Nick Graetz

New research out today with my colleague Jacob Udell on financial distress in the multifamily market. We focus on the impact on tenants, who have little say over their landlords’ financial decisions but bear the brunt of the consequences of this escalating crisis.

Check it out!

The bodily scars of legal violence: local immigration enforcement, state immigrant policy, and health inequality Abstract. Over the past three decades in the United States, a surge of federal, state, and local laws and policies has increased levels of immigration enfo

🚨 New paper: “The Bodily Scars of Legal Violence: Local immigration enforcement, state immigrant policy, & health inequality” 🚨

Forthcoming in @sfjournal.bsky.social w @ngraetz.bsky.social @atheendar.bsky.social & Robin Ortiz

academic.oup.com/sf/advance-a...

Work With Us - Climate and Community Institute Job opportunities at the Climate and Community Institute

‼️ Join my team ‼️ @cplusc.bsky.social is hiring a Housing Policy Manager to help advance progressive housing and climate solutions alongside some of the best tenant unions, labor unions, policymakers, and researchers in the field.

Apply here by Oct 5! climateandcommunity.org/careers/

Working paper with more details on data/methods: osf.io/preprints/so...

Great piece in Bloomberg by ‪@markgongloff.bsky.social discussing all these issues: bsky.app/profile/mark... ‬

Insurers Charge Low Credit Homeowners Twice As Much for the Same Policy In many cases, a low credit score is more expensive than high disaster risk

I have a blog up at CCI that goes into why home insurers use credit scores and what this all means for how we are socializing risks, how we are sharing costs, and ultimately who is making these decisions: climatecommunityinstitute.substack.com/p/insurers-c...

This has important implications for the notion that prices are effectively signaling disaster risk and can therefore be used to reduce exposure by convincing people to move or not buy in certain areas: credit scores don’t cause disasters.

By placing so much focus on credit scores, insurers effectively allow homeowners to compensate for living in high-risk areas by having high credit scores.

Penalized · Consumer Federation of America A typical homeowner with a “low” credit score will pay nearly $2,000 more each year - or almost double the price - for their insurance premiums than their otherwise identical neighbor with a “high” cr...

New work with CFA @consumerfed.bsky.social‬ and CCI @cplusc.bsky.social showing insurers charge low credit homeowners twice as much as high credit homeowners for the exact same policy on the exact same house: consumerfed.org/reports/pena...

A Maine Woman Paid Her Back Rent. Her Record Still Says She Was Evicted. Repayment plans are supposed to help public housing tenants avoid eviction. In Maine, these deals have put evictions on their permanent records, even if they’ve fulfilled all the terms and were never ...

NEW: Jasmin Belanger believed the deal was simple: pay off what she owed, and her landlord would let her keep her housing.

It wasn’t until months later that she learned it had left her with a permanent record of an eviction — despite there never being one.

With @bangordailynews.bsky.social

Could this city be the model for how to tackle the housing crisis and climate change? Vienna has a way to make affordable housing and combat climate change all at the same time. Now U.S. cities want in, and they're building their own green housing.

Vienna is the global capital of social housing, and is regularly ranked as the world's most livable city.

Our new report, featured in this @npr.org exclusive, explores Vienna’s green social housing—home to the majority of its renters—and how it can work here.

www.npr.org/2025/06/15/n...

Could this city be the model for how to tackle the housing crisis and climate change? Vienna has a way to make affordable housing and combat climate change all at the same time. Now U.S. cities want in, and they're building their own green housing.

Vienna has a way to make affordable housing and combat climate change all at the same time. Now U.S. cities want in, and they're building their own green housing.

The Climate Crisis Hits Tenants Hardest. They're Fighting Back. From California to North Carolina, tenants are organizing to demand protections from natural disasters.

Bee's home filled with ash during the wildfires. Holly pays $350/month to heat her studio apt.

Desperate for safety & change, both turned to a trusted source: the tenant union.

The climate crisis hits tenants hardest, but tenants are fighting back. I wrote about it in @shelterforce.bsky.social

cover image for Reconsidering Reparations, featuring small black hands planting a seedling. Text of the cover: "Reconsidering Reparations Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. With a new preface by the author."

the good folks at @haymarketbooks.org are releasing a paperback version of Reconsidering Reparations, April 1st, with a beautiful new cover courtesy of Steve Leard. some dismal parts of the latter chapters have aged unfortunately well - but look forward to discussions about it in today's context

Work With Us - Climate & Community Institute There are currently no open positions at Climate & Community Institute.

We are hiring Junior Research Fellows for the summer of 2025! We are looking for outstanding graduate students to join us for the summer to make meaningful contributions to our transformative research and policy work across geographies and economic sectors. Applications due March 3.

Opinion | Biden Left Us With a ‘Prius Economy.’ It’s Time for Something Different. (Gift Article) Climate issues are fueling the cost-of-living crisis, especially for the poor and working class.

This piece by @aldasky.bsky.social & @triofrancos.bsky.social is 💯

We need an economy that invests in “affordable green housing, higher wages, cheap clean energy, lower commuting costs and expanded mass transit. States, cities and towns can get the ball rolling.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/o...

Look for the Tenant Union Those caught in the crossfire of corporate landlords and financial engineering need a regulatory agenda to protect them.

In the next four years, tenant unions will deepen their organizing. They'll win safer homes, fairer leases, and local regulatory policies, all of which can build the blueprint for national change.

Great to write some on this and more w/ @taraghuveer.bsky.social in @theprospect.bsky.social

The Mortality Implications of a Unionized Career An emerging literature has documented a wide range of protections and benefits that union membership provides for health and wellbeing. However, this …

Over lifetime, each additional year of union membership reduces the odds of mortality by 1.5%. Effects primarily occur between ages of 41 and 67.

Nice work @tvanheuvelen.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Eviction was a Deadly Risk During the COVID-19 Pandemic While many groups experienced higher-than-normal rates of death during the pandemic, the excess mortality of renters threatened with eviction was ten times higher than that of the general population.

Link to blog: evictionlab.org/eviction-was...

Excess Mortality Associated With Eviction During the Pandemic This cohort study of renters who received eviction filings, similar renters who did not, and the general population across the study area compares rates of exce

Link to JAMA paper: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Record Rent Burdens Batter Low-Income Life More tenants than ever spend half or more of their income for shelter, leaving less for everything else, taking an emotional toll and leaving some without a place to call their own.

As rent burdens hit record highs, we should be considering policies to reduce evictions and guarantee affordable housing as not just housing policy, but as critical health policy: www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/u...

Rep. Watson Coleman Leads 47 Members of Congress in Letter to HUD Secretary Fudge Requesting Information on Efforts to Reduce Evictions Among Vulnerable Groups The Official U.S. Congressional website of Bonnie Watson Coleman

Last Friday, Rep. Watson Coleman led a letter signed by 47 other members of Congress asking HUD to investigate the disparate impact of eviction among classes protected by the Fair Housing Act: watsoncoleman.house.gov/newsroom/pre...

As pandemic-era policies expire, we are today at risk of returning to a normal that has meant not only increased economic struggle and precarity for marginalized renters, but also increased risk of premature death.

Theorizing Pathways Between Eviction Filings and Increased Mortality Risk Evictions have become recognized as important social determinants of individual and community health, largely due to the revelatory work of Desmond in the past

Dr. Jack Tsai provided an insightful editorial on our article, theorizing the mechanisms connecting eviction with increased mortality risk and more: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

This new paper in JAMA adds to this evidence base connecting eviction with increased mortality risk, especially during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Soaring rent prices aren’t just hurting wallets. They’re shortening life spans. High rent burden can lead to chronic stress, neglected medical care and harmful coping behaviors, which deteriorates tenants' health.

In a follow-up @socscimed paper, we showed that rent hikes and evictions were both associated with significant increases in mortality risk prior to the pandemic, conditioning on an extensive set of state, neighborhood, household, and individual characteristics: www.usatoday.com/story/news/h...

The Americans Most Threatened by Eviction: Young Children About a quarter of Black babies and toddlers in rental households face the threat of eviction in a typical year, a new study says, and all children are disproportionately at risk.

In a previous @PNASNews paper, we described our process of linking eviction court records to administrative data, using these linked data to show who is threatened with eviction each year: www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/u...

We don’t find anything to suggest that our excess mortality results are the product of selection bias from shifting underlying mortality profiles in the population filed against or changing types of eviction activity during the pandemic. Still, it’s difficult to know.

This study has several limitations. Most importantly, it’s possible that instead of increasing mortality risk for threatened renters, the pandemic induced policies that selected for a much more vulnerable group being threatened by eviction.

Total filings were reduced by around half during this period, in large part driven by the eviction moratoria. Still, many renters faced the threat of eviction over this period, especially around ages 25-50.