Research

My current research, in collaboration with Unlock NYC, focuses on the experience of housing voucher recipients in combatting source-of-income discrimination. While many cities, including New York, have laws prohibiting landlords from discriminating against housing applicants who will pay using a voucher, the enforcement of these laws remains patchy, and voucher holders still routinely experience denials for apartments that they could easily afford. This prolongs the experience of homelessness, which in NYC already lasts longer than in peer cities.

I am also beginning a research project focused on the role of popular education in higher education service-learning environments, drawing on my own experience and that of colleagues who teach in similar service-learning programs.

In the past I have completed several intertwined research projects, generally focused around homelessness, policing, and urban development in New York City:

• The visuality of homelessness. Homelessness often invokes a visual trope–primarily propogated through photography–that suggests homeless people as either dangerous, indicative of urban blight (and therefore the need for development), or pitiable urban subjects. Picture the Homeless pushes back against this narrative by demonstrating that homeless people themselves can control their visual narrative, and in doing so can push forward policy changes that pinpoint the true cause of homelessness: the commodification of housing and land. My research in this area has resulted in an article in Environment and Planning D on an anti-homeless photography campaign, and a piece co-authored with PTH members on the Society and Space open site.
• Anti-homeless policing and green development. Development and the policing of homelessness share an intimate relationship. Drawing on 311 data and internal police documents, juxtaposed against a spatial analysis of trends and patterns in the city’s green development agenda, I write in Housing Studies about the shift from policing “encampments” to “homeless hotspots” in New York City. In collaboration with my colleague Jessie Speer, I have written on homeless memorists’ theories of this relationship in Capitalism Nature Socialism. In Metropolitics, I discuss the role of green development in homeless “diversion” programs, such as the one currently implemented by New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) in and around the subway system.
• Green Infrastructure and Homelessness. In my dissertation, I focus on a case study of New York City’s plaza program as a prime example of ecological development. Cities such as New York have made a massive turn toward green infrastructure in recent years, from rainwater recycling systems to horticulture-driven plazas and waterfront resilience projects. Through a close ethnographic engagement alongside an engagement with urban political ecology, this ongoing phase of my research aims to fully understand the role that environmental logics and green infrastructures play in the reorganizing of public space in the city, and its impact on the lives of homeless urban dwellers. In a Geography Compass piece written alongside Jennifer L. Rice and Sara Black (both of the University of Georgia), I argue for research that takes seriously housing justice and other seemingly non-environmental movements as a move towards a more curious ethos within urban political ecology.

My research has been generously supported by funding from the Association of American Geographers, the Social Science Research Council, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and the Department of Geography, Environment and Society and College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. I have also received fellowships from BlueRidge Labs, Imagining America, and the University of Minnesota Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center.