The politics of shelter is arguably one of the most crucial and contentious issues confronting many of America’s largest metropolitan areas. In particular, the Bay Area’s homeless crisis is one of the worst in the nation: the Bay Area has the third largest population of people experiencing homelessness (28,200) in the U.S., and shelters a smaller proportion of its homeless (33 percent) than any metropolitan area in the U.S. besides Los Angeles (25 percent), according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

Homelessness speaks not only to the questions of housing costs, patterns of eviction, and how best to provide low-cost housing, but to a much wider set of issues pertaining to the diverse communities of people living on the streets, the forces driving the continual creation of a large homeless classes, and the most effective way to provide the varied services required by those in need. From building tiny homes to establishing job placement services, Bay Area cities have tried a variety of solutions to tackle this challenge, but the rate at which people are housed is typically exceeded by the rate at which people are added to the homeless population.

What are the institutional barriers contributing to homelessness in California, and what can be done to alleviate them? What are the consequences of the criminalization of the homeless and what are their rights and civil liberties? This online Matrix On Point panel discussion will explore the Bay Area’s housing crisis and homelessness by drawing upon the insights of researchers, advocates and  activists and medical practitioners.

About the Speakers

Thomas Fuller is the San Francisco bureau chief for The New York Times. He has spent the past two decades in postings abroad for The Times and The International Herald Tribune in Europe and most recently in Southeast Asia. He covered military coups in Thailand, the demise of dictatorship in Myanmar and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s transition from political prisoner to politician, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the expansion of the European Union into Eastern Europe, rioting in French cities, the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, choking forest fires in Borneo and the legacy of war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. In December 2019, he wrote a profile about a homeless encampment in Oakland that brought global attention to Bay Area homelessness.

Christopher Herring: Chris Herring is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University. Herring earned his PhD in Sociology at the University of California Berkeley, where he was affiliated with the Global Metropolitan Studies Program and Center for Ethnographic Research and taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Poverty, Urban Sociology, Social Theory, Qualitative Methods, and Pedagogy. His research focuses on poverty, housing, and homelessness in US cities. Chris' research, writing, and teaching embraces the ideals of public sociology. He has collaborated on three major studies and publications with the National Coalition on Homelessness and San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, the latter where he continues to organize as a member of their Human Rights Workgroup. He has also collaborated on research with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, the Western Regional Advocacy Project, and ACORN. Chris regularly consults with think-tanks, county governments, and legal aid groups.

Margot Kushel, MD is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center and the Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations. Her research focuses on reducing the burden of homelessness on health through examining efforts to prevent and end homelessness and mitigating the effects of housing instability on health care outcomes. She uses a variety of research methodologies, with an aim toward informing the development of programs and policies to end homelessness via understanding the complex interactions between health and housing. She has a particular interest in homelessness in older adults and homelessness in medically complicated individuals.

Tomiquia Moss: With more than 20 years of leadership and management experience, Tomiquia is locally and nationally recognized as a dynamic nonprofit and public sector leader with expertise in housing, public policy, and community development. Currently, Ms. Moss serves as the Founder and CEO of All Home, a new organization dedicated to finding regional solutions to the homelessness and housing crisis in the Bay Area. Before leaving to establish All Home, Ms. Moss served as the CEO of Hamilton Families, a San Francisco organization offering emergency, transitional and permanent housing services for families experiencing homelessness. From 2014 to 2017, she served directly under the mayors of both San Francisco and Oakland, most recently as Chief of Staff for Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. Previously, she was the Executive Director of the HOPE SF Initiative, a public housing and neighborhood revitalization effort with the late San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee’s Office. She served as the founding project director of the San Francisco Community Justice Center of the Superior Court of California.

Carolina Reid (moderator): Carolina Reid is an Associate Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning and the Faculty Research Advisor for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Carolina specializes in housing and community development, with a specific focus on access to credit, homeownership and wealth inequality. She has most recently published research on the impact of the foreclosure crisis on low-income and minority communities, the role of the Community Reinvestment Act during the subprime crisis, and the importance of anti-predatory lending laws for consumer protection. Carolina is particularly interested in interdisciplinary research and the integration of qualitative and quantitative methods.

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