Writing

2022

Sandra Smith and Chris Herring. 2022. “The Limits of Ban the Box.” Institute for Labor and Employment Research. University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley

"Ban the Box" policies require employers to remove the box applicants are asked to check on applications if they have a criminal record, and delay background checks until an offer has been made. We surveyed 351 people on probations and interviewed 43 about their experiences. First, we found that only 20% of those surveyed even knew the policy existed. Most who did know, didn't know much, and unsurprisingly the knowledge of the policy varied by education level and race. Second, even if the box was removed (which it wasn't always) respondents were discriminated beyond the job app, asked about records in interviews and having offers revoked after background checks, but not being told why. Like Pager's findings on the box, race matters at each step. Third, a set of findings show that BtB's impacts are highly contingent by race, echoing earlier research done on the employer side (Agan and Starr, Doleac, etc). They find BtB reduces the likelihood that employers call back young Black and Latinx men, when they cant screen for records. Interviewees expressed similar perceptions that BtB benefits whites, and described new proxies for records used by employers especially towards Blacks. We provide several policy recommendations for strengthening BtB, but recognize in certain employment sectors, this will not provide relief for some Black and Latinx applicants. This suggests affirmative steps need to be taken to benefit Black/Latinx job seekers specifically

2021

“Criminalizing Homelessness” in Counterpoints: An Atlas of Displacement and Resistance. With Paul Boden. Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.

With Paul Boden of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, we have a small contribution on mapping the criminalization of homelessness in California and San Francisco. Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance brings together cartography, essays, illustrations, poetry, and more in order to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism. Compiled by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, each chapter reflects different frameworks for understanding the Bay Area’s ongoing urban upheaval, including evictions, indigenous geographies, health and environmental racism, state violence, transportation and infrastructure, migration and relocation, and speculative futures. By weaving these themes together, Counterpoints expands normative urban-studies framings of gentrification to consider more complex, regional, historically grounded, and entangled horizons for understanding the present.

"Complaint-oriented “services”: Shelters as tools for criminalizing homelessness." The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 693.1: 264-283.

This article argues that the expansion of shelter and welfare provisions for the homeless can lead to increased criminalization of homeless people in public spaces. First, I document how repression of people experiencing homelessness by the police in San Francisco neighborhoods increased immediately after the opening of new shelters. Second, I reveal how shelter beds are used as a privileged tool of the police to arrest, cite, and confiscate property of the unhoused, albeit in the guise of sanitary and public health initiatives. I conclude by considering how shelters increasingly function as complaint-oriented “services,” aimed at addressing the interests of residents, businesses, and politicians, rather than the needs of those unhoused.

Compassionate Alternative Response team (CART): A community plan for san francisco. policy report. with Adriana camarena, stella kunkat, jennifer friedenbach, john hamanski, samantha lew, courtney mcdonald, sara shortt, john stiefell.

Recognizing that additional police resources were not sufficiently exiting individuals out of homeslessness, the San Francisco Police Commission unanimously passed a resolution in January of 2020 calling for a more effective response to homelessness to be developed that would eliminate the use of police officers as a first and primary response. A stakeholder group was established, forming a coalition of those impacted by police violence and community based organizations to work in partnership with representatives from the Mayor's office, staff from the Board of Supervisors, and City Agencies. Acknowledging the promise of such a program, the Board of Supervisors placed $2 million in reserve during the latest budget process to seed this yet to be determined program.

Despite being sidelined by COVID-19, the process started in July 2020 with over 50 participants working collectively. City departments and officials, community organizations, mental health consumers, people with lived experience with homelessness, service providers, advocates and academics were encouraged to envision a new way of approaching street crisis. From the start, the group was intentional about centering unhoused individuals in the design of the alternative. 95 unhoused neighbors, ages 18 to 67, were surveyed. Their responses were foundational in establishing a new response model that would eliminate police responses which have exacerbated racial disparities and disproportionately left those who are unhoused, disabled, and experiencing poverty feeling as if they are unwanted and disposable. The new model would be called Compassionate Alternative Response Team (CART). CART reengineers emergency communications, dispatch, and response strategy to address the social and behavioral health needs occurring in public spaces while uplifting the unhoused.

2020

stop the revolving door: a Street level framework for a new system. Community-Based Needs Assessment Study. with Jamie Suki chang, Mark Fleming, Jeniffer friedenbach, Olivia glowackie, chris hanssmann, pike long, samantha lew, Kelsey Ludwig, kate saxton.

In 2018, A ballot proposition to tax .5 percent on annual gross receipts over $50 million with funds earmarked toward helping the homeless passed with 60% of the popular vote in San Francisco. This amounts to more than $300 million additional funds to end homelessness in San Francisco. To guide the spending of this new funding, the Our City Our Home Coalition funded a community-based study to assess the needs of homeless individuals regarding homelessness prevention, shelter, mental health services, and substance use treatment. Together with Dilara Yarbrough of San Francisco State I co-directed the study, which was designed through a series of workgroups with service providers, city officials, advocates, and academics. The survey was carried out by 11 formerly homeless peer researchers, who were fully compensated and given extensive training. Surveys were conducted with 600 currently homeless individuals in San Francisco. In addition, 25 focus groups were held with 4-6 individuals in each. The study asked questions about causes of homelessness, experiences with social services, and what policy improvements and investments homeless San Franciscans felt would be most helpful for resolving their housing precarity.

 For the Good of us all: Addressing the needs of our unhoused neighbors during the covid-19 pandemic. UC Berkeley School of Public Health. with Kamran Abri Lavasani, Haruna Aridomi, Colette Auerswald, Zachary Butzin-Dozier, Grigid Cakouros, Joey Chiang, Brandon Chu, Jack Colford, Hoaian Dang, Sarah Ferrell, Jay Graham, Madeleine Kane, Toshali Katyal, Christine Ma, Dough Martin, Matt Matusiewicz, Sandra McCoy

As medical practitioners, public health professionals, and social scientists who are members of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health Community Action Team, we are committed to bridging the gap between scientific evidence and the community in an effort to ensure the health and wellbeing of people experiencing homelessness (PEH) during the COVID-19 pandemic. In our report, based on a review of a wide range of evidence, we summarize the relevant public health principles and knowledge about SARS-CoV-2 and its associated illness, COVID-19. We then highlight the reasons for the greater rates of illness and mortality of PEH before the pandemic. We link these causes to their higher vulnerability to SARS-CoV-2 infection, severe disease and mortality. We then provide an overview of the latest policy developments in the COVID-19 response to homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area and in six other cities. We conclude with recommendations regarding testing and housing to protect society’s most vulnerable people and the broader communities in which they live from preventable morbidity and mortality

“PERVASIVE PENALITY: HOW THE CRIMINALIZATION OF HOMELESSNESS PERPETUATES POVERTY.”  SOCIAL PROBLEMS. WITH DILARA YARBROUGH AND LISA MARIE ALATORRE.

A growing literature is looking beyond incarceration to understand the extent to which the criminal justice system perpetuates poverty and inequality. This paper examines how anti-homeless laws, the most prominent and rapidly growing subset of quality of life laws in US cities today, produces various forms of police interactions that fall short of arrest, yet have wide-ranging impacts on the urban poor. Because such interactions are largely untracked by the state, and in turn under-scrutinized by scholars, our study provides one of the first assessments of the effects of quality-of-life policing on marginalized groups drawing on a citywide survey of those who have recently experienced homelessness along with 43-in-depth interviews. Our analysis elaborates the mechanisms through which consistent punitive interactions, including move-along orders, citations and destruction of property systematically limit homeless people’s access to services, housing, and jobs, while damaging their health, safety, and well-being. Our findings also suggest that anti-homeless laws and enforcement fail to deliver on their promise of reducing urban disorder, instead creating a spatial churn in which homeless people circulate between neighborhoods and police jurisdictions rather than leaving public space. We argue that these laws and their enforcement, which affected the majority of study participants, constitute a larger process of pervasive penality - consistent punitive interactions with state officials that most often do not result in arrest, but nonetheless exact widespread and deep material and psychological harm. This process not only reproduces homelessness, but also deepens racial, gender, and health inequalities among the urban poor. 

“FIGHTING ANTI-HOMELESS LAWS THROUGH PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH: REFLECTIONS FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO COALITION ON HOMELESSNESS’ CRIMINALIZATION STUDY."  In Press. WITH LISA MARIE ALATORRE, BILAL ALI, JENNIFER FRIEDENBACH, TJ JOHNSTON, AND DILARA YARBROUGH. IN S. GREENBAUM AND P. ZINN (EDS), Collaborating for change: A participatory action research casebook. NEW BRUNSWICK: RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Formed in 1987, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness has been organizing against the criminalization of poverty for over 20 years. In collaboration with sociologists, we conducted a PAR study about the effects of the criminalization of homelessness in San Francisco. This chapter discusses 1) how our participatory research process enhanced the quality of data and worked as a vehicle for organizing 2) how our project impacted the organization, city, and narrative on the criminalization of homelessness and 3) how we confronted assumptions about expertise as we worked to establish homeless people as leaders and experts in the local policy arena.  Our successes, struggles, and process will be useful to other researchers and organizers designing and implementing projects that establish the expertise and leadership of directly affected communities.

“BETWEEN STREET AND SHELTER: HOMELESS SECLUSION AND THE NEUTRALIZATION OF POVERTY.” In CLASS, ETHNICITY, AND STATE IN THE POLARIZED METROPOLIS: PUTTING WACQUANT TO WORK. John FLINT and Ryran POWELL (EDS.). LONDON: PALGRAVE.

On any given night, hundreds of thousands of Americans find themselves without a home and residing either outside on the streets or inside in a shelter. Yet, we know very little about why some go in and others stay out. This article examines the dynamic connection between these two primary spaces of homeless seclusion in the US metropolis through a case study of San Francisco: a city known for both its robust shelter system and large number of unsheltered homeless. The paper draws on an enactive ethnography living alongside those on the streets and in shelters, and an ethnography of the bureaucratic field working alongside policymakers, police officers, social workers, and community groups, to illustrate how state classifications and policies sort, propel, and repel sections of the poor into one space or another. The paper builds on and extends Wacquant’s underutilized conception of socio-spatial seclusion (2010) to elaborate how state regulations of physical space (shelter/street) work in consort to (re)produce distinctions in social space (deserving/undeserving) that both fuels inequality from below, while neutralizing poverty through invisibilization and de-politicization.

“CONCENTRATED POVERTY.” IN THE WILEY-BLACKWELL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES. WILEY-BLACKWELL.

Concentrated poverty refers to a spatial density of socio-economic deprivation. The concept and term is primarily utilized in US policy and scholarship to refer to areas of “extreme” or "high-poverty" defined by the federal census as areas with "40 percent of the tract population living below the federal poverty threshold. Concentrated poverty has taken on multiple conceptual formations, being used as (1) an analytic measure, (2) a designation of territory, and (3) a causal variable in explaining social, health, and economic outcomes.  While initial scholarship on the topic focused on the causes of concentrated poverty, most contemporary urban research focuses on measuring and explaining its effects; the extent of a possible “double burden” imposed on poor families living in extremely poor communities of both being poor and living in a poor community. The concept and related scholarship have become central to spatially targeted and area-based policy interventions, particularly in the field of housing.

“Evicting the Evicted: Zur Kriminalisierung von Obdachlosigkiet. Ein Gespräch mit dem Soziologen Chris Herring” in Technopolis: Urbane Kämpfe in der San Francisco Bay Area. Katja Schwaller (ed). Zurich: Seismo.

A German translation of an interview where I discuss the criminalization of homelessness and the cultural politics of housing and homelessness in San Francisco. Part of an edited volume by Katja Schwaller that features essays and interviews of scholars and activists including Rebecca Solnit, Richard Walker, Rachel Brahinsky, Erin McCelroy, Kathleen Coll, and others.

“Democrats Hate Trumps plan for homelessness. but, it’s their plan too: liberal cities have treated homelessness like a crime for years”

A critique of west coast lawmakers criminalization of homelessness featured in Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook Section and online at PostEverything.

“Interrogating San Francisco’s Approach to Street Homelessness.” Medium Post.

This article was written in response to a city hall hearing I gave expert testimony at concerning the city’s Healthy Streets Operation Center (HSOC). It considers the adequacy of San Francisco’s shelters and the degree to which the city’s treatment of street homelessness is effective and and humane. The blog post received over 1,000 views in the first 48 hours, and then went viral after Billionaire Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce tweeted it.

2018

“Eviction Lab Misses the Mark.” With Gretchen Purser, Lisa Bates, Erin McElroy, Manissa McCleave Maharawal, Daniela Aiello, Pamela Phan, and Terra Graziani. Shelter Force.

There is perhaps no more influential and popular book on poverty and housing at the moment than Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Evicted. The book provides narrative accounts of Desmond’s time following very poor tenants and their landlords through the conditions that lead to, and follow after, evictions in a mobile home park and a poor urban neighborhood in Milwaukee. The book also integrates Desmond’s quantitative analysis of Milwaukee court records of evictions that he collected and other social scientific research to give the stories context, policy analysis, and policy recommendations. In his research, Desmond expressed frustration at the lack of data on evictions, and set about trying to correct it. In May 2018, Desmond released the first national eviction database through his Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Its aim is to help users “discover new facts about how eviction is shaping your community, raising awareness and working toward new solutions.” The project, which allows online users to easily view eviction trends in their neighborhoods and state, has been hailed as “a gift” for housing activists, and received widespread praise from academics, policymakers, and journalists alike.However, the methods the Eviction Lab has used to gather its data, as well as some of the policy assumptions being made based on that data, raise critical questions that have yet to be meaningfully engaged. As housing activists and academics who conduct research on issues of housing and displacement, and who are involved in multiple housing movements across the United States and Canada, we have encountered major problems with Eviction Lab’s practices of big data production, Desmond’s mode of public engagement, and the analysis and solutions offered in Evicted.

2017

“The Roots and Implications of the Trump Election.” CO-Editor with Miranda Smith and Thomas Gilbert. Berkeley Journal of Sociology forum. Vol. 62.

This forum includes critical reflections on the rise of Trump in the political field during the 2016 election in the US and World, including implications for race, class, immigration, gender, politics, culture, media, the economy, and more.

2016

“ENGELS IN THE CRESCENT CITY: REVISITING THE HOUSING QUESTION IN POST-KATRINA NEW ORLEANS” WITH EMILY ROSENMAN. ACME: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR CRITICAL GEOGRAPHIES. IN SPECIAL ISSUE REVISITING ENGELS’ HOUSING QUESTION, T. SLATER, H. LARSEN, A. HANSEN, AND G. MACLEOD (EDS).

Before Hurricane Katrina, renters comprised the majority of New Orleans’ population. The disaster destroyed a disproportionate amount of rental housing, particularly in the affordable sector. Yet the vast majority of reconstruction funding and volunteer labor has gone to homeowners and initiatives to increase homeownership in the city. We explore the legitimation of this bias toward propertied interests through the lens of Engels’ (1872) critical assessment of Proudhonist and bourgeois socialist ‘solutions’ to the housing question of 19th century Britain. We consider three aspects of Engels’ critique that have been crucial to the post-storm policy regime in New Orleans: homeownership framed as a solution to social problems, the shifting of the housing question into legal and moral spheres, and housing ‘solutions’ enacted by the state that ultimately benefit the propertied and moneyed classes. In examining the contemporary housing question of post-Katrina New Orleans, we extend Engels’ evaluation of the legal and moral spheres that come to veil and reproduce urban economic and racial inequalities, while distinguishing the expanded role of the contemporary state in supporting the tenets of an ‘ownership society.’ Our argument explores how neoliberalism disguises state actions that protect and expand property ownership in contemporary capitalism

“LIVING THEORY: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES FOR TEACHING THEORY ETHNOGRAPHICALLY” WITH M. ROSALDO, J. SEIM, AND B. SHESTAKOVSKY. TEACHING SOCIOLOGY.

This article details the principles and practices animating an “ethnographic” method of teaching social theory. As opposed to the traditional “survey” approach that aims to introduce students to the historical breadth of social thought, the primary objective of teaching ethnographically is to cultivate students as participant observers who interpret, adjudicate between, and practice social theories in their everyday lives. Three pedagogical principles are central to this approach, the first laying the groundwork for the two that follow: (a) intensive engagement with manageable portions of text; (b) conversations among theorists; and (c) dialogues between theory and lived experience. Drawing on examples from our experiences as Graduate Student Instructors for a two-semester theory sequence, we offer practical guideposts to sociology instructors interested in integrating “living theory” into their own curricula by clarifying how each principle is put into action in course assignments, classroom discussions and activities, and evaluations of student learning. We conclude by encouraging sociology departments and instructors to consider the potential benefits and drawbacks of offering social theory courses built around in-depth readings of, and conversations between, social theorists and the social world.

“Sheltering those in Need: Architects Confront Homelessness.” Introductory Essay for the 2016 Berkeley Prize Essay Competition. UC Berkeley, College of Environmental Design

The crisis of shelter in the modern metropolis is a social problem that necessarily invokes an architectural response. As co-founder ofArchitecture for Humanity, a non-profit solving design problems in service of the world’s poorest, writes, “If you strip away the ego, the archi-lingo, and the philosophies of design, the sole purpose of architecture is to provide shelter.” Yet all too often, the architecture of basic shelter is left to the poor themselves, who create or adapt ad-hoc temporary structures to guard against the elements, or else to bureaucrats whose designs do not address the needs of the homeless and displaced, but rather the housed and state officials who are often interested in quarantining the poor at the lowest possible cost.

This year’s BERKELEY PRIZE Competition asks students to investigate the sheltering of those in need within their own communities from a different angle, by considering how architects might mitigate the suffering of the displaced by designing for the needs, desires, and interests of the marginalized and supporting efforts to abolish homelessness.  It asks students to consider architecture as a social art, which incorporates the social, political, and humanitarian context of design and its humanitarian possibilities. While the obvious structural solution to this query is the production of housing, until there is political will to realize it, our contemporary moment urgently requires temporary and transitional accommodations that provide more comfort than the pavement.  It is from this liminal zone of dwelling, between street and home, that architects of the 21st century must sadly grapple with as the precarious, floating, and stateless factions of society who have no place to call home continually increase in cities across the globe

2015

“TENT CITY, AMERICA” PLACES JOURNAL. DECEMBER, 2015. 

A synoptic overview of mass homeless encampments in the United States and their relationship to urban economy, politics, and policy from the mid 19th century to the present.

“EVICTING THE EVICTED: FIVE MISLEADING RATIONALES OF HOMELESS CAMP EVICTIONS.” PROGRESSIVE PLANNING. FALL, 2015.

Despite being tolerated long enough by authorities to amass dozens and even hundreds of homeless individuals, most mass homeless encampments in the US are eventually evicted – whereby local police forces along with legions of public work employees forcibly remove those who have already been evicted from the private spaces of the real estate market. Drawing on a comparative analysis of field observations and statements by public officials of evictions in five California cities this brief commentary outlines the five common justifications made by officials for eviction and establishes their fallacy each through the empirical outcomes of “camp clearance.”''

Punishing the Poorest: How the Criminalization of Homelessness Perpetuates Poverty. Policy Report. With Dilara Yarbrough, Lisa Marie alatorre, and the San Francisco coalition on Homelessness.

This report documents and analyzes the impacts of the rising tide of anti-homeless laws in an era of mass incarceration on those experiencing homelessness in San Francisco drawing on findings from a citywide survey of 351 homeless individuals and 43 in-depth interviews carried out by volunteers at the Coalition on Homelessness and supervised by researchers at the UC Berkeley Center on Human Rights.  We also analyze data from public record requests on policy, citations, and arrests received from the San Francisco Police Department, Sheriff ’s Office, Human Services Agency, Probations, and Recreation and Park Department. The report provides an in-depth analysis of each step in the criminalization of homelessness — from interactions with law enforcement, to the issuance and processing of citations, to incarceration and release – and makes evident how criminalization not only fails to reduce homelessness in public space, but also perpetuates homelessness, racial and gender inequality, and poverty.

Street Sheet Articles on the Criminalization of Homelessness

“SAN FRANCISCO: A NATIONAL LEADER IN CRIMINALIZING HOMELESSNESS SINCE 1981”

“MAJORITY OF SAN FRANCISCO’S HOMELESS IMPACTED BY ANTI-HOMELESS LAWS”

“SAN FRANCISCO’S SYSTEM OF MASS CITATION”

“COUNTY JAIL: A PRIMARY SHELTER FOR SAN FRANCISCO’S HOMELESS PEOPLE”

“THE CRAZINESS OF CRIMINALIZATION” 

“THE ROOTS AND IMPLICATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES’ HOMELESS TENT CITIES.” WITH MANUEL LUTZ. CITY, 19 (5).

Since the turn of the 21st century several US cities have witnessed the resurgence of large-scale homeless encampments. This paper explains how and why such encampments emerged during a period of national economic expansion through a comparative study of encampments in Fresno, California and Seattle, Washington. Contrary to the widespread media coverage of tent cities as a consequence of the most recent recession, the paper argues they are instead rooted in penal and welfare urban policies. Precipitating as both protest and containment, durable encampments relieve the fiscal and legitimation crises of criminalization and shelterization for the local state and simultaneously function as preferred safe-grounds to the shelter for homeless people in both cities. Rather than contradicting the existing policies and theories of the ongoing punitive exclusion of marginalized populations, the seclusion of the homeless into large encampments complements its goals of managing marginality across the city.

“The Magical Bum.” State of Things Film Journal.

Over the past two decades, the trope of the magical negro has flourished in the American cinema. This mystical black character is depicted as wiser and spiritually deeper than the white protagonist and he often possesses supernatural or magical powers. His wisdom and powers are then used to save and transform tousled, uncultured, lost, or broken whites into competent, successful, and content people within the context of the American myth of redemption and salvation. Slipping into the ‘90s lineup without much popular notice, the stock character entered into public consciousness only in 2001 when film-maker Spike Lee, addressing college audiences at Washington University and Yale, critiqued this trend as no more than a reincarnation of the same old stereotype of African Americans as the "noble savage" or the "happy slave" that had existed for decades in film and TV. But the magical negro is not only black, he is also often poor - impecunious, uneducated, and in some way outwardly or inwardly disabled either by discrimination, disability, addiction, or social constraint. He is also often stuck in dead-end jobs of the modern day precariat – as bus drivers and janitors, or even worse, prisoners or homeless. This essay explores the trope of the Magical Bum in American Cinema: tracing the caricature’s genealogy, illustrating its key attributes, and interrogating the cultural myths they project.

2014

"THE NEW LOGICS OF HOMELESS SECLUSION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF HOMELESS ENCAMPMENTS IN THE WESTERN UNITED STATES.” CITY AND COMMUNITY, 13(4), 285-309.

Since the late 1990s, scores of American cities have witnessed the re-emergence of large-scale homeless encampments for the first time since the Great Depression. Commonly portrayed as rooted in the national economic downturn and functionally undifferentiated, this paper demonstrates that large-scale encampments are rather shaped by urban policies and serve varied and even contradictory roles in different localities. Drawing on interviews and observations in 12 encampments in eight municipalities, this study reveals four distinctive socio-spatial functions of encampments shaped by administrative strategies of city officials and adaptive strategies of campers. I demonstrate how large-scale encampments paradoxically serve as both tools of containing homeless populations for the local state and preferred safe grounds for those experiencing homelessness. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of homeless seclusion for social analysis and policy, arguing that exclusion and seclusion are two sides of the same coin of the management of marginality in the American city.

“FOUR FALLACIES OF THE JUNGLE EVICTION.” BEYONDCHRON. SAN FRANCISCO. DECEMBER, 2014.

An Op-Ed published in the wake of the eviction of San Jose's largest homeless encampments.

Republished in the Street Spirit, KQED Forum. Cited on Alternet, Truthout, California Planning and Development Report, Planetizen (2014).

 “Struggles for the Public University” Co-editor with Manissa McCleave Maharawal. Forum in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. Vol 59.

Around the world over the past decade students, teachers, parents, employees, and citizens have protested against the privatization of the public university. While the dismantling of public education has often been defined by tuition increases and reductions of government funding amidst fiscal crises, this forum reveals deeper political, cultural, and economic machinations. Comprised of a collection of essays and interviews by students on the front lines, the forum links local struggles with broader forces shaping the conflicts and opportunities on the ground.

2013

“The Housing Question of Disaster Reconstruction:  Rebuilding New Orleans on the Tenants of Ownership Society” In E. Murphy and N. Hourani (eds.), The Housing Question: Tensions, Continuities, and Contingencies in the Modern City. Ashgate Press.

New Orleans’ recovery paradigm has been framed by policy makers and community activists as a bottom-up, citizen-led, and market driven reconstruction. Resonating with this portrayal has been the flurry of criticism by scholars over the neoliberalization of New Orleans (Smith, 2005; Davis, 2006; Peck, 2006; Kelman, 2007) and an impressive output on new theories of disaster capitalism (Klein, 2007; Gunewardena and Schuller, ed. 2008), that have highlighted waves of privatization, tax reductions, welfare cuts, and the withdrawal of the state. However, interrogating the complex, overlapping, and multi-year story of America’s largest post-disaster housing program in its history reveals that New Orleans’ reconstruction is not simply or even primarily a product of new market-based approaches and “roll-back” of the state, but instead being driven by a “roll-out” of state programs privileging the city’s propertied class. Examining post-disaster housing policy at multiple levels of government reveals that the state’s consistent bias towards subsidizing and privileging homeowners has significantly contributed to the uneven geographic development of New Orleans. I argue that this pol icy bias, which conflates victims-rights with property rights, has allowed claims of citizenship to both veil and justify a process to redistribute power from the larger group of renters that faced disproportionate losses to the smaller group of less affected homeowners within the city.

2012

“THE HOMELESS QUESTION OF OCCUPY” WITH ZOLTAN GLUCK. IN OCCUPY!: SCENES FROM OCCUPY AMERICA. ­NEW YORK: VERSO PRESS. 

Zoltan Gluck (CUNY) and I reflect on the politics of homelessness within the Occupy Movements of Oakland, New York City and beyond. We explore the tensions between the housed and unhoused people who ended up occupying public space together during these moments of protest. We argue for a prefigurative politics of inclusion that does not exclude the unhoused who may be merely seeking shelter within protest encampments and the need to articulate this as a critique of the state rather than a problem of the camp.  Published prior to the scores of evictions of occupations across the US and globe by mayors whom justified such evictions not as acts against free-speech and protest, but rather safe and healthy hazards caused by the presence of  "a-political" unhoused people.

Reprinted from The Occupy Gazette. New York: N+1 Publishing. October, 2011.

2011

 “From Berkeley to New York: Rearticulating the Struggle for Education.” with Zoltan Gluck. The Occupy Gazette. New York: N+1 Publishing. November, 2011.

Zoltan Gluck and I examine how Occupy changed the student movements in Berkeley and New York City and how the student movement is shaping the Occupy Movements. With Occupy's attention to the privatization and financialization as connected processes at the heart of neoliberalism student movement discourse in both cities has shifted from a narrow conversations about tuition to a broader one about a system of corporate predation that makes higher education unaffordable, inaccessible, and reliant on unsustainable debt-financing and speculation.

2010

TENT CITIES IN AMERICA: A PACIFIC COAST REPORT. NATIONAL COALITION FOR THE HOMELESS. WASHINGTON DC.

The report profiles 12 large homeless encampments in 8 west coast cities and explains how current tent cities have emerged and operate on a daily basis, how local government authorities have shaped and reacted to encampments, and how community organizing efforts at work within these settlements.

Cited in/on NBC, CBS, Newsweek, The Huffington Post, Atlantic Cities, Daily Telegraph (London), United Nations Newsletter, Education News, Legislative Analysis of California Senate Bill SB608, and dozen of local news reports.