Susan Saegert is an American scholar in environmental psychology whose work has helped shape the study of housing, community life, and urban environments. Her career connects psychology with questions of place, social inequality, public policy, and collective wellbeing.
She was born in 1946 and studied at the University of Texas, where she earned her degree in 1968. She later received her doctorate in social psychology from the University of Michigan in 1974. This combination of psychology and social research became the foundation for her long academic career.
Saegert’s professional home has been closely linked to the City University of New York Graduate Center. She has served there as a professor of environmental psychology and as director of the Center for Human Environments. She was also the first director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Research on people and environments
Saegert’s early research focused on crowding and environmental stressors. These topics placed her at the center of a field concerned with how physical surroundings affect human behavior, mood, health, and social relations.
Over time, her work moved toward housing and urban communities. She became interested not only in how housing conditions affect residents, but also in how communities can influence housing conditions. This shift is important because it treats residents not as passive recipients of policy, but as actors capable of shaping their own environments.
Her research also addressed women and environments, connecting everyday spaces with questions of gender, safety, access, and social opportunity. In this sense, Saegert’s work helped expand environmental psychology beyond individual perception and into broader social structures.
Housing, social capital, and community power
A central part of Saegert’s career has been her study of distressed housing and low-income neighborhoods. With colleagues at the Housing Environments Research Group at the Center for Human Environments, she worked in partnership with community organizations and coalitions in New York City.
This work led to important research on social capital and poor communities. Social capital refers to the relationships, trust, networks, and shared capacities that help communities act together. For Saegert, these community ties were not abstract ideas. They were practical resources that could affect housing quality, safety, and neighborhood stability.
Her work with Gary Winkel and other collaborators examined how social capital relates to housing, crime, community participation, and neighborhood revitalization. These themes appear throughout her publications and reflect a long-standing concern with the relationship between physical space and civic life.
Professional service
Saegert has written and edited several important works, including Social Capital and Poor Communities, co-edited with J. Phillip Thompson and Mark R. Warren, and The Community Development Reader, co-edited with James DeFilippis. Her bibliography also includes studies on affordable housing, urban communities, healthy housing, poverty, crime, and civic capacity.
Her professional service has been extensive. She served as president of Division 34 on Population and Environment of the American Psychological Association, co-chaired the Environmental Design Research Association, and participated in APA work on urban psychology and social and economic status.
These roles show her influence not only as a researcher, but also as a figure in the development of environmental psychology as a field.
Susan Saegert’s biography is shaped by one central concern: how environments affect people, and how people can act together to change environments. Her work shows that housing is never only a physical structure. It is also a social setting, a source of health, a form of security, and sometimes a site of struggle.
Through research, teaching, writing, and institutional leadership, Saegert has helped connect environmental psychology with community development and urban justice. Her career remains important because it treats neighborhoods not as background scenery, but as places where human wellbeing and collective power are built.