Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Cross-Appointments
Fields of Study
- Colonialism, Racialization, Indigeneity
- Computational and Quantitative Methods
- Social Policy
- Urban Sociology
Areas of Interest
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Housing and Community Development – This project explores the intersections of housing policy, neighborhood investment, and community well-being. It examines how planning and development initiatives reshape local geographies of opportunity and exclusion. Through comparative analysis across Canadian and U.S. cities, the project investigates how community development impacts people and place.
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Black Placemaking and Reparative Justice – This project examines the relationship between Black placemaking practices and dominant property ownership regimes through a comparative case study approach. It investigates how Black communities have historically created, sustained, and defended spaces of belonging and cultural life in the face of exclusionary property logics that privilege individual ownership, market value, and dispossession.
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Racial Capitalism and Urban Theory – This project explores the omission of racialization processes within urban theory by using racial capitalism as a theoretical intervention. This project places urban studies in conversation with theories from Black Sociology, Black Geographies, and Black Studies to unearth the iterative relationship between race and class/racism and capitalism in producing the urban environment.
Biography
Dr. Prentiss Dantzler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Founding Director of the Housing Justice Lab within the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. He also holds affiliations with the Departments of Geography and Planning and Social Justice Education. As an interdisciplinary community-engaged scholar, his research focuses on housing policy, neighborhood change, and residential mobility with a particular focus on urban poverty, social policy, race and ethnic relations, and community development. His work focuses on how and why neighbourhoods change and the extent to which policymakers, institutions, and local denizens create and react to those changes. Prentiss received his Ph.D. in Public Affairs with a concentration in Community Development from Rutgers University-Camden. He also holds an M.P.A. from West Chester University and a B.S. from Penn State University.
His research sits at the nexus of urban poverty, neighbourhood change, race and ethnic relations, housing and community development. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Dantzler explores how and why neighbourhoods change and how policymakers and communities create and react to those changes. He currently serves as a Deputy Editor for City and Community and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban Affairs, Metropolitics, and Housing Policy Debate. He also serves as Secretary/Treasurer for the Community and Urban Sociology Section at the American Sociological Association and as Treasurer to the Urban Affairs Association.
Recent Publications
Prentiss Dantzler, Khalil Martin, & Abigail Meza. "Visible Minorities, Visible Risk: Unpacking Toronto's Unequal Eviction Burden." Metropolitics.
Prentiss Dantzler & Jason Hackworth. 2025. "Racial Capitalism and the Propaganda of Conservative Economics." Journal of Black Studies.
Ashley E. Nickels, Prentiss Dantzler, Brooke Moeller, Emeline Renz, & Miles Davis-Matthews. 2025. "Saviors, Villains, or Allies? Exploring How Nonprofit Developers Navigate Narratives of Gentrification in a Changing City." Urban Affairs Review.
Daniel Silver, Prentiss Dantzler, and Kofi Hope. 2025. "Residential preferences, place alienation, and neighborhood satisfaction: A conjoint survey experiment in Toronto’s inner suburbs." Journal of Urban Affairs.