Jared N. Schachner
Sociologist of Urban Stratification
Sociologist of Urban Stratification
My research uses 21st-century Los Angeles as an empirical case to examine how transformations in urban social infrastructure and shifts in urban sociodemographics reshape— and often reproduce— inequalities, along the lines of race/ethnicity, class, cognitive skills and socioemotional health.
I take a broad, multilevel view of urban social infrastructure— ranging from digital information systems and broadband Internet access to school enrollment policies, environmental remediation schemes, and housing interventions— and theorize how these infrastructural shifts operate as a key institutional mechanism shaping inequalities in opportunity, particularly among children.
FUNDING
The L.A. County Housing Affordable Housing Solutions Agency has funded a $150K project on which I am PI to begin building a new, comprehensive database of all affordable housing units in the county
Arnold Ventures has funded a two-year $250K project on which I am co-PI, with Jorge de la Roca and Wesley Miller, to identify unpermitted housing units in L.A. and to assess the potential impacts of legalizing them. We are partnering with the East L.A. Community Corporation on this work.
First5 Los Angeles has funded a one-year $90K project on which I am PI to help develop their housing policy agenda, to support families with young children in L.A. County
The Weingart Foundation has funded a two-year $150K project supporting community-engaged research with homelessness services providers, on which I am PI
The National Alliance to End Homelessness and the Conrad R. Hilton Foundation have awarded ~$400K total for two research projects on which I am PI related to age and race inequalities in adults' homelessness experiences. NAEH press release covering this work is here.
The National Science Foundation has funded two three-year research projects (total of ~$1.3M) examining how to conceptualize and measure city- and neighborhood-level disparities in broadband access on which I am a co-PI, with Nicole Marwell and Nick Feamster (University of Chicago).
MEDIA/PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
The American Enterprise Institute's The Report Card podcast interviewed me to discuss a study I led examining the effects of a pandemic-era broadband expansion on school engagement and achievement among 5th-8th graders in Chicago Public Schools (see Annenberg EdWorkingPapers for full paper and Thomas B. Fordham Institute's The Education Gadfly Show feature on this work).
Several local media outlets in Los Angeles covered a study I led revealing that metros with higher levels of public housing exhibit lower levels of unsheltered homelessness (see USC press release, Los Angeles Daily news article, and HPRI working paper).
Top-line findings from a housing/homelessness module of the L.A. Barometer panel survey I helped develop with USC's Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) are now out; findings were covered by the L.A. Times and LAist.
PUBLICATIONS
The Gerontologist just published an article on which I am lead author and selected it for the Editor's Choice Award: "Racial Heterogeneity in Housing First Supports' Effectiveness: Evidence from Los Angeles County" (w/ Steven Schmidt and Gary D. Painter).
An article on which I am lead author, "The Implications of Digital School Quality Information for Neighborhood and School Segregation," (w/ Gary D. Painter, Ann Owens) has been published in a special issue of Urban Studies on digital technology and urban inequality (edited by George Galster and Jan Üblacker).
An article describing a cross-disciplinary effort of which I am a part to integrate linked external data on neighborhoods schools with the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development longitudinal survey has been published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.
My sole-authored article, "Racial Stratification and School Segregation in the Suburbs: Evidence from Los Angeles County," (Social Forces) received Honorable Mention for the ASA Section on Sociology of Education's James C. Coleman Best Article Award.
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Primary Research Affiliate
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Affiliated Researcher
Postdoctoral Scholar/Mansueto Fellow
Ph.D., Sociology & Social Policy
I am currently a Research Scientist at the USC Price School of Public Policy and an affiliated researcher with the UChicago Consortium on School Research and the Los Angeles Education Research Institute.
Before USC, I completed a postdoc at UChicago and a Ph.D. in Sociology & Social Policy at Harvard, where I was also a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy and a Meyer Fellow in the Joint Center for Housing Studies.
My research examines how transformations in urban social infrastructure and shifts in urban sociodemographics reshape— and often reproduce— inequalities, along the lines of race/ethnicity, class, cognitive skills, and socioemotional health.
I take a broad, multilevel view of urban social infrastructure— ranging from digital information systems and broadband access to school enrollment policies, environmental remediation schemes, and housing interventions— and theorize how these infrastructural shifts operate as a key institutional mechanism shaping inequalities in opportunity, particularly among children.
By probing how these shifts alter patterns of residential and school sorting, exposure to risks and resources, and the tempo of cognitive and socioemotional development, my work— at the intersection of urban sociology, stratification, and social policy— develops a novel multiscalar and multigenerational account of how urban inequality evolves across time and place, using 21st-century Los Angeles County as a theoretically strategic case.
My sole- and coauthored work based on this agenda has been published or is forthcoming in Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, Social Forces, Child Development, Journal of Health & Social Behavior, American Educational Research Journal, Urban Studies, Urban Affairs Review, Housing Policy Debate, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, JAMA Network Open, Environment International, The Gerontologist, RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference .
As a Principal Investigator, I have secured nearly $800,000 of external funding from sources that include the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Conrad R. Hilton Foundation, Weingart Foundation, L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency, First5 Los Angeles, the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, and the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. I am Co-Principal Investigator on another $1,000,000+ in external grants, from the National Science Foundation and Arnold Ventures.
Prior to my doctoral studies, I attended Harvard’s Kennedy School, worked at the New York City Department of Education, consulted several national nonprofits, including the United Negro College Fund and National Audubon Society on their social impact strategies, and received a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics & Economics and Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (summa cum laude).
Journal of Health and Social Behavior
For several of my upcoming papers, I will be using Texas A&M University Geoservices support to geocode administrative data to census tracts. See https://geoservices.tamu.edu/Services/ for more details on their services.