Ungoverned and Out of Sight: Urban Politics and America's Homeless Crisis

Chronic homelessness has severe implications for health disparities. Black Americans are four times as likely and Hispanic Americans are two times more likely to experience homelessness compared to white Americans (Fusaro, Levy, and Shaefer 2018). Homelessness contributes to high rates of chronic disease, adverse behavioral health outcomes, increased mortality, and lower rates of educational and job attainment over the life course (Fazel, Geddes, and Kushel 2014). Longer durations of homelessness are associated with high mortality rates, adverse behavioral health outcomes and chronic medical conditions; moreover, persons experiencing chronic homelessness are more likely to remain homeless as length of homelessness increases (Henwood, Byrne, and Scriber 2015; S. Kertesz et al. 2016). Homelessness and chronic-homelessness hit large metropolitan areas especially hard over the past two decades (Bishop et al. 2017a). Unsheltered homelessness, which is primarily long-term homelessness, is increasing again for the first time in ten years (Bishop et al. 2017a). Most research on homelessness focuses on empirical research identifying best practices for solutions to chronic homelessness. However, there is a wide gap in the literature investigating the political processes shaping the processes leading to the development of these best practices. This dissertation seeks to understand the political decision-making processes influencing adoption of best-practice solutions to reduce chronic homelessness. Homelessness is a unique case of a health issue that is governed by an almost entirely decentralized system – both historically and today (Jarpe, Mosley, and Smith 2018). The history of devolution and decentralization in homelessness governance makes it a unique policy space where various actors work in different ways to establish different types of policies that all attempt to manage homelessness to different ends. This dissertation argues that homelessness policy, specifically policies seeking solutions to long-term or chronic homelessness, are governed in four separate and distinct policy arenas: the state, local government, economic elites, and homeless service providers. The separation and conflict between these structural interests in policy goals and policy processes result in increased challenges to establishing and implementing effective solutions to end chronic homelessness. Challenges include limited state-level support such as financial resources and/or administrative burdens due to misaligned policy goals; inequity in political participation that may exclude at-risk populations; and, finally, limited involvement by municipal governments in many cases, which may constrain homeless programming by limiting resources and policymaking authority. This research finds that structural changes incentivizing re-centralization of homelessness governance in conjunction with increased municipal policy capacity may be required to promote coordination across the different policy spaces to overcome collective action problems and develop effective solutions to long-term homelessness.PHDHealth Services Organization & PolicyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153426/1/cwilliso_1.pd

Cities, zoning, and the fragmented response to homelessness

America’s cities are facing a pressing homelessness crisis, with insufficient affordable housing as the chief cause. Local governments are critical policy partners in addressing and ending homelessness through their control over land use policy, what housing gets built in a community, and where it can be built. This policy brief explores the fact that there is little coordination of cities’ homelessness and zoning/land use planning policies.Community Solution

2021 Menino Survey of Mayors

The 2021 Menino Survey of Mayors represents the eighth nationally representative survey of American mayors and is based on interviews with 126 sitting mayors from 39 states. The 2021 Survey explores mayoral views on COVID-19 recovery, equity and small business, closing the racial wealth gap, and housing and homelessness. The second set of findings, released with Community Solutions, delves into homelessness, including mayoral perspectives on roles, challenges, and opportunities for addressing the crisis in their cities. The 2021 Survey continues with the support of Citi and The Rockefeller Foundation.Citi; The Rockefeller Foundation; Community Solution

Policing and the punitive politics of local homelessness policy

Advocates and researchers agree that solutions to homelessness must address the root causes. Communities need to increase access to quality, affordable permanent housing and provide the necessary social and medical services to support unhoused people remaining stably housed. Yet, local governments may not always follow these evidence-based housing policy programs, instead pursuing punitive policing or the criminalization of homelessness. Such policies do not end homelessness and may actually promote cycles of homelessness. This policy brief investigates the involvement of the police in responses to homelessness in cities across the country. The authors amass a wide array of data, including a novel survey of mayors and details of Homeless Outreach Teams from the nation’s 100 largest cities. They find that the police are highly influential in city homelessness policymaking and are frequently involved in implementing homelessness policy.Community Solution

Policing the police : why it is so hard to reform police departments in the United States?

Why has it been so difficult to reform U.S. policing? We provide a theoretical argument that understanding of the entrenched militarisation and accountability problems of U.S. police departments would benefit from using theory in comparative research on civil–military relations. American police forces undermine local democracy by encroaching upon the decision-making powers of city officials in ways that resemble militaries in fragile democracies. Applying historical and contemporary evidence and existing scholarly research on policing, we explain police militarisation was initiated by civilian leaders of city governments to garner governmental legitimacy, and by-proxy police support, in racialised contexts. Trading off city governments’ institutional strength in order to maintain legitimacy produced opportunities for police insubordination or subversion of city government oversight of police activity. Consequently, cities with low public legitimacy and/or weak municipal institutions, faced with high demands by militarised police departments, may be more likely to experience police subversion of democratic accountability over police activity.https://journals.sagepub.com/home/BPIhj2024SociologySDG-16:Peace,justice and strong institution

Ecological countermeasures to prevent pathogen spillover and subsequent pandemics

Substantial global attention is focused on how to reduce the risk of future pandemics. Reducing this risk requires investment in prevention, preparedness, and response. Although preparedness and response have received significant focus, prevention, especially the prevention of zoonotic spillover, remains largely absent from global conversations. This oversight is due in part to the lack of a clear definition of prevention and lack of guidance on how to achieve it. To address this gap, we elucidate the mechanisms linking environmental change and zoonotic spillover using spillover of viruses from bats as a case study. We identify ecological interventions that can disrupt these spillover mechanisms and propose policy frameworks for their implementation. Recognizing that pandemics originate in ecological systems, we advocate for integrating ecological approaches alongside biomedical approaches in a comprehensive and balanced pandemic prevention strategy

Local Supportive Housing Policy by Continuum of Care

A novel and comprehensive cross-sectional dataset (2017) was developed to document and measure municipal supportive housing policy choices and key political factors associated with these choices. The dataset is comprised of 232 municipalities of 354 municipal continuums of care (CoCs) from the HUD 2016 CoC database in order to control for cities directly receiving federal homeless funding. The final sample accounts for 66 percent of all CoCs in the U.S. Municipalities were chosen based on their inclusion in the HUD 2016 Point in Time (PIT) count survey, therefore selecting municipalities with a CoC that are receiving federal funding for homelessness solutions. This is a comprehensive, cross-sectional dataset of municipalities across the United States that includes measures of local homeless policies; measures of local political indicators including local policy conservatism, fragmentation, municipal governmental structure; other relevant social policies (Sanctuary City status, Medicaid expansion, state level supportive housing policy); local demographic characteristics; local economic factors