For the last 12 years I have been working to end homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area. During that time, which has included providing front-line outreach in some of our nation’s largest encampments, managing a growing nonprofit, and serving in an executive leadership role in local government, I have…

I was born in 1986. Millennials like me — Americans born between approximately 1980 and 1996 — have never known a United States without homelessness. …

In 2016, I started working in local government in San Rafael, a medium-sized city located in Marin County, CA (the suburban community immediately north of the Golden Gate Bridge). A few years into that position, local housing advocates began demanding that the City and County create a permanent homeless shelter. …

One of the most powerful insights from systems thinking is that system components (goals, feedback loops, flows) tend to configure themselves in predictable ways. These regular patterns are called “system archetypes.” When you familiarize yourself with these archetypes, it becomes clear that many of society’s biggest challenges are just different…

We are surrounded by systems. From schools to traffic to government agencies, systems are interconnected sets of people/things/ideas that are organized in a way that achieves something. Some systems, such as a bathtub, are quite simple. Others, like the global financial system, are extremely complex. …

A system is an interconnected set of people/things/ideas that is organized in a way that achieves something. We are surrounded by systems: our digestive systems, our bodies overall, schools, our democracy, international trade, a forest ecosystem, global climate. When systems stop working, there are a handful of predictable ways in…

Despite growing up in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, it took living in the San Francisco Bay Area to understand the deep-seated, systemic nature of racism in America’s housing system. Housing isn’t the sexiest realm of public policy, but it is the cornerstone of countless other systems…

When we hear the word “addiction”, we often imagine drug or alcohol abuse. While substance abuse disorders are absolutely examples of addiction, addiction is also a systemic pattern that appears in many different contexts and settings. …

I’ve written dozens of articles about the power of systems thinking and its applicability to homelessness. To be clear, I am 100% committed to the idea that homelessness is a complex system, and it requires systemic solutions. And at the same time, while I know this to be true intellectually…