis has on women of color-led households and offer several policy recommendations from tenant protections to community ownership of land and housing.