Lisa K. Bates, PhD is Professor at Portland State Universityin the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning and in Black Studies. She is the Portland Professor in Innovative Housing Policy. Her scholarship focuses on housing and community development policy and planning. Recognition of her work includes the 2019 UAA-SAGE Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award and the 2016 Dale Prize for scholarship advancing community self-determination and racial justice.
Dr. Bates’ research and practice includes deep engagements with community-based organizations working towards racial justice and housing rights, including Portland’s anti-displacement coalition. She also has an advisory partnership with local government partners including research, planning, and policy formulation and evaluation. Her work to describe gentrification and displacement in Portland has been widely cited and used as a model for planning to address neighborhood change. Dr. Bates leads the Evicted in Oregon team, which tracks eviction cases, evaluates public policy, and uses community-based methods to develop insights and ideas about housing justice. She is also collaborating with Dr. Amie Thurber to evaluate Portland’s ground-breaking policy to support housing opportunities for families displaced over multiple generations of urban renewal.
Dr. Bates is a 2019 Creative Capital awardee, recognizing her practice at the intersection of art, urban planning, and radical geographic thought. Through collaboration with multimedia artists, she urges developing new visions of Black history, present, and possibility. This radical Black spatial imaginary practice includes the Portland African-American Leadership Forum People’s Plan, which asked “what would it be like if your city, neighborhood, community loved Black people?” and the art exhibition and social emergency response center HERE|Humboldt, developed as part of the collective Black Life Experiential Research Group.
Her B.A. is in Political Science from the George Washington University, and she holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining PSU’s faculty, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.