SOCIOLOGISTS MAKING A DIFFERENCE
Marco Brydolf-Horwitz is studying how people living unsheltered in downtown Seattle find housing. His dissertation uses ethnographic and archival methods, and focuses on a homeless encampment intervention called JustCARE that closed encampments with the use of harm reduction techniques and temporary shelter in converted hotels.
The JustCARE coalition reveals that although moving into housing is an accomplishable outcome, even for some of the most vulnerable and marginalized people on the street, housing is an ongoing process that takes significant labor and coordination. Some of this labor happens at the regional level, regarding the politics of how the limited number of housing resources within Seattle-King County’s homeless system are distributed.
For the unsheltered, often chronically homeless clients JustCARE worked with, housing also requires considerable face-to-face labor to bring people inside, keep them engaged with services, and then on to housing. Brydolf-Horwitz's dissertation shows that housing does not happen automatically or according to official dictates — it must be produced, by relationships and labor at regional, organizational, and interpersonal levels.