Susan Saegert

Susan Saegert is Director of the Center for Human Environments (CHE) and Professor of Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center where she has worked since receiving her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1974. She was also the first director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. 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. These interests involved her with a team of architects, planners and housing finance experts in developing a plan for Downtown Denver that increased residential uses and amenities, which is evidenced in the cityscape of Denver today.

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 and Gary Winkel have worked in partnership with community organizations and coalitions to understand how to successfully improve distressed housing and neighborhoods in New York City. This work has also resulted in a book on social capital co-edited with two political scientists: S. Saegert, J.P. Thompson, & M. R. Warren (Eds) "Social capital and poor communities". New York: Russell Sage, 2001.

She has been recently quoted in David Gonzalez's September 24, 2007 "New York Times" article "Risky loans help build ghost town of new homes" noting that in New York a trend is developing where “whole neighborhoods are wiped out, crime increases, the neighborhood’s reputation goes down, quality of life is undermined, and people can’t sell their houses,” due to the accessibility of adjustable rate loans and bad mortgages.

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 more recently serving on the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Urban Psychology. She has served on the editorial boards of Environment & Behavior and the Journal of Environmental Psychology for most of the last 20 years. With Gary Winkel, she wrote the Annual Review of Environmental Psychology for 1990.

elected Recent Publications

Saegert, S. (2006) Building Civic Capacity in Urban Neighborhoods: An Empirically Grounded Anatomy. Journal of Urban Affairs

Saegert, S., & Evans, G. ( 2003). Poverty, Housing Niches, and Health in the U.S.. Journal of Social Issues, 59, 569- 590.

Saegert, S., Klitzman, S., Freudenberg, N., Cooperman-Mrozek, & Nassar, S. (2003). Healthy Housing: A structured review of US interventions to improve health by modifying housing in the United States, 1990-2000. American Journal of Public Health, 93, 1471-1478.

Saegert, S. & Winkel, G.H. (2004). Crime, social capital and community participation. American Journal of Community Psychology, 34 (3-4): 219-133.

Saegert, S. & Benitez, L. (2005) Limited Equity Housing Cooperatives: Defining a Niche in the Low Income Housing Market . Journal of Planning Literature 19:, 427-239.

Saegert, S., (2000). Urban Communities. In A. Kraut (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Psychology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

Saegert, S. & Clark, H. (2005). Women and housing. In Housing: Foundation of a New Social Agenda. Bratt, R., Hartman, C., & Stone, M. (Eds.), Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Saegert, Susan & Evans, Gary. (1999) Residential crowding in the context of inner city poverty. In Wapner, S.,J.Demick,H.Minamik & T. Yamamoto (Eds) Theoretical perspectives in environment-behavior research: Underlying assumptions, research problems, and relationships. New York: Plenum.

Saegert, Susan & Winkel, Gary. (1999) CDCs, Social Capital and Housing Quality. Shelterforce, March/April 22-24

Saegert, Susan, Phillip Thompson, Robert Engle, Jocelyn Sargent. (1999) "Stretched Thin: Employment, parenting, and social capital among mothers in public housing. New York: Foundation for Child Development Working Paper Series

Saegert, S., & Winkel, G. (1998). Social Capital and the Revitalization of New York City's Distressed Inner City Housing. Housing Policy Debate,9(1)17-60. Washington, D.C.: Fannie Mae Foundation Mae Foundation Mae.

Saegert, S., & McCarthy, D. E. (1998). Gender and Housing for the Elderly: Sorting through the accumulations of a lifetime. In R. J. Scheidt & P.G. Windley (Eds.), Environment and Aging Theory: A focus on Housing. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Saegert, S., (1998). In Rem Housing. In W. Van Vliet (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Housing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Saegert, S., and Winkel, G. (1997). Social capital formation in low income housing. New York, Housing Environments Research Group of the Center for Human Environments, City University of New York, New York.

Saegert, S. (1997). What is the situation: A comment on the Fourth Japan/USA seminar on Environment-Behavior Research. In S. Wapner, & J. Demick (Eds.), Handbook of Japan-US Environment-Behavior Research Towards a Transactional Approach. New York: Plenum.

White, A., & Saegert, S. (1996). Return from Abandonment: The Tenant Interim Lease program and the development of low-income cooperatives in New York City’s most neglected neighborhoods. In van Vliet, W. (Ed.), Affordable Housing and Urban Development in the U.S.: Learning from Failure and Success, Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Saegert, S. & Winkel, G. (1996). Paths to empowerment: Organizing at home. American Journal of Community Psychology, 24, 517-550.

Leavitt, J. & Saegert, S. (1990) From Abandonment to Hope: Community Households in Harlem. New York: Columbia University Press.

Saegert, S. & Winkel, G. (1990). Environmental Psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 441-477.