Jake is an urban and political sociologist, focused on democracy, housing, and changing cities. His current research examines the various causes and consequences of gentrification and displacement - and the relationships between the two.
Jake was previously a Dissertation Fellow with the Institute for Research on Poverty, a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab, and a Research Fellow at Participatory Budgeting Project. He is currently a substitute assistant professor at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. Starting in Fall 2020, he will be a postdoctoral scholar at the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University.
Ph.D. Sociology, 2020
University of Wisconsin - Madison
M.S. Sociology, 2016
University of Wisconsin - Madison
B.A. Sociology, 2009
University of Minnesota
This project examines how displacement and gentrification vary across urban contexts and over time. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) I look at how displacement rates are affected by local contextual factors. With this longitudinal dataset, I additionally explore the effects of displacement on low-income households.
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a process where everyday people come up with ideas for and vote on how to spend public money. By getting people directly involved in issues that affect their community, many hope that this form of participatory democracy will have broader impacts on the civic and political life of communities. In a collaborative project with Carolina Johnson and Sonya Reynolds, we use quasi-experimental methods to test whether people are more likely to vote in regular elections after they participate in PB. To do so, we created a unique dataset that matches participatory budgeting voters in New York City with their state voter files. This provides the full voter history before and after voting in PB.
This project traces pathways of mobility for displaced New York City residents. Using network analysis of the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey. I find that every neighborhood in NYC is both a sender and receiver of displaced people, and that some are displaced from their home, yet find ways to stay in their neighborhood.