Steven Schmidt

📣 Call for Papers:
Debt Urbanism and the Housing Question

ℹ️ I'm putting together a symposium proposal to The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) with co-editors @sklosterkamp.bsky.social & Mel Nowicki

🗓️ Deadline for abstracts 22 August 2025

🏹 Please spread the word!

New report by @zparolin.bsky.social: Housing costs, especially in high-cost states like California, are a massive driver of poverty.

A few of Zach's key findings ⬇️ 🧵

US Renters Face Storm of Rising Costs A building boom has helped slow rent increases. But affordable apartments remain scarce, and higher energy costs and cuts to housing aid further cloud the forecast.

A full 65% of working-age renters can’t cover non-housing costs after monthly housing payments. @patrickcsisson.bsky.social @bloomberg.com

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

It's publication day for Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing, available in paper & free .epub! It traces a century of struggle over Los Angeles' periphery, culminating in the use of policing to expel and repress Black tenants. Here's a look at its chapters:

🚨 Support Los Angeles immigrant communities 🚨

Please consider donating to one or all of the following orgs:

Immigrant Defenders Law Center: give.immdef.org/donate

LA Jail Support / Bail Fund:
account.venmo.com/u/jailsuppor...

Unión del Barrio:
uniondelbarrio.org/main/support...

Congratulations to the new editors of the ASA journal City & Community @cicojournal.bsky.social: Brian J. McCabe, Georgetown University, and Ann Owens @annowens.bsky.social @usc.edu! Their 3-year term begins January 1, 2026.

California’s Homeowners Insurance Market is a National Bellwether With rebuilding efforts underway in Los Angeles following January’s devastating Palisades and Eaton fires, the scale of damages and recovery needs i

With housing costs far above the national average and increasingly severe wildfires fueled by climate change, California faces the difficult task of meeting both affordability and insurability objectives. Our @stevekoller.bsky.social asks: what brought us here?

www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/califor...

Perceived Fairness of Couples’ Division of Housework: Evidence From a Multi-Factorial Experiment in the United States - Daniela R. Urbina, Daria Tisch, 2025 Although the ratio of women’s to men’s housework hours has declined, women still spend more time than men doing household tasks in most high-income contexts. Th...

New paper with Daria Tisch ‪(@dariatisch.bsky.social‬) on fairness perceptions of housework divisions using a multi-factorial experiment in the U.S., now out in one of my favorite journals––Gender and Society: doi.org/10.1177/0891...

The role of social networks in institutional trust during economic downturns Abstract. Citizens’ trust in institutions is crucial for the proper functioning of societies. While national economic performance is a key predictor of ins

My new paper doi.org/10.1093/esr/... explains that personal networks expose us to different degrees to economic distress, which shapes public opinion (here, institutional trust). Yet institutional trust research has largely overlooked networks. #sociology #netsky

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

Report from @science.org:

• NSF staff told that its 37 divisions are being abolished. Programs within to be drastically reduced.

• Layoffs expected, details via memo Friday 5/9.

• Another round of grant terminations expected. (Already 1400 cancelled ~$1bn)

www.science.org/content/arti...

PUBLICATION DAY! Pick up a copy of Doubled Up to learn more about how families use doubling up as a private safety net and how these arrangements reshape family life.

The biggest project I've worked on for the last chunk of years was just published. It asks, how big are US Black-white lifespan differences?

This might seem like a narrow question. I hope to convince you by the end that there are answers you didn't anticipate. And I hope some of them will move you.

Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...

FYI: The Spencer Foundation, Kapor Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have collaborated to offer $25K rapid response grants.

"This rapid response bridge funding opportunity is for scholars and teams whose grants have recently been cancelled by NSF."

2/4

Call your elected representatives. Talk to local communities.

Tell them why science investments matter, including training for the future of science (STEM ed).

Need some inspiration? See this AWESOME letter from the labor union that represents NSF employees: drive.google.com/file/d/1xtnM...

Comments on Federal Register As population scientists, we are opposed to the reclassification of our expert colleagues in government service to the proposed “Schedule Policy/Career” excepted service category laid out in the propo...

Hey demographers! Leslie Root @lesja.bsky.social and I whipped up comment on the proposed changes exposing our federal colleagues to political interference. Here's our text if you want to submit a public comment, too.
Link to submit your response below.

Research to Advanced Racial and Indigenous Health Equity We seek to build an actionable body of evidence to construct fair systems that determine resource distribution and support health equity. Deadlines: Rapid Response brief proposal 5/28/25; New Research...

Are you a health equity researcher who has lost federal funding for a project?

RWJF’s Evidence for Action is offering Rapid Response grants to support community-centered, social science research disrupted by cuts. ☀️

More details: www.rwjf.org/en/grants/ac...

The Attack on International Students New surveillance and punishment systems are a warning to us all

New, from me: Marco Rubio used to boast that he was banned from China, calling it a totalitarian state.

Now he combines a) new surveillance capabilities to monitor and punish international students, with b) little accountability or due process. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-attack...

I.R.S. Agrees to Share Migrants’ Tax Information with ICE The agreement is a major departure from the Internal Revenue Service’s efforts to gain the trust of migrants and encourage them to file their taxes.

This is a wrongheaded move that will simultaneously sever noncitizens’ relationship to state institutions, threaten the well-being of immigrant families, and deprive Social Security beneficiaries of a tax base that has allowed the program to remain solvent. Shame.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/u...

Congratulations, Benny! 🎉 🎊 Such great news!

The US Capitol Building

In a new letter, AERA and other education research leaders call on Congress to protect the nation’s education data, research infrastructure, and knowledge base, by safeguarding the IES and broader Education Department staff, leadership, and mission. www.aera.net/Portals/38/E...

Five Ways Residential Mobility Has Changed in the Pandemic Era There were important changes in residential household mobility during the pandemic, some of which proved temporary while others persisted into the pos

There were important changes in household mobility during the pandemic, some of which proved temporary while others persisted. @riordanfrost.bsky.social outlines 5 ways in which mobility patterns changed (or didn't) in the pandemic era.

www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/five-wa...

Households Running Out of Emergency Funds - Apollo Academy Data from the Fed shows that households’ ability to come up with $2,000 for an emergency expense within the next...

Households are running out of emergency funds: their ability to come up with $2,000 for an emergency expense is at the lowest level since the survey started in 2015.

www.apolloacademy.com/households-r...

Congratulations!! I’m excited to pick up a copy 🙂

Call for Applications: Fellowship Program for Research on Early Care and Education and Economic Well-being Among Hispanic Children and Families - Hispanic Research Center

Please share this great opportunity for early-career researchers from our colleagues at the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families! Applications are due by 4/18/25. More info here on eligibilty and how to apply: www.hispanicresearchcenter.org/emerging-sch...

Given Chaos, I don’t expect anyone to notice the hearing for head of Federal Housing Finance Agency. But FHFA is one of the most consequential agencies that most folks have never heard of. And chief on its agenda will be full privatization of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac. Here’s why that’s very bad. 1/5

This is such a nice, digestible summary of one of my recent articles! I enjoyed reading the other research briefs, too — thanks @contexts.org! Check it out below!

Meta @meta_nomad Awful day today. I had 2 volumes of the collected work of Hegel in my car and someone broke in and left 2 more. (Photo of car with broken window)

US Housing Department to Shed Half its Workers, Union Chief Says The US Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to discharge 50% of its workforce, the agency’s union president told Bloomberg Law.

The department will cut employees in the offices that enforce civil rights laws, compile data about the housing market, and pay to rebuild communities after disasters.

news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-...

Cities and Their Neighbors: Examining the Rural–Urban Divide on a Local Scale — Urban Affairs Review Kenosha County, Wisconsin held the state's only contested race for District Attorney last year. The community's recent history of protest and violence resurfaced in the campaign as the Republican cand...

New article @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social by @bwitkovsky.bsky.social, "Cities and Their Neighbors," a highly topical analysis of the urban-rural divide in Wisconsin.

urbanaffairsreview.com/uar-archive/...

Another great resource: the Segregation Tracking Project. We built off NCES data to create Longitudinal Imputed School Database. Race/eth and free lunch data for every school in the US 1991-2022. We impute erroneous/missing data but retain original CCD values.

edopportunity.org/segregation/