Past and Future Speakers

Next Speaker

• 11/22/2024 Arturo Baiocchi, Associate Professor at California State University, Sacramento – Will speak on his experience running the PIT survey and work with government-sanctioned camp in Sacramento.

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Title: TBD
Authors: Arturo Baiocchi
Biography: Dr. Baiocchi is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Work at Sacramento State and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Health Policy, Practice, and Research (CHPRR). His research focuses on vulnerable young adults, mental health, and homelessness. He also teaches course in social welfare policy, homelessness, and community-based research. In the past seven years, Dr. Baiocchi, along with colleagues, have drafted a series of academic publications and community reports on the prevalence and response to homelessness in Sacramento County and across the state (e.g., reports for the CA Dept of Social Services, CA Interagency Council on Homelessness, US Bureau of Justice, Sacramento Continuum of Care, CA Health Foundation). Notably, Dr. Baiocchi was the lead author of the 2022 report “State of Homelessness in Sacramento County,” which highlighted pronounced trends in growing numbers of individuals experiencing homelessness in Sacramento, ongoing racial disparities, as well as the disconnect and marginalization that many individuals living on the street feel toward policies to address homelessness. His research has been highlighted in the Sacramento Bee, the Los Angeles Times, the Chris=an Science Monitor, Kaiser Health News, Capital Public Radio, CalMatters, and other media. In October 2022, Dr. Baiocchi received the Homeless Justice Champion of the Year award from the Sacramento Housing Alliance.

Upcoming Speakers

• 12/06/2024 Devin Collins, PhD Student, in Sociology, UW – collaborative paper with Selen on the Seattle SOE.

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Title: A Prolonged State of Emergency for Homelessness? The 2015 Proclamations in Seattle and the Exercise of Symbolic Power
Authors: Selen Güler and Devin Collins (co-first authors)
Abstract: In fast-growing urban centers, growing homelessness has emerged as a vexing issue confronting local leaders. While poverty governance scholars assert that state actors respond by embracing strategies of punitive containment, overt criminalization may be untenable in the socially progressive cities experiencing some of the highest rates of homelessness in the county. Through an in-depth archival analysis of the 2015 State of Emergency (SOE) on homelessness in Seattle and King County, this study centers a case in which policymakers neither “normalized” homelessness nor openly projected commitments to punishment. Instead, the SOE framed homelessness as a social and economic catastrophe brought about by rapid growth, housing unaffordability, and policy failure. Despite this framing, immediate post-emergency policies remained narrowly focused on punitive, short-term interventions targeting the physical and administrative visibility of homelessness rather than its structural drivers. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of the state, we interpret the SOE and subsequent policies as an exercise of symbolic power stemming from officials’ need to reconcile the fiscal and social contradictions that increasing homelessness presents. By interrogating the disjuncture between official discourse and policy, this study offers new insights on the operation of social control and crisis mitigation in contemporary neoliberal cities.

• 01/24/2025 Jason M. Ward, Codirector, RAND Center on Housing and Homelessness - will speak on ongoing enumeration/survey project on unsheltered homelessness in 3 neighborhoods in LA.
• 01/31/2024 Nathanael Lauster, Associate Professor of Sociology, UBC – will speak on talk about what we see up here via homeless counts, etc, and local experiences, as well as what we get from comparative homeless counts in Vancouver, BC.

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See Dr Lauster's blog post on comparing King County, WA with Vancouver, WA, point-in-time count here.

• 02/07/2025 Ryan M Finnigan, Associate Research Director, Terner Center for Housing Innovation, University of California, Berkeley

• 02/14/2025 Molly Richard, Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University’s Center for Innovation in Social Science – Will speak on doubled-up population.

• 02/21/2025 Whitney Gent, Assistant Professor of Communications at UNL. Will speak on U.S. homelessness rhetoric.

Past Talks

• 11/15/2024 Chris Herring, Assistant Professor, UCLA – Will present a chapter from his forthcoming book “Carewashing criminalization” on the ways liberal cities legitimate ongoing criminalization and the politics of criminalizing poverty more generally.
• 11/01/2024 Gregg Colburn, Associate Professor in Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments, UW – will speak on his book “Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns”

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Gregg Colburn, an associate professor in the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington, will talk about his book Homelessness is a Housing Problem. The book helps us better understand the current homelessness crisis, how we got here as a nation, and how we can do better in the future.

Using rich and detailed data, this groundbreaking book explains why homelessness has become a crisis in America and reveals the structural conditions that underlie it. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, "Homelessness Is a Housing Problem" explores U.S. cities' diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts.

• 10/25/2024 Horacio de la Iglesia, Professor of Biology, UW - Will speak about sleep in people experiencing homelessness.
• 10/18/2024 Andrew Messamore, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UW - “The Effect of Community Organizing on Landlords’ Use of Eviction Filing: Evidence from U.S. Cities”

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Title: The Effect of Community Organizing on Landlords’ Use of Eviction Filing: Evidence from U.S. Cities
Authors: Andrew Messamore
Abstract: Eviction filing rates have declined in many large cities in the United States. Existing scholarship on eviction, which focuses on discrete tenant-landlord relationships, has few explanations for this decline. I consider whether community organizing by nonprofit organizations shapes the social organization of communities and causes landlords to file fewer eviction filings. In cities where tenant and anti-poverty organizing has become common, community-oriented nonprofit organizations advocate for disadvantaged communities and help residents avoid poverty. Community organizing has rarely been studied as a predictor of housing security among low-income tenants, despite studies of how community organizing shapes the use of property in wealthy neighborhoods. I estimate the causal effect of community organizations on eviction filing rates between 2000 and 2016 using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofits and eviction. Evidence from year-to-year models in 75 large cities spanning sixteen years estimate that an addition of ten community nonprofits in a city of 100,000 residents is associated with a ten percent reduction in eviction filing. This effect is comparable to the effect of community organizations on murder and is roughly a third of the association between eviction and concentrated disadvantage.

• 10/04/2024 Brandon Morande, PhD Student in Sociology, UW - Will present relational event models on tent displacement events in REACH data.
• 09/27/2024 Hugo A. Aguas, PhD Student Sociology, UW - California’s Homeless Provider Burnout
• 08/15/2024 Data Science for Social Good Fellows will present on a focus group around people’s experience with a new PIT counting method
• 07/19/2024 Daniel Malone, Executive Director, DESC
• 06/07/2024 Elizabeth Nova, PhD Sociology Student, UW, presenting on Vehicular Living
• 05/17/2024 Aja Sutton, Postdoc Stanford University, presenting on ETS REACH data
• 05/10/2024 Nora VanRees and Alison Smith, Undergraduate UW, presenting on PIT methods
• 05/03/2024 David Coomes, PhD Epidemiology student, UW, presenting on KCPH data
• 04/19/2024 Adam Visokay, PhD Sociology Student, UW, presenting on Verbal Autopsy

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• Agenda