Master's in Urban & Regional Planning
Brian McCabe

Brian J. McCabe is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and an affiliated faculty member in the McCourt School of Public Policy. Professor McCabe is the author of No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community and the Politics of Homeownership (Oxford University Press, 2016). In the book, he unpacks the challenges of strengthening communities through homeownership as owning a home has emerged as the core vehicle for building wealth in the United States. He also co-edited The Sociology of Housing with Dr. Eva Rosen (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and a recent volume of Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research with Peggy Bailey (Center for Budget and Policy Priorities) celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Housing Choice Voucher program.

For nearly a decade, Professor McCabe has been studying Seattle's Democracy Voucher program, an innovate program designed to transform the role of money in local politics. In addition to co-authoring several articles and research briefs on the program, McCabe is the co-author of the Democracy Vouchers and the Fight for Fairer Elections in Seattle (Temple University Press, 2024) with Dr. Jennifer Heerwig.

Professor McCabe is finalizing a new book manuscript about the scarcity of rental assistance in the United States. In the book, The Housing Lottery: Navigating Scarcity on America's Rental Market, McCabe describes how public housing agencies ration assistance in the Housing Choice Voucher program. In doing so, he calls attention to the fundamentally inadequate system of rental assistance, including the ways that scarcity shapes outcomes for low-income renters.

Since coming to Georgetown, Professor McCabe has 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. He regularly presents research at the American Sociological Association, the Urban Affairs Association and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. He is the incoming editor-in-chief of City & Community, a journal of urban sociology, and serves on the editorial board of Housing Policy Debates. Professor McCabe teaches courses on urban studies, inequality and cities.

An alumnus of Georgetown, Professor McCabe graduated from the School of Foreign Service in 2002. He completed a Masters degree in urban geography at the London School of Economics in 2004 and a PhD in the Sociology Department at New York University in 2011. From 2022 - 2024, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.