Name: Stevie Harris
Social Justice Group: Homelessness in NYC (A)
Date of Fieldwork: January 31, 2024
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Franklin Spurbeck, senior research assistant at Portland Universities
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork:
Franklin Spurbeck works as a senior research assistant at Portland Universities Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative. Franklin’s job is to turn data into a clear and efficient analysis. For example, if 10 people are interviewed about how expensive their rent is Franklin will take their answers and turn them into statistics and graphs regarding past information and future prediction. After Franklin has created new statistics and compared them to other versions of data figuring out the causes and effects of homelessness becomes a lot easier. We asked Franklin some questions about homelessness and its main cause. The three main answers we got were, housing costs, income, and substance abuse. All of these things Franklin believes are the main causes/contributors to the homelessness epidemic. Another big takeaway that we took from our interview was how mental health affects an unhoused person. Specifically how negative stereotypes affect an unhoused person’s mental health. There are certain stereotypes that all homeless people are drug addicts, and that every homeless person wants to kill you and those things are just not true. Even though, yes there are some crazy people out there, they are less than ⅓ of NYCs unhoused population. It’s because of these fake ideas people have been so unempathetic towards the unhoused community. Franklin proved our thesis that New York City’s homeless community is often stereotyped and standardized as a crazy group of individuals all living on the street due to mental institutions closing almost 100 years ago by explaining to us that due to people’s fear and unwillingness to trust, homelessness has become a norm due to no one wanting to disrupt the century long tradition of normalizing the unhoused. If people were able to see past the stereotypes and minority of mentally unstable individuals they would understand that being unhosued is not a self brought curse. It is something you cannot control. If the public opened their hearts up, maybe landlords wouldn’t raise their rent a crazy high amount or an employer would look past the fact that someone didn’t have a home a couple of years ago. If people were able to do that the world would truly be a better place and we know this because of Franklin Spurbeck.
