Alumni Spotlight: Sophia Wedeen

Alumni Spotlight is a series highlighting former affiliates of the Initiative on Cities (IOC). We catch up with our alumni to feature their current work, updates, and accomplishments. Today, we highlight Sophia Wedeen, a former Staff Assistant with the Initiative on Cities.

Sophia is a research analyst at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, a research center within the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In her current role, Sophia conducts quantitative research on housing affordability, rental markets, home remodeling activity, and housing quality and conditions.

In her senior year at Boston University, she worked as a staff assistant at the IOC, where she developed and honed her interest in urban research and policy. After graduating with a BA in Political Science and a minor in Economics in 2017, she spent two years working at the City of Boston’s Assessing Department, where she administered a tax exemption program.

In the last year, Sophia has written about the exposure of rental housing to weather and climate-related hazards, the financial burden of home repairs, and how the exclusion of rental housing reinforces segregation at the neighborhood level. She also worked on several papers on renter household finances, including one published in Housing Policy Debate examining the different measures of rental housing affordability. She is currently working on the 2023 iterations of the Joint Center for Housing Studies’ signature reports, The State of the Nation’s Housing and Improving America’s Housing.