Lan Deng

Lan Deng’s research and teaching interests fall broadly in the areas of housing, real estate, and local public finance. She has been studying housing and real estate development in both the U.S. and China. As a planning scholar, she is interested in examining the different types of interventions the two countries have developed to ensure adequate housing and suitable living environments for their residents. In the U.S., the interventions she has studied include major government housing programs as well as community-based initiatives. She is a leading scholar in the study of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, the country’s largest affordable housing production program. Her research has examined several key aspects of the program’s performance, including its financial cost, neighborhood impacts, and the long-term viability in affordable housing provision. She has also conducted research to examine how affordable housing investment as well as community-based efforts may alter the trajectory of neighborhood changes.

Deng’s work in China is also widely recognized. Driven by the same research interests that have motivated her U.S. work, Deng’s work in China has focused on examining the role of the state in shaping the country’s housing system. This includes a comprehensive assessment of the state’s major housing reforms and how they have transformed China’s housing policy and housing finance system. It also includes the study of China’s housing supply system to see how it has changed in response to the development of private markets versus persistent state interventions. More recently she has conducted research to evaluate the performance of China’s Housing Provident Fund program, a collective savings scheme that provides subsidized lending to support participants’ home purchases. Her current work in China investigates changes in the structure of China’s real estate development industry and what they mean for Chinese housing markets and the housing affordability challenge the country faces.

Deng currently serves as the North American Editor for Housing Studies, a leading international journal on housing research. From 2020 to 2022, she was the Associate Director for the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, one of the nation’s most prominent centers on Chinese studies.

Deng holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning (2004) from University of California, Berkeley, an M.S. (1999), and B.S. (1996) from Peking University, China.