Speakers Jerusalem Demsas, Margot Kushel, Steve Banks and Matthew Desmond present "How to Solve America's Homelessness Crisis"
When: Tuesday, October 22, 2024, 5-6:30 pm
Location: Friend Center 101, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
Margot Kushel, MD is a Professor of Medicine at University of California San Francisco, Division Chief of the Division of Health Equity and Society, and Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations and the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. She is a practicing general internist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of homelessness, with the goal of preventing and ending homelessness and ameliorating the effects of homelessness on health. She is the Principal Investigator of the California State Study of People Experiencing Homelessness (CASPEH) and numerous NIA funded studies on homelessness in older adults.
Jerusalem Demsas is a Staff Writer at The Atlantic where she writes about institutional failure, particularly as it relates to housing and infrastructure in Democratic states and cities, touching on issues of citizen voice, gentrification, and interstate mobility. She has written extensively on housing policy and NIMBY-ism both at The Atlantic and at her previous outlet, Vox, where she co-hosted the politics and policy podcast The Weeds.
Steve Banks served as commissioner of the New York City Department of Social Services (DSS) from 2014 to 2022, overseeing an agency of approximately 16,000 staff with a $12 billion annual budget that served over three million New Yorkers annually. He implemented key programs like the nation's first Right to Counsel for low-income tenants, expanded legal assistance for immigrants, and streamlined access to assistance programs addressing income inequality and homelessness. In 2016, appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, he also led the Department of Homeless Services, working to decrease evictions, reduce family homelessness, close substandard shelters, and expand housing assistance. Prior to his city government service, Steve spent over three decades at the Legal Aid Society in New York City, serving as attorney-in-chief from 2004 to 2014. There, he managed legal operations handling 300,000 cases annually and restored the organization's financial stability.
Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and the principal investigator of The Eviction Lab. He is the author of multiple books, including Poverty, by America (2023) and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. Desmond's research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award.
