Wishing you a happy new year! During the fall quarter, we expanded our research team and national network and continued progress on multiple research projects. This year we are  continuing to build connections with community partners, collect and analyze data, and have released a major report about shelter use patterns in San Diego County. Please read updates about our team and community-based research initiatives. As we begin the new year, we'd like to thank all of the housing, homelessness, and research partners who continue to support our work. We look forward to working with you in the new year.
 
Sincerely,
Jennifer Nations, PhD - Managing Director
Mirle Rabinowitz Bussell, PhD - Faculty Director
Leslie R. Lewis, PhD, MPH - Director of Education and Community Engagement

New Reports: Shelter Usage Trends and Transportation Challenges for Affordable Housing Residents

In January we released a new report, Passing Through and Staying Put: Emergency Shelter Trajectories in San Diego County, 2018-2023. This report is one in an ongoing series about homelessness service provision and access in San Diego County and details program trajectories for nearly every person who utilized an emergency shelter program in the San Diego Coordinated Entry System (CES) at least once during the period from January 2018 to December 2023. We use Homelessness Management Information System (HMIS) data, provided by the Regional Task Force on Homelessness (RTFH), to show patterns in shelter use and navigation. You can access the report through this link.

The University of California Institute of Transportation Studies published a research report and  policy brief from our project Examining Transportation Access and Cost Burdens for Affordable Housing Residents in San Diego County. For this study, our team surveyed nearly 200 residents of affordable housing to identify the cost and time burdens they faced in getting where they need to go. Alongside our findings, we suggest ways that local San Diego agencies can alleviate time and cost burdens for low-income residents as well as make transportation stops feel more accessible and safe. Find the study publications here.

Meet Our Newest Team Members

This past fall, three new undergraduate researchers and one staff researcher joined our team: Isaiah Davis, Katelyn Chen, Samantha Lee, and Dania Garcia. Isaiah is a 2nd year Urban Studies & Planning major who is assisting with our social media and newsletter and supporting a team to understand how services can improve program outcomes for people with histories of substance use and criminal justice involvement. Katelyn is a 3rd year Urban Studies and Planning major and Environmental Studies minor who is assisting with our website and working to document the availability of support for veterans experiencing homelessness. Samantha is a 3rd year Urban Studies & Planning and Real Estate & Development double major  who is participating in a study of local government coordination to provide homeless services. Finally, Dania is a staff researcher who graduated as an Urban Studies & Planning major in 2024. She is currently supporting Homelessness Hub on our Domestic and Intimate Partner Violence study and works as a policy analyst at the UCSD Design Lab.

GIS/Data Team Updates

The Homelessness Hub GIS/Data Team is managed by Julie Wartell and includes students and postdoctoral fellows. GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems  and is a way to organize, display, and analyze data in order to identify spatial relationships and trends. The GIS team collects, creates, and manages data in order to map and spatially analyze issues related to housing and homelessness. Not all data that we use are spatial data, but when we are able to collect or create spatial data, this can greatly enhance our understanding of issues, problems, and solutions.

The types of data, maps, and analysis that we have used and produced ranges widely – from the shelter system to forced eviction rates, from affordable housing locations to food distribution sites. We have assisted non-profit organizations with collecting spatial data through tools such as Esri’s Survey123. We recently digitized (converting PDF graphics to GIS layers) the Downtown San Diego Partnership counts of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness downtown to easily view and analyze change over time (see the Dashboard here!). The team has contributed data collection and analysis to a water quality research project, maps and analysis to the Shelter Evaluation, and creates and maintains spatial layers for public mapping. Check out the Maps and Data link on our website.

HEART Fellowship

We are approaching the one-year anniversary of the Homelessness-Experienced, Action-Research Training (HEART) Fellowship. The HEART Fellowship is an effort to democratize research processes related to homelessness by upending traditional notions of whose expertise is valued in academia. Our Fellows--Kuni Stearns, Chelees Turner, Frank “Ken” Kensaku Saragosa, Cassandra Ellis, Stella Brown, Dennis Larkin, and Amelia Broadnax—have worked with Leslie Lewis and Stacey Livingstone to build an inclusive, mutually-supportive learning community. Fellows learned about social science research methods and the historical, structural, and cultural roots of mass homelessness. Fellows also shared their experiential perspective of the homelessness services ecosystem in San Diego and have informed many aspects of our team's research practices.

The HEART Fellows have been integrally involved in co-designing research for the Homelessness Hub Service Ecosystem Evaluation, our multi-year study of the shelter and services ecosystem in San Diego County. This includes work on four qualitative studies of homelessness service access among subpopulations of people experiencing homelessness, including domestic/intimate partner violence survivors, veterans, older adults, people with criminal justice involvement. These studies enable us to take “deep dives” into the strengths, vulnerabilities, experiences, and specific barriers faced by these common subgroups.

HEART Fellows Develop and Present Webinar

Alongside the ongoing case study work, the HEART Fellows spent the summer months sharing the impact of  collaborative research. They developed a webinar, lauded and promoted by the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the California Research Bureau, entitled, Advancing Research Justice and Democracy in Homelessness Research: The HEART Fellowship and presented it on September 24, 2024. The team received enthusiastic feedback from an international audience of researchers, public and nonprofit representatives, advocates, and community members.

Homelessness Research Roundtable at National Conference

Two of our team members organized and facilitated a roundtable, "The State of Homelessness Research: Views from Academic Research Centers," at the annual Association of Collegiate Schools Planning conference in Seattle, Washington. Our postdoctoral scholar, Josh Newton, moderated an engaging conversation between our faculty director, Mirle Rabinowitz Bussell, and Gregg Colburn from University of Washington's Homelessness Research Initiative, Marisa Zapata from Portland State University's Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative, and Ryan Finnigan from UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation. We look forward to continuing collaborations with these centers and more to improve research on homelessness and housing!

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