Mahesh Somashekhar

Mahesh Somashekhar is currently pursuing three projects. The first aims to understand the effect of gentrification on local retailers and community organizations. To this end, he is digitizing and geocoding the corpus of the Gayellow Pages, a U.S. directory of local organizations serving queer people that has been in continuous publication since the 1970s. He is using this data to understand whether queer organizations are surviving the gentrification of gay villages, and where they are moving when they are displaced.

His second project examines how ethnic economies, traditionally expressed as business clusters in neighborhoods like Chinatowns and Little Italies, are refashioning themselves as ethnic platform economies and online marketplaces in the 21st century. He is using web scraping techniques to understand the missions, product offerings, and geographies of ethnic platform economies, and to compare and contrast them with territorially bounded ethnic economies.

His final project elucidates how central racism and racial inequality are to gentrification and its effects on individuals and communities. For this project, he is conducting a series of demographic analyses comparing White and non-White individuals displaced from gentrifying neighborhoods. He is also investigating how economic development in gentrifying neighborhoods differs according to the racial composition of longtime residents as well as incoming gentrifiers.

Somashekhar’s research has been published in journals including Social Problems, City & Community, Urban Affairs Review, and Economic Development Quarterly. Prior to joining UIC, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Washington, where he continues to be an External Affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.