Hello everybody, My name is Kai Wong and I’m a senior at Durham Academy conducting a study on houselessness in Durham. I’m particularly interested in houselessness as it relates to gentrification and affordable housing, and want to learn about actionable solutions that students like me can take. This is my blog where I’ll be posting regular updates to track my progress. For my first post I just thought I’d record some of the work I did over the summer.

Summer reading:

Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies by Leslie Kern

• This book aims to dispel the notion of gentrification as an inevitable/natural force in urbanization, and instead frames it as a phenomenon uniquely driven by humans. The book also seeks to analyze the effects of gentrification through an intersectional lens (race, class, gender, etc.). I found this book super useful, as it encourages me to understand issues of displacement and gentrification through a broader lens not just in terms of what I considered to be their driving forces, but who they affect and how.
• Evicted by Matthew Desmond
  • This book tells different stories of families struggling with eviction from the perspectives of tenants and landlords. It seeks to humanize the struggle for affordable housing and to help readers understand that housing issues aren’t purely an issue of houselessness. With factors such as rising housing costs and lack of protection for tenants, there are many Americans at risk of displacement that aren’t necessarily living on the street. 
• Durham Government Executive Summary on Houselessness
  • This source gave me insight into the specifics of local policy oriented towards houselesness in Durham. It mainly deals with issues of houselessness related to the availability of affordable housing, mental illness, drug use, disability, race, and government funding. While this source was pretty helpful in that it gave me insight into what the city understands to be the most pressing aspects of its houselessness crisis, it was ultimately very disorganized and full of typos. Many graphs often didn’t contain units and certain sections were sometimes left completely blank. But I suppose the fact that the city’s own executive summary is pretty messy and poorly made reveals a lot about the way the city of Durham is currently handling the issue. 
• Other shorter studies:
  • In addition to the longer sources I’ve read, I’ve also read quite a few shorter studies. This has included studies on the effects of incarceration on housing insecurity, the city of Durham’s history of racial displacement, as well as permanent supportive housing developments in Durham.

Interviews:
Towards the end of August I was super privileged to be able to conduct two interviews, both with community organizers working in local mutual aid groups. Unlike much of my prior  research which had focused on policy-based solutions, we mainly discussed everyday actions that citizens like myself can take in building community. This involved simple tasks such as volunteering at mutual aids, or even beginning to  understand the neighborhoods we live in as cohesive communities, creating wider support systems that reduce the sense of isolation many individuals might feel when facing houselessness. This has been super impactful in my research, as it’s opened up an entirely new variety of solutions that are concrete, practical, and accessible.