Lance Freeman is the James W. Effron University Professor. Freeman is one of the world’s leading scholars of urban housing and gentrification, with joint appointments in the Department of Sociology in Penn Arts & Sciences and the Department of City and Regional Planning in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

Freeman, most recently professor in the Urban Planning Program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University, spent the 2020-21 academic year at Penn as the Provost’s Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow. He is the author of A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America, which won the 2020 Distinguished Book Award from Columbia University Press, and There Goes the ‘Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up, which won the 2007 Best Book Award from the Urban Affairs Association. He is also the author of dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters about such critical issues as housing policy, urban poverty, neighborhood change, and residential segregation.