Browsing by Author "Wang, Yi"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Barriers to Recruitment and Retention of Entry-Level Employees: Perceptions from Employers in Ramsey County
    (Resilient Communities Project (RCP), University of Minnesota, 2019) Lyftogt, Kayla; Malone, Jack; Murray, John; Wang, Yi
    This project was completed as part of the 2018-2019 Resilient Communities Project (rcp.umn.edu) partnership with Ramsey County. The mission of Ramsey County's Workforce Solutions (WFS) program is to strengthen the economic success of the community through personalized and effective workforce development. It serves as a resource for both job seekers and businesses by providing training opportunities and personalized assistance in searching and applying for jobs. Businesses also receive assistance with recruiting, screening, training, and retaining workers. WFS staff know there are many program participants who experience transportation barriers that prevent them from accessing or keeping jobs. Ramsey County project lead Max Holdhusen worked with a team of students in PA 5041: Qualitative Research Methods, taught by Dr. Greta Friedmann-Sanchez, to conduct a needs and barriers assessment of transportation resources and options through interviews with employers in suburban Ramsey County that face challenges in recruiting and maintaining job seekers due to a lack of public transportation options. The students' final report, presentation, and a poster summarizing the project are available.
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    Hybrid Linear Modeling via Local Best-fit Flats
    (University of Minnesota. Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, 2010-10) Zhang, Teng; Szlam, Arthur; Wang, Yi; Lerman, Gilad
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    The Impact of the COVID-19 Eviction Moratorium on Landlord-Initiated Displacement Actions In Minnesota
    (Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, 2022-10) Goetz, Edward G; Wang, Yi; Damiano, Anthony
    The COVID-19 pandemic created a critical housing situation for many lower-income households whose earnings were interrupted by the economic dislocations produced by the pandemic. Renters especially were faced with the prospect of being forced from their homes through eviction if and when they fell behind on rent. Moreover, the potential for families to be homeless was seen additionally as a public health issue during a pandemic when increased exposure could readily lead to increasing infection and death rates. In this environment, local, state, and federal authorities began to respond by issuing eviction moratoria of different types and providing emergency rental assistance to keep families in their homes. In Minnesota, the Governor’s Executive Order 20-14 established an eviction moratorium on March 23, 2020. This Order remained in force until a phase out began in August of 2021. The federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued a temporary national moratorium on September 1, 2020. Originally set to expire on December 31, Congress extended it for one month to January of 2021 and then President Biden extended it through July of that year. The CDC moratorium was targeted to counties experiencing high levels of COVID-19 transmissions, and thus did not cover all areas. The CDC moved to issue a new moratorium in August of 2021, but this was challenged by the real estate industry and overturned by the Courts. The Minnesota eviction moratorium was more comprehensive than the CDC eviction moratorium but was renewed on a monthly basis. Finally, in July of 2021, 16 months after it was first initiated, the moratorium was phased out. In July, evictions were allowed for lease violations but not for non-payment of rent. In August, landlords could terminate leases for non-payment from tenants who were ineligible for COVID-19 emergency rental assistance. In September, evictions were allowed for tenants ineligible for COVID-19 emergency rental assistance. This gradual reduction of tenant protections was referred to as the ‘eviction off-ramp’. The final eviction protections applied in cases of non-payment by eligible tenants with a pending COVID-19 emergency rental assistance application. Those protections lasted until June 1, 2022. Eviction moratoria did much to alleviate the concerns of tenants and their advocates that families would be thrust out of their homes during the pandemic. At the same time, however, reports of landlords ignoring the eviction moratoria (see, e.g., Morgenson 2020; Strickler, 2022; U.S. House of Representatives, 2022) were an ongoing concern. Additionally, there was concern that landlords were resorting to other means to move renters out of units, that instead of pursuing formal eviction proceedings through the Courts, that landlords were pushing out renters through other extra-judicial means. Together, eviction and extra-judicial actions taken by landlords to move renters out of their homes constituted what we call “Landlord Initiated Displacement Actions” (LIDAs). This study is an attempt to analyze the question of how the moratorium affected the rate at which LIDAs occurred across the state of Minnesota. We examine these questions by looking at the calls made by tenants to a statewide tenant help line in Minnesota operated by HOME Line. HOME Line is a nonprofit statewide tenant advocacy organization that provides free and low-cost legal, organizing, education, and advocacy services to tenants. In this study we report on LIDAs generally, but we also look specifically at the trends related to the use of formal eviction and extra-judicial LIDAs. Our findings show that tenant calls to HOME Line about LIDAs declined during the moratorium period. This decline was entirely due to a reduction in calls about formal evictions. Calls about non-eviction LIDAs did not change during the pandemic. Thus, we did not see a “substitution” effect take place during the moratorium in which landlords reduced formal eviction efforts and replaced them with extra-judicial LIDA activity. Concerningly, however, after the pandemic eviction calls returned to their pre-pandemic level and non-eviction LIDA calls increased to a level above what they had been before the pandemic. One potential explanation for this is that although a ‘one-for-one’ substitution between eviction and non-eviction LIDAs did not take place, the reduction in evictions during the moratorium resulted in a greater relative use of extra-judicial LIDAs. The period of the moratorium may have convinced landlords of the usefulness, for their purposes, of extra-judicial LIDAs, leading to an increase in their use after the moratorium was lifted. This increased use more or less maintained the relative importance of non-eviction LIDAs in the repertoire of landlord strategies. We may be seeing the establishment of a ‘new normal’ in which landlords are more reliant on extra-judicial LIDAs. We also examined whether landlord strategies, as reflected in the calls tenants made to HOME Line, varied by the racial profile of the area or by the race of the renter. We found that eviction calls were less common in predominantly White zip codes than they were in zip codes that were more than 50% Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC). The same was true of non-eviction LIDA calls. The impact of the moratorium was to reduce eviction calls both in White and in BIPOC areas, though the reduction was greater in BIPOC areas and it continued after the moratorium ended. In White zip codes, eviction calls dropped by less and then rose above pre-moratorium levels after the moratorium ended. Similarly, during the moratorium, eviction calls from BIPOC tenants declined more than from White tenants. Eviction call levels remained below pre-moratorium levels for BIPOC renters after the moratorium phase out, but increased to above pre-moratorium levels for White renters. In all, it seems that the moratorium had a greater ameliorative impact on BIPOC renters and in BIPOC communities than it did for White renters and White areas.
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    Private Rental Listings in Beijing, 2015 and 2018
    (2021-04-08) Wang, Yi; wang8262@umn.edu; Wang, Yi; University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs
    The dataset includes rental listings from Lianjia (http://bj.lianjia.com) and Woaiwojia (https://bj.5i5j.com) in 2015 and 2018. I employed a web-scraping software program to collect rental listings every Sunday from January to March in 2015 and 2018. The information collected includes the unit’s geographical location, floor area (in square meters), and monthly rent. I then removed items that were duplicates from the original raw collections, items that contained invalid or incomplete information, and items that were not about residential units but storage or commercial spaces.
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    Robust hybrid linear modeling and its applications.
    (2012-08) Wang, Yi
    Hybrid Linear Modeling (HLM) uses a set of affine subspaces to model data and has been widely used in computer vision. However, many segmentation algorithms need to know d and K as a priori. Therefore, determining the dimension d and the number K of subspaces is an important problem in HLM. In this manuscript, we suggest two automatic ways to empirically find d and K. One obtains local estimation of the dimension by examining the geometric structure of a neighborhood. The other finds K or both d and K by detecting the "elbow" of the least square error. We provide a partial justification of the elbow method for special cases. We also demonstrate the accuracy and speed of our methods on synthetic and real hybrid linear data. Another challenge in HLM is to deal with highly corrupted data. We study the related problems of denoising images corrupted by impulsive noise and blind inpainting (i.e., inpainting when the deteriorated region is unknown). Our basic approach is to model the set of patches of pixels in an image as a union of low dimensional subspaces, corrupted by sparse but perhaps large magnitude noise. For this purpose, we develop a robust and iterative method for single subspace modeling and extend it to an iterative algorithm for modeling multiple subspaces. We prove convergence for both algorithms and carefully compare our methods with other recent ideas for such robust modeling. We demonstrate state of the art performance of our method for both imaging problems.
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    Robust locally linear analysis with applications to image denoising and blind inpainting
    (University of Minnesota. Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, 2011-09) Wang, Yi; Szlam, Arthur; Lerman, Gilad
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    Three Essays on Housing Affordability in Chinese Cities
    (2023-07) Wang, Yi
    Housing policy and state-led redevelopment programs play central roles in the production of urban inequality in Chinese cities. Despite the potentially adverse impact of state-led redevelopment on marginalized population, studies that examines the interconnectedness of redevelopment, housing affordability, and migrants’ health have been rare. Using data compiled from the Beijing Municipal Government, the real estate brokerage company Lianjia, the Census Bureau, and the National Health Commission, the three essays fill in the current research gap by understanding the geography of rental affordable housing in recent years, examining the causal relationship between state-led redevelopment and rental housing affordability, and investigating the relationship between declining housing affordability and migrant health. The results suggest that (1) rental housing in Chinese cities has become less affordable in recent years partially due to the state-led urban redevelopment; and (2) the declining housing affordability jeopardizes migrant workers’ residential stability and health.