In the majority of my work, I ask some variant of the following question: how do human service organizations set the stage more or less successfully for service seekers to overcome difficult life circumstances? The circumstances I am most interested in are homelessness and housing insecurity, deep poverty, and drug addiction.

Frontline Nonprofits and the Management of Homelessness

From budgets for low-income housing programs to laws about public sleeping and camping, the American government regularly pronounces its ideas about what homeless individuals need and deserve. Accordingly, much research focuses on how state-proctored (top-down) ideology drives organizational efforts to manage homelessness. Little scholarship, in comparison, has examined the extent to which ideological pressures percolate outward and upward from frontline homeless service organizations themselves. Combining several types of data, including over 150 interviews with top leaders from frontline nonprofits, representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and hundreds of documents authored by or about such organizations, this project reveals how distinct ideas about what causes homelessness (a deterioration of people’s connections, a deterioration of people’s finances, a bit of both) and how inevitable those causal forces are (wholly, somewhat, not at all) intersect to define organizations’ administrative and programmatic cultures. Tracking organizations’ decision making historically and through the novel coronavirus pandemic, the project argues that those ideas are largely independent of, and robust to, major shifts or ruptures in the American political and economic landscape. It suggests, as a result, that any policy reforms targeting homelessness, although surely important undertakings, likely must be accompanied by reform from within the homelessness management system—for within that system, organizations’ actions are driven by competing sets of ideas about what is being managed and to what ends it is being managed.

Sobriety-Oriented Organizations and Drug Addiction

Another project draws on participant-observation research at a Boston-area nonprofit. I spent the majority of the research period with individuals from a leased-housing program the nonprofit administered, which provided subsidized apartments to individuals who were trying to overcome drug addictions and had histories of homelessness. This project has yielded two papers. One muddies the common logic that ‘negative’ social ties are best avoided or discarded by individuals who are trying to achieve and maintain sobriety. The other illustrates how local institutional norms can undermine the healthful potential of shared, sobriety-oriented settings, depending on how they structure interaction within those spaces.