Nick Graetz

Nick Graetz

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton University

Eviction Lab

climate + community project

Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative

Biography

I’m a demographer/sociologist studying the political economy of housing and population health. My interdisciplinary quantitative research is organized around two central tenets of sociology: context and explanation. Contemporary contexts and outcomes are the function of cumulative, historical exposures. I use relational sociology to inform quantitative analyses of place, race, and class, focusing on the entangled, reciprocal systems of social and economic reproduction. My research is driven by a commitment to applying theory-driven quantitative methods to real-world problems in a way that is transparent, reproducible, and motivated by a need to address the fundamental causes of social and health inequity in the United States.

At Princeton’s Eviction Lab, I’m working on several projects related to the rental housing market, displacement, social programs, and health outcomes. Many of these projects are in close collaboration with the Census Bureau, where we are linking individual eviction records to restricted-use data on welfare enrollment, employment, and mortality. This work situates racialized housing inequality as a fundamental cause of population health disparities, focusing on profiteering, exploitation, and power relations between specific actors (e.g., landlords and tenants).

I’m also working on a set of simulation and data fusion methods for creating robust small-area estimates in the United States, combining ACS data with other national surveys such as the Residential Energy Consumption Survey. This includes funded collaborations with Data for Progress, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and the EPA. I co-authored several policy briefs using this work for the Data for Progress Green New Deal platform, Senator Nikil Saval’s COVID-19 platform, and Congressman Jamaal Bowman’s Green New Deal for Schools platform.

My academic work in these areas is published or forthcoming in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Forces, Nature, Spatial Demography, Sociological Methodology, the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, the New England Journal of Medicine, and elsewhere.

Download my CV.

Interests

  • Structural racism
  • Housing policy
  • Causal mediation analysis
  • Population health
  • Political economy
  • Stratification
  • Life-course modeling
  • Bayesian small area estimation
  • Data visualization

Education

  • Ph.D., Demography and Sociology, 2021

    University of Pennsylvania

  • M.A., Demography, 2018

    University of Pennsylvania

  • M.P.H., Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2016

    University of Washington

  • B.S., Psychology and Political Science, 2013

    University of Wisconsin-Madison

Select publications

Historical redlining and contemporary racial disparities in neighborhood life expectancy

Forthcoming in Social Forces.
Historical redlining and contemporary racial disparities in neighborhood life expectancy

Structural racism and quantitative causal inference: A life course mediation framework for decomposing racial health disparities

Published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
PDF
Structural racism and quantitative causal inference: A life course mediation framework for decomposing racial health disparities

Small-area analyses using public American Community Survey data: A tree-based spatial microsimulation technique

Published in Sociological Methodology.
PDF
Small-area analyses using public American Community Survey data: A tree-based spatial microsimulation technique

Early life patterns of criminal legal system involvement: Inequalities by race/ethnicity, gender, and parental education

Published in the Demographic Research.
PDF
Early life patterns of criminal legal system involvement: Inequalities by race/ethnicity, gender, and parental education

Decomposing county-level working-age mortality trends in the United States between 1999–2001 and 2015–2017

Published in Spatial Demography.
PDF
Decomposing county-level working-age mortality trends in the United States between 1999–2001 and 2015–2017

Household wealth and child body mass index: Patterns and mechanisms

Published in the The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.
PDF
Household wealth and child body mass index: Patterns and mechanisms

Ecological factors associated with suicide mortality among non-Hispanic whites

Published in the BMC Public Health.
PDF
Ecological factors associated with suicide mortality among non-Hispanic whites

Mapping disparities in education across low- and middle-income countries

Published in Nature.
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Mapping disparities in education across low- and middle-income countries

Mapping local variation in educational attainment across Africa

Published in Nature.
PDF
Mapping local variation in educational attainment across Africa

Current projects and working papers

The impacts of rent burden and eviction on all-cause mortality in the United States

Under Review. We construct a novel longitudinal dataset linking all renters in the 2000 Census to – million eviction court records (2000-2016) and administrative death records from the Census Numident file (2000-2019). For the subsample of renters who completed an American Community Survey between 2008-2012, we also measure within-individual changes in rent burden since 2000. Conditional on renter, household, neighborhood, and state characteristics, we show that a 50% rent burden in 2000 was associated with –% higher age-adjusted mortality from 2000-2019 compared to a 30% burden. Following those persistently renting during midlife from 2000 to 2008-2012, 10 and 20 percentage point increases in burden were associated with –% and –% higher mortality from 2008-2012 to 2019. Across all renters, the threat of eviction (a court filing without a judgement) and an eviction judgement were associated with –% and –% higher mortality. We examined variation in these associations by age, race, gender, state of filing, and modelled eviction risk. We discuss implications for health and housing policy during the COVID-19 pandemic while contextualizing these debates within the broader, durable ecology of housing insecurity and death that was entrenched long before the present crisis.
Last updated on Apr 17, 2019 0 min read
The impacts of rent burden and eviction on all-cause mortality in the United States

A comprehensive demographic profile of the US evicted population

Under Review. Millions of American renter households are threatened with eviction each year, yet we know little about the individuals living in these households. We link – million eviction court cases to U.S. Census data, providing the first national estimates of the full population of individuals living in a household facing an eviction lawsuit. In an average year between 2007 and 2016, – million people faced the threat of eviction, including – million children. The average evicted household included one child, and the most common age to be evicted in America was during childhood. Black Americans made up only –% of all renters yet accounted for –% of those affected by eviction filings and –% of those who were evicted. Roughly one in – Black Americans living in a renter household was threatened with eviction each year and one in – was evicted.
Last updated on Apr 17, 2019 0 min read
A comprehensive demographic profile of the US evicted population

American Eco-Apartheid: Mapping racial disparities in longevity driven by political economy, state violence, and environmental exposure

Under Review. We still lack a unifying theoretical framework—complete with parsimonious empirical tools—to describe interconnected, spatialized, racialized inequalities in the US, a framework that synthesizes socioeconomic and environmental relations and emphasizes mechanisms amenable to policy change. Common quantitative indices tend to be atheoretical, lack explicit causal accounts, and cannot offer policy guidance. In this study, we propose the eco-apartheid framework and index to fill this gap. We develop our index in dialogue with two research traditions with complimentary strengths—American apartheid/redlining and environmental justice mapping. Our index is consistent with those frameworks’ historical, causal narratives, and clarifies the role of structural racism in contemporary U.S. inequalities. In keeping with a South African apartheid analogy, we place greater emphasis on state violence and labor market inequalities than many analogies to apartheid. By aggregating just 6 measures—covering political economy, state violence, and socio-environmental exposures—each amenable to direct policy action, the eco-apartheid index predicts life expectancy differences of over 5 years between census tracts at the top vs. bottom of the index, in the 20 largest US metropolitan areas. It predicts 2 to 3 times higher Covid mortality rates between top vs. bottom zip codes in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, in the period before vaccination. The index predicts neighborhood life expectancy better than maps of redlining and air toxin exposure. It performs as well as the Area Depravation and Social Vulnerability indices, with far fewer variables, stronger theory, and clearer policy implications. By demonstrating the empirical validity of the eco-apartheid theoretical framework, we hope to spark research and debate on the spatial intersections of racialized, environmental, and economic inequalities in the United States and around the world.
Last updated on Apr 17, 2019 0 min read
American Eco-Apartheid: Mapping racial disparities in longevity driven by political economy, state violence, and environmental exposure

Historical mechanisms connecting home values over three generations to contemporary Black-white disparities in wealth

Under Review. The Black-white wealth gap in the United States has persisted and widened since the 1960s. Analyses have identified many mechanisms underlying wealth correlations across successive generations, but few studies have quantified the relative contributions of these interconnected and racialized systems of reproduction to the total gap we observe today. Using linked data from the PSID (N=2,977), I define a wealth gap in 2015-17 between three generations racialized as Black and three generations racialized as white since 1968-70. I use a fully interacted counterfactual mediation framework to decompose this disparity into the historical, racialized contributions from grandparent home value, parent educational attainment, parent home value, grandchild educational attainment, and grandchild home value. I demonstrate how these relations become structurally embedded in the distributions of subsequent home values and educational attainment over each generation, such that the contemporary wealth gap can be decomposed into a system of contemporary discrimination and compositional differences predicated on historical discrimination. Findings from this study contribute to our understanding of the dynamic, racialized process of multigenerational place-based wealth accumulation and support the importance of historically contingent social policy centered on reparative justice.
Last updated on Apr 17, 2019 0 min read
Historical mechanisms connecting home values over three generations to contemporary Black-white disparities in wealth

The scars of legal violence: Immigration enforcement, policy, and population health inequality

In Progress. The sociopolitical environments where immigrants in the U.S. live have changed drastically in recent decades, with substantial variation across and within states. Yet there is limited empirical investigation of the consequences of these changes for population health. Linking panel data from the Health and Retirement Study (2004-2016) to data on county-level immigration enforcement and state-level immigrant policy, this study estimates three-way fixed effects models to examine how within county changes in immigration enforcement and within state changes in immigrant policy shape within person changes in health. We pay particular attention to racial-ethnic and nativity variation in these links. Results show that as local immigration enforcement intensifies and state policy contexts become more restrictive, foreign-born adults—especially Latinx immigrants—experience accelerated health decline, including increases in functional limitations and physiological dysregulation. Like episodes of physical violence that can leave lacerations and damage—both visible and more hidden—our results provide evidence of the health harms of state sanctioned legal violence - what we call scars of legal violence. Findings highlight how policies governing immigrants not only shape structures of racial domination and immigrant exclusion but the embodied health inequities that flow from them, with implications for understanding and redressing population health disparities.
Last updated on Apr 17, 2019 0 min read
The scars of legal violence: Immigration enforcement, policy, and population health inequality

Public and policy writing

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All Data for Progress climate + community project Media Interviews Other

A Green New Deal for Public Housing to Deliver Racial, Economic, and Climate Justice

A Green New Deal for Public Housing to Deliver Racial, Economic, and Climate Justice

COVID-19 in Philadelphia

COVID-19 in Philadelphia for Nikil Saval 2020.

Forced to move out of her home, a mother and her special-needs son struggle to find options

Interview with the Grio.

Rents are starting to come down, but the trend may not hold

Interview with the AP.

Report: A Green New Deal for American Public Housing Communities

National report for DfP on GND for public housing with interactive maps.

Report: A Green New Deal for NYCHA Communities

Report for DfP on a Green New Deal for NYCHA communities.

Report: A Green New Deal for Suburban Transportation

National report for DfP on GND for suburban transportation.

Report: Public Housing at risk: Adaptation through a Green New Deal

Rising Rents and High Mortgage Rates - Housing Costs Squeeze Budgets to the Brink

Interview with CNET.