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Susan Saegert

Curriculum Vitae
ssaegert@gc.cuny.edu
212.817.1886

Susan Saegert is Professor of Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center where she has worked since receiving her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan. She was Director of the Center for Human Environments (CHE), served as the first director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center, and taught in the department of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University. Currently, Dr. Saegert serves on the Board of Directors of the Urban Affairs Association and Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDCo) and is a member of New York City Community Land Initiative (NYCCLI) Policy Work Group. Her early research focused on crowding and environmental stressors. She then began to study the relationship between housing and human development and well being, as well as women and environments. Her research in inner city communities led her to focus less on how housing conditions can affect residents and more on how communities can affect housing conditions.
With colleagues at CHE in the Housing Environments Research Group (HERG), she has worked in partnership with community organizations and coalitions to understand how to successfully improve distressed housing and neighborhoods in New York City. Her research then expanded to include personal and community effects of the foreclosure crisis on low and middle income homeowners.  In response to the distressing findings of that work, her current research program focuses how Community Land Trusts affect homeowners, renters, and communities.  At present, Saegert and her research team are analyzing data from CLT homeowners in Minneapolis and Portland Oregon, in comparison to demographically similar residents of those cities who took homeownership readiness classes from the same organizations preparing buyers for CLT homeownership, as well as waitlisted residents. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.  Her books include From Abandonment to Hope: Community Households in Harlem (Seagert & Leavitt, 1990), Social Capital and Poor Communities (Saegert, Thompson, & Warren, 2001), The Community Development Reader  (Eds. 1) (DeFilippis & Saegert, 2008), The Community Development Reader 2nd Edition (DeFilippis & Saegert, 2012), and The People, Place, and Space Reader (Gieseking, Mangold, Katz, Saegert, & Low, 2014). Her professional activities have included serving as president of Division 34 on Population and Environment of the American Psychological Association, co-chairing the Environmental Design Research Association, and serving on the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Urban Psychology. She has also served on the Board of Directors of the Urban Affairs Association. She has served on the editorial boards of Environment & Behavior and the Journal of Environmental Psychology for most of the last 20 years.
Recent Publications
Inequality of Forms of Capital: Crisis and Opportunity in Low Income Housing Policy
in Metropolitics

Hackett, K., Saegert, S., Dozier, D., Marinova, M. (2018). Community Land Trusts: Releasing Possible Selves through Stable Affordable Housing. In press, Housing Studies. Published online March 13, 2018. Accepted 2017

Saegert, S. (2018). INVITED FOCUS ARTICLES COMMENT: Opening up Housing Theory: Who speaks, who listens, and to what end? In press, Housing Theory and Society, published online 2017.

Saegert S, Hackett K., Maor, E.& Pryiomka K. (2017). Interrupting Inequality through Community Land Trusts: Collective Goods and Forms of Capital Accumulation. In press Housing Theory and Society.

Greer, A., Thaden, E., & Saegert, S. (2014) Journeys to default: Applying the housing niche model to foreclosure risk and consequence. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 31 (1) 72-90.

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