Taesoo Song

About Taesoo Song

Taesoo Song is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, based at the university's Washington, D.C.-area campus in Arlington.

His research asks how housing supply, both new construction and the transformation of the existing housing stock, shapes access to housing and neighborhoods, and with what consequences for inequality.

He pursues this question across three connected lines of inquiry: housing supply and neighborhood change, examining how land use and housing policy shape residential mobility; race and immigration, with a focus on the homeownership and residential attainment of Asian American populations; and data infrastructure, evaluating large-scale administrative data sources needed to study these dynamics at fine spatial and temporal scales.

His work appears in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Urban Studies, Housing Policy Debate, Cityscape, and the Journal of Urban Affairs.

Song holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked with the Terner Center for Housing Innovation and the Urban Displacement Project on housing supply, preservation, and displacement policy in California, and with the Seoul Institute on commercial gentrification in Seoul. He has also served as the Senior Data Science & AI Fellow at the UC Berkeley D-Lab, where he developed and instructed data science workshops.

Areas of Expertise

Housing Policy, Immigration, Urban Analytics

Selected Publications

• Davis, J., Song, T. & Chapple, K. (2026). How Does Upzoning Impact Residential Mobility Among Low-Income Households? Evidence from New York City. Housing Policy Debate, 1–21.
• Song, T. & Reid, C. (2026). The Implications of Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH) Sales for Residential Mobility. Journal of the American Planning Association, 1–15.
• Song, T. (2025). Anti-immigration and the Politics of Housing Affordability: Examining the Evolution and Housing Market Impacts of Foreign Buyer Taxes in British Columbia and Ontario. Journal of Urban Affairs, 1–17.
• Chapple, K. & Song, T. (2025). Can New Housing Supply Mitigate Displacement and Exclusion? Evidence from Los Angeles and San Francisco. Journal of the American Planning Association 91(1), 1–15.
• Ramiller, A., Song, T., Parker, M. & Chapple, K. (2024). Residential Mobility and Big Data: Assessing the Validity of Consumer Reference Datasets. Cityscape 26(3), 227–239.
  Song, T. & Chapple, K. (2024). Does Gentrification Constrain Housing Markets for Low-Income Households? Evidence from Household Residential Mobility in the New York and San Francisco Metropolitan Areas. Urban Studies 61(13), 2603–2622.

Recent Courses Taught

• UAP 5494: Advanced Quantitative Techniques for Urban Research