Going into my Leadership in Action experience, I knew I wanted to build on the research I had done during my first Laidlaw summer, but I did not want to simply repeat the same project in a different place.

My original research looked at Gujarat’s Disturbed Areas Act, a law that regulates certain property transactions in designated areas. I initially approached it as a housing-market question, but as I worked on the project, I became much more interested in the broader implications. If a law changes who can buy property in a neighborhood, what does that mean for segregation, mobility, and who gets access to certain parts of a city?

For my LiA, I spent ten weeks at the CUF in New York City and called my project “Zoned Out: Law, Segregation, and Urban Inequality.”

The first two weeks were mostly about understanding what the New York version of that question actually looked like.

I quickly realized that there was no clean comparison. New York’s housing problems are shaped by zoning, affordability, housing supply, transportation, neighborhood investment, and a long history of segregation. It was much messier than finding one law and estimating its effect.

That was actually what made the project interesting.

I spent those first weeks reading about housing and neighborhood inequality in New York and trying to understand which parts of my Gujarat research could still be useful. Instead of asking whether the same policy existed in both places, I started asking whether similar mechanisms could show up in completely different systems.

The biggest shift for me was realizing that policy research was not just about proving that a problem existed. I had already spent a lot of time learning how to measure effects.

This summer made me start asking the harder question: once we know there is a problem, what can actually be done about it?