Helping Scholars Pursue Timely Research

Many scholars pursuing research on a range of timely and important housing issues have been awarded financial assistance under the Early Doctoral Student Research Grant (EDSRG) and Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant (DDRG) programs sponsored by HUD's Office of University Partnerships (OUP). These two programs are designed to encourage research on policy-relevant housing and urban development concerns.

The EDSRG program offers grants to accredited universities, enabling doctoral students to research and write papers on housing and urban development issues. The program also encourages these students to present their papers at conferences and publish them in a refereed journal. The DDRG program funds accredited universities to support doctoral research on housing and community development issues, thus providing doctoral candidates with a forum for sharing their findings and producing research that may prove useful in HUD's policymaking efforts. This article highlights the two programs' recent grant awards, outlines their eligibility requirements, and identifies sources of more detailed information.

EDSRG Awards

The research funded under the most recent cycle of EDSRG awards assisted seven students, and covered such topics as the relationship between organizational social context and technology utilization among homeless service providers, housing conditions and health, the effects of housing vouchers on the welfare and housing choices of recipients, central city gentrification, and the processes leading to foreclosure.

OUP competitively awards one-time EDSRG grants of up to $15,000 for a 12-month period to pre- dissertation doctoral students whose studies include urban economics as a major or a concentration within another field related to housing and urban development. Eligible applicants for these grants are accredited institutions of higher education willing to sponsor predissertation doctoral students who:

• Are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents currently enrolled as full-time students in an accredited doctoral program;
• Have not taken preliminary or comprehensive examinations;
• Have completed at least two semesters or three terms of a doctoral studies program (depending on the course structure of the institution); and
• Have an assigned faculty adviser to supervise the research manuscript.

Grant funds awarded under the EDSRG program must be used to support the doctoral students' direct costs in completing their research paper; for example, for stipends, computer software, purchasing data, travel expenses to gather data, transcription services, and compensation for interviews. The funds awarded under the EDSRG program may not be used to pay for tuition, computer hardware, or meals.

DDRG Awards

The research funded under the most recent cycle of DDRG awards, which assisted 12 students, includes such topics as the use of eminent domain for urban redevelopment; the causes and consequences of evictions; the relationship between the media and local low-income housing policy; the relationships among neighborhood integration, housing inequality, and safety; modeling spatial spillovers from rental to owner housing; credit discrimination and African American homeownership from 1910 to 1960; client participation in relation to agencies providing emergency and temporary shelter; and closures of manufactured home parks.

The Office of University Partnerships competitively awards one-time grants of up to $25,000 for a period of 24 months to doctoral candidates currently enrolled at accredited institutions of higher education. Eligible applicants for the DDRG program are accredited institutions of higher education that are willing to sponsor doctoral students who:

• Are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents currently enrolled in an accredited doctoral program;
• Have a dissertation proposal or prospectus that has been or will be accepted by the full dissertation committee by the application deadline date;
• Have an assigned dissertation adviser; and
• Have satisfactorily completed all other written and oral doctoral degree requirements, including all examinations, except for the dissertation, by the date specified by the DDRG program.

Grant funds awarded under the DDRG program must be used to support the direct costs the students incur in completing their dissertation. The eligible costs include stipends, computer software, the purchase of data, travel expenses to collect data, transcription services, and compensation for interviews. The funds awarded under the DDRG program may not be used to pay for tuition, computer hardware, or meals.

For More Information

Fiscal Year 2008 EDSRG and DDRG funding cycles are now closed. Details of the 2009 program cycles will be published in the early spring of 2009 at www.oup.org. The website also offers detailed information on recently funded research topics, as well as abstracts of the funded research papers. For answers to more detailed questions, contact Susan Brunson, Program Analyst, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of University Partnerships, Room 8106, 451 Seventh Street, SW, Washington, DC 20410; telephone: 202.402.3852; fax: 202.708.0309; email: susan.s.brunson@hud.gov.

The 2008 second quarter U.S. Housing Market Conditions report features an article on using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data to examine the current mortgage market turmoil. "Using HMDA and Income Leverage to Examine Current Mortgage Market Turmoil" demonstrates how the HMDA data provides for construction of a powerful variable allowing analysts to more closely control for the income leverage used by a borrower, and for the associated payment risk when securing the reported loan amount. This measure, when coupled with other data reported under HMDA, can contribute to an understanding of the evolution, nature, and magnitude of the current upheaval in the mortgage and real estate markets. For more information, visit www.huduser.gov/periodicals/ushmc/summer08/index.html.