Brian McCabe

I am a political and urban sociologist interested in the way local policies and programs pattern inequality in cities.

Bio and Featured Works

I study rental assistance programs, housing markets and municipal campaign finance programs to understand how public policy shapes civic engagement and how local agencies govern poverty. My research relies on a range of methodological techniques, including analyses of administrative data and interviews.

I am the author of No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community and the Politics of Homeownership (Oxford University Press, 2017) and The Housing Lottery: How Scarcity Drives America's Rental Assistance Policies (University of Chicago Press, 2026), and the co-author of Democracy Vouchers and the Promise of Fairer Elections in Seattle (Temple University Press, 2024). I am the co-editor of The Sociology of Housing: How Homes Shape Our Social Lives (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and a volume of Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research on the fiftieth anniversary of the Housing Choice Voucher program. I have published in a range of interdisciplinary journals, including the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Sociological Science, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, City & Community, the Journal of Urban Economics, Housing Policy Debate, and the Journal of the American Planning Association, among others.

I serve as the co-Editor-in-Chief of City & Community, a journal of urban sociology, and am an elected member of the Policy Council for the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM). From 2022 - 2024, I served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development in the Office of Policy Development & Research (PD&R) at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

At Georgetown, I teach courses on urban studies, social inequality and public policy, including Housing Policy in America; Gentrification, Justice and the Future of Cities; and The City: Approaches to Urban Studies. I regularly collaborate with undergraduate students in the research process.

An alumnus of Georgetown, I graduated from the School of Foreign Service; completed a Masters degree in urban geography at the London School of Economics; and hold a PhD from New York University .

About Brian McCabe

Expertise

Campaign finance
Global Cities
Housing policy
Political Sociology
Urban and Regional Planning