Nashville housing research earns geography award

Professor Madhuri Sharma and co-author Mikhail Samarin (’23) from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, are receiving the Wrigley-Fairchild Award for the best paper published in the Geographical Review in 2024. Their research examined the experience of immigrants in the Nashville housing market.

In the Department of Geography and Sustainability, Sharma has been exploring why people live where they live, and Samarin was focused on rent-burden analysis while writing his doctoral dissertation. Together they were able to test the index Samarin created for measuring rent burden at a macro scale, and given the significance of scale in the discipline of geography, and how it explained rent burden on a micro level, this work was published. “Different indices can be only applied at a particular scale of geography, and as a geographer, I wanted to test the scientific validity of that index at micro scale,” Sharma explained.

Their cartographic and geospatial analysis of racial/ethnic distribution of rent burden at local scales  found that in neighborhoods with higher diversity and more foreign-born who were not yet citizens, the residents had to devote a higher percentage of their earnings to rent, and that was also the case in areas with high-income whites and Asians. Their analysis also pointed to the value of newer-built housing in mitigating rent burden, according to “Rent-Burdened in the South? A Neighborhood-Scale Analysis of Diversity and Immigrants in Nashville.” Sharma and Samarin also wrote about their research in The Conversation.

Why Research Nashville Housing?

Professor Madhuri Sharma delivers a lecture at the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai in March 2023. Her research on the Nashville housing market has won an award from Geographical Review as its best paper published in 2024.

Since 2000 the Latino population has increased tremendously in the southeast, Sharma noted, and Nashville is one of the major metropolitan areas that have attracted both documented and undocumented immigrants, along with Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; and Charlotte, North Carolina.

The Nashville population is also more diverse and intermixed than Memphis or Knoxville. “Nashville has a very distinct characteristic in terms of its attractiveness to a lot of people, including white, Black, Hispanic, Asians, American Indians,” Sharma said. “Nashville is a symbol of a very dynamic and upbeat metropolitan area,” including diverse industries.

She recently published a paper in Social Sciences on home ownership disparity among the racial/ethnic groups, including these minorities. “I find the same kind of pattern; where there are a lot of immigrants, the overall ownership is much, much lower compared to other census tracts,” Sharma said.

Sharma is looking ahead to possible qualitative research involving future students, such as interviewing immigrants about rental and home ownership issues.

“The Nashville metropolis contains higher than the state’s overall share of the foreign-born, and based on research conducted by other immigration scholars, its share of immigrants is projected to grow by 40.7% during 2019-2040, providing a lot of opportunity for in-depth, field-based research,” she said. 

With a mixed methods approach, research may try to figure out which metropolitan areas in the South are receptive to immigrants and what economic growth opportunities might be instrumental in attracting and retaining immigrants in specific cities.

Sharma began analyzing how racial/ethnic residential segregation varied across major US metropolitan areas while pursuing her doctorate. After joining the UT faculty in 2009, she explored the same frameworks for looking at Knoxville, a mid-sized southern city. 

Pathway to Geography

Sharma grew up in India and considered becoming a software engineer before earning a master’s degree in business administration and starting her career in rural management. “I actually worked in India at different levels of geography, from the grassroot level of villages to the districts to the state level, and then later on at the national level, with different institutions,” she said, working in economic and social development with the most impoverished communities. Sharma came to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in geographical information systems (GIS) and found her background in math and science helpful.  

Sharma’s mentor while pursuing a PhD was a renowned population and economic geographer Lawrence Brown, who developed the market-led pluralism framework for examining racial and ethnic spatial patterns in US housing markets. 

Sharma is expected to receive the award from Geographical Review in March 2025, at the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Sharma previously received an AAG Ethnic Geography Specialty Group Distinguished Service Award. 

While she was surprised and pleased to receive the recognition for her work, Sharma said, “The thing that drives me to work every day is addressing the problems concerning inequality and making sure that we live in a more equitable and better society.”