 So, welcome to TomMeetingTV. We're here today to discuss complex systems and homelessness, or really like, how does change happen and how do we make sure everybody has a place to live? And we're with Yoshi Bird. Tell us a little bit about who you are. We, I saw you on LinkedIn, I saw you on, is it LinkedIn? Probably LinkedIn, yes. It was LinkedIn and there was something that piqued my interest in the sentence about using systems and systems thinking to approach issues around homelessness. Sure, so my history has been entirely in sort of inter-systemic organizing and regional coordination of homelessness systems. And so I've worked in general population homelessness systems, domestic violence and sexual assault specific systems. I've worked in shelter, diversion, permanent supportive housing, like every type of homelessness system or service that exists. I have worked, administered or coordinated at some point in my life, including during the pandemic when we had to move our entire system into hotels and then back again. So for me, the work of homelessness has never been sort of a person-by-person approach, even though every person involved in homelessness or who is currently on house is having a very unique and different personal experience. The work that I've done is primarily been how can we make the system move people through more quickly so that we can achieve a reduction in overall homelessness faster and get people into housing so that they can start to work on the things in their lives that they want to work on instead of having it be imposed by some external singular entity. So I sort of think of people as complex systems too and there's a lot going on in people's lives. There's a lot of priorities that are important to them that may not be important to me. And so when you're trying to help someone, you are number one, you're looking at how can these larger, broader systems support that person and their personal goals and number two, how can you respect that they're a person with incredibly sort of complex motivations and history and background and how can you be sure that you're providing them with the support and resources that they need to meet those goals and to make sense of themselves and where they are in the world and where they want to be. So overall that sounds like pretty mission-driven and you have an internal north star. Do you want to talk a little bit about where that comes from? You know, that's a good question. I'm not sure, but I have always been a person who has had a really strong sense of mission and a really strong sense of wanting to do good in the world and it's definitely been something that made me feel sort of alienated from people in my environment sometimes because for example, if you're running a system that means you can't have a whole lot of friends in the system that you're working with. They're colleagues, they're people that you're trying to design a thing with, design an operation with but you can't necessarily sort of all be sort of like buddies outside of work. So for me, I've always been really sort of what motivates me, what brings me to my work is this passion for changing the world and for making things better for people who have often quite difficult circumstances and so that, yes, that's just how I am. And I think possibly because I was born in Detroit and I was sort of surrounded by and I moved, I want to say I moved to Gross Point Woods when I was in the high school. And so I went from a place where there was significant poverty and segregation and lots of issues that were happening in Detroit and then I went to a very wealthy and affluent community and so I sort of had this perspective of what it was like living on both sides of the divide line and for me, it was very difficult to live in the Gross Point environment after having come from Detroit because it was like, what are people motivated by here? What is it that matters to them? And to me it was the experiences of the people who I grew up with, the experiences of my family, of sort of the working class Detroit community that I came from so that's possibly part of where, I don't know, some of it's just who I am. Well, I mean what you're describing, so sometimes the word system is a big word for a lot of folks. I mean for me, what does that term mean? And when you describe those two living experiences, you're talking about an experiential relationship with two different systems. Yes. Can you just define what is a system? So a system is just something that's comprised of many smaller components and a complex system is one where you might have emergent behavior so you may understand sort of the behavior of the small components of the system. You may know the rules that govern the activity in those systems. You may know sort of what outcomes to expect based on what behavior is happening within that system but once you put all of those pieces together the complex system will develop some sort of behavior that is not predictable. So a system from what I'm, so a system from what I study at UVM for example is a little bit different from like the systems of homelessness but there is still sort of emergent behavior in everything we do, including things like language. And so my study while I've been at UVM has been looking at the use of language to signal homelessness increases or decreases in different areas and you could sort of apply systems thinking to literally anything but sort of that emergent behavior piece is what is important for the complexity part of that definition. Maybe tangential to that but we're using the term homeless and we're talking about language and a new term that's arisen is houseless. Yes. You wanna just talk about that as a language for the audience. Why are we using the word homeless instead of houseless and why do people use those terms differently? Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean language really matters to people and so for me I've always used the word homelessness because I've been in that system for so long and that's kind of the predominant term still even today and it's sort of the term that's used by funders. So you always wanna speak your funders language when you're seeking additional grant funding so I would be using the sort of terms that our funders are propagating. Thankfully now there's a little bit of a shift toward newer language and so we'll begin to see more of what would be a better characterization of the situation which is that a person is not without a home wherever you are, you are home. You are home with your family, you are home with your community but what we really need to do is get people into a house like we need to get them into an apartment. We don't necessarily need to bring them home although to some extent I think some of the language becoming more sanitized or more sort of depoliticized can make people feel less of a emotional connection to it and so that's why I think some people still prefer the word homelessness because it really does invoke some of the stigma and some of the emotion that people feel in their mission toward helping people. So that's been something I should say that throughout my career I've really worked on is how can we find ways to speak across philosophical approaches to this work. Some people, we just need to get people housed because housing first is the policy, it's been shown by data to reduce homelessness and it does and that's all correct but the people who are doing the work on the ground tend to be people who've experienced homelessness or maybe their communities have high rates of homelessness where they live or maybe their families have and so they have an emotional connection to it and to them saying the word unhoused might seem really sort of aseptic or just very like sort of like almost like too woke for them but it's obviously, it's meant to make sort of an important rhetorical point or a data-driven point but it may not mean something or resonate with the real people doing the work so I try to find ways to sort of bridge that divide between people, how can we get everyone speaking similar language or at least having a common understanding even if they don't use the same word. Interesting, thanks for that, it's illuminating so you have this background and you decide to come to UVM to learn more about complex systems and you decide to get involved in a project called the Zoning Atlas, can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, my first year here I was really sort of entrenched in learning things like coding, learning things like statistical inference like very basic information that other people probably learned in undergrad but I haven't been in undergrad for about 20 years so I needed to relearn all of those fundamental concepts and while I was doing that I thought you know I should pick up some kind of project that would be of interest to me and keep my sort of footprint in the housing and homelessness community because that's where I'm probably going to work long term that's where I've had most of my career and that's where I feel the strongest sort of affinity to it so I said why don't I go to the housing conference and my colleague Michael Arnold who works with me in the complex systems lab said there's a housing conference it's a statewide conference that brings together everybody who's anybody in the housing world including the state, including private investors including agencies and so we should just go and check it out and see what's happening I said sure maybe there'll be something on homelessness and I went and even though housing wasn't really my focus most of my career I went and I saw Sarah Bronen speak and she is the director of the National Zoning Atlas and she works out of Cornell University and she did the keynote presentation where she talked about the power of the Zoning Atlas and some of the reform that was made possible in Connecticut because of her work on the Zoning Atlas and because of the work of desegregate Connecticut and all of her colleagues and so it was really inspiring they talked about how important it was to visualize the information that's encoded in our zoning regulations because it really is very dense, it's very opaque it's written for lawyers it's not written for the common person and it's really difficult to get a broad sense of what's happening across a large geospatial large geospatial region when you have to read different zoning codes for all of those different jurisdictions within that region so she's like if you wanna make a policy argument to someone it's so much more powerful to be able to show them here's the parts of here we've illuminated where in Vermont you are allowed to build for family housing by right here's the areas where you're prohibited from doing it here's the areas where you're allowed to have an accessory apartment or a mother-in-law apartment above your garage here's where you're not allowed to and so that kind of visualization was really powerful and it democratized the understanding of zoning regulations it makes it much more possible for somebody who doesn't have the advanced legal training to understand what's happening in their own community and understand what they can do with their own property it also is important in terms of community desegregation climate change resiliency all kinds of different areas of policy are affected by zoning and so I said you know this would be a great project to be involved with I'd love to do it and I just know from having worked in homelessness services and having worked for within sort of the public area that people are exhausted they're overworked and they will all say this is a great idea we totally are on board with the zoning outlets we need this policy tool but and maybe everybody says I can do this piece of it I can do that piece of it but having a person who can coordinate all of those pieces often requires pay and it often requires like specific training or a background or community relationships and nobody has time on top of their full-time jobs to do that too without additional compensation I said you know what I'm a grad student I'm getting paid to be here to do this research why don't I help out and so Michael and I started working with all the different stakeholders and said let's launch this thing let's do what other people need done so that they can put in their piece too and not feel overwhelmed or burdened with this additional sort of like upfront work of developing a tool so there's a national zoning atlas it began in when did it when did the national zoning atlas launch that is a great question I wish I had done my homework and prepared for that so there's a national zoning atlas and there's a variety of states that contribute individual data so do you know how many states are in that national zoning atlas at this point I want to say around like 14 states or so they're trying to get it done nationwide and currently all of the states in New England we are the last state that got involved in the effort but all of the New England states are working on developing their state atlases and there's I'm assuming there's some sort of standardization of data even though zoning data is probably not standardized state to state right so the national zoning atlas developed a standardized methodology so you can do this apples to apples comparison across jurisdictions because two jurisdictions can have completely different language they can have completely different due process requirements so what the national zoning atlas did was that they said okay basically in sort of the most elemental terms you are defining what uses are allowable what dimensional standards are required for buildings in that area and then some other information like what are the you know what are not allowable uses or what are what are sort of the construction materials that might be required or the sort of character of the neighborhood requirements so they said let's take all that information develop standardized approaches to how we catalog that information and what the values would be that describe how a community thinks about that thing and then they published the how to guide which allows different states to then take their their zoning information and sort of map it on to the values that they've identified through the national zoning atlas methodology so that we all have the same terms that we're using the same data points we're collecting so you can theoretically now once Vermont is done compare jurisdictions in Vermont to jurisdictions in Hawaii and well I'm curious why you would want to compare Vermont to Hawaii well I mean in general you'd want to know sort of why what is it that makes something work in one state versus another you might be more apt to look at something like New Hampshire versus Vermont for example because because we have more similar zoning issues we have more similar sort of like geography we have similar communities so it might be a more like sort of immediate comparison that you'd be interested in making but you might also be interested in looking at let's say Hawaii versus Vermont and saying from a resource conservation perspective how have they protected their environmental resources through zoning in a way that is different from how we've done it in Vermont and does that contribute to the way that Hawaii has developed economically or developed sort of their communities has it contributed to their levels of racial integration versus segregation versus how it happens in Vermont so that kind of information is important because you would join it with other data sets like our American Community Survey or the American Housing Survey to say okay we're looking at Vermont and Hawaii they're very different places but we want to know why one has more success in this policy objective than this one does and does it have anything to do with the zoning distribution or is it completely divorced from that so that may be why you're interested yeah and at this point looking at something like the state of Vermont are there zoning rules and regs for all communities yes absolutely okay okay at one point I feel like there wasn't and then there must be a statewide push to have zoning regulations yes so that is why you can use that data talk a little bit more about just the methodology like how are you going about collecting this data and putting into the map and we could actually maybe bring up the map to to look at that walk us through this map sure so what we do is we go to each jurisdiction whether it's a town city village gore and we we first collect the data that's publicly available which is their zoning regulations their official zoning map and then also any geospatial files that they may already have developed most of Vermont has already geospatially mapped its zoning districts so what we'll do is we'll read through the zoning regulations and we'll ask a certain number of questions so I think we have something like you know 45 questions that we ask of each of these districts you may say okay we're in the Burlington regulations and we want to know what are the rules around single family homes duplexes three family homes or four plus family homes where do you where are you required to have a public hearing in order to develop that kind of residential development on your land where is it allowed without any sort of public hearing process where is it prohibited and then we would sort of code that in our database according to those values and then we put in information like minimum parking requirements or maximum height of buildings as well those are sort of more straightforward it's like a number versus a menu of options but you basically are just going to interpret what the code is telling you is sort of the due process and the dimensional requirements for that town and then we join that data with the geospatial file if it exists ensuring that it lines up with the official zoning map so if we're looking at this map right now the orange and the gray and the purple can I mean this is 30 out of 800 districts that we've collected so far right yes so you're in the midst of doing the work is there any story that you would tell from this at this point or is there not enough data well I would like to I would like to defer until we have more data because we've really only done Chittenden County and Addison County and they are they have very complex zoning landscapes and are probably different from a lot of other zoning landscapes throughout Vermont so I'm going to hold on any sort of definitive outcomes until we have a chance to look at more of Vermont I really it's very important to me that we have all of Vermont involved in this I think sometimes people think that there's just a Chittenden County focus to to research and I don't want that to be the case I want to be able to respect that there's a story to be told that is different from place to place and from community to community do you have resistance I've had a couple of people who've written me and said they were concerned for various reasons and I think that one thing that's really important is for people to understand that this data exists whether or not I put it on a map these rules exist whether I put it on a map or not and so it's really agnostic to your personal agenda and this zoning reform is something that actually it matters to people on both sides of the political spectrum there are people who are extremely progressive in San Francisco who are mapping on a zoning atlas so that they can work on community desegregation and you've got people in Montana who are working on a zoning atlas who are very libertarian and very sort of right wing and they have a different agenda that they're bringing to the work but the mapping of the zoning ordinances is not sort of in itself a political act it's what you do with that information that will matter and so I try to engage people it's really important to me that everyone who is is on board with it even if I disagree with you on everything I want you to have a voice I want you to understand that this tool will also help you to meet whatever goal you have and so I just also want to make sure that it's used I don't want to develop something spend hundreds of hours working on it and then it just dies in the vine so yes I've had some resistance but that's fine we can all disagree on policy objectives just let's get this stuff mapped so that you can tell me what you think should be changed and I can tell you what you think I think should be changed and maybe we can come somewhere in the middle you know right now we're just kind of doing our best guess what do we think happens in Vermont nobody knows because nobody wants to read 1600 pages of zoning regulations yeah and and this again may be a left field question but you know one of the things that many communities are grappling right now with is uniform code zoning how does that show itself in a map or in a project like this or not I think that's probably where you have a lot of resistance is people want to say this is my community it doesn't need to be sort of compliant with some uniform code that was developed by somebody in a completely different community that has completely different needs and I hear that like I I understand that people have really really clear intention around wanting their communities to continue to have the same value that they feel that they've had and so you know I think that what we'd like to see through our visualization is how things like the recent land use reform may affect the way that communities zone and sort of the timeline that that happens according to so if we're looking at a time series of how the zoning data develops over time we'll have a sense of how s100 sort of rolls out over time and its impact on community zoning but you know there are some people are not going to agree with sort of like wide-scale reform for a specific purpose and they may want more sort of localized localized zoning authority and that's completely understandable and this map can help you to sort of make arguments to that effect too if that's what's important to you s100 legislation that just passed in vermont can you let folks know what that is sure so vermont has had a historic year in terms of land use reform there was a there was a land use act that had not been sort of revised or revisited in almost half a century and so this is a change that has made in theory is is attempting to make the development of affordable housing a lot more accessible to people and able to happen more quickly and so we're sort of keeping an eye on that and seeing what happens and how it plays out one of the things you can do with this map will be to to sort of overlay it with development of affordable housing so you can see does the promise of zoning reform lead to actual increases in the amount of affordable housing in a district and so we'll be able to sort of map that over time and see it what is the timescale that you're expecting when you're saying over time i mean the last number that i heard and this is you know completely through the grapevine is that we lost at least 4 000 homes houses shelters during the flood and that was on top of what people are considering a housing crisis in vermont what's the timescale of something like this to be part of affecting change and i guess the deeper question is where does change happen in our communities is it happening on this like intense policy level is it happening through activists who is it happening through legislation where is change happening from your experience i think the answer to that question is yes it happens in all of those places and what's important about these kinds of policy tools and the academy particularly because i'm in the academy now um is that it can't just be people who have lived in the academy their whole life it can't just be policymakers who've worked out of the state house their whole career you've got to have everybody involved and so that's what's really important to me in terms of this project is that the uh that there's knowledge co-creation amongst lots of a diversity of stakeholders with the diversity of opinions and a diversity of agendas and so i'm coming in as a person who's worked in homelessness my entire life and that's what really matters to me i'm interested in how zoning may prevent or facilitate the uh further the affirmative furtherance of fair housing which is a policy objective of HUD that's something that's important to me you know where affirmative furtherance of fair housing what a great term yes it's really meant to like when i was working in homelessness one of our our sort of contract requirements is that you have to try to place households that are unhoused in communities that have higher opportunities or communities that are better resourced you can't just keep placing people in the same communities that you know we've always placed people in out of the shelters um for the past like 50 or 100 years but it becomes really difficult if you can't find housing in higher uh higher opportunity communities because the zoning prevents people from building for family housing for example and so that's sort of the bread and butter of our world that's where we tend to place people because that's where vouchers will work that's maybe where landlords have more of an ability to absorb some risk in terms of like the rent and um and and sort of people who are just getting back on their feet so so i've lost track of what the question was well we're change it's we're change happens and also what's the time scale yes this project so the time scale for us is that we really like to complete the first iteration of the zoning atlas this year this academic year and we're working on Bennington and Rutland County is next and for me i think that that knowledge and sort of and change comes from everyone working together in the community putting aside their differences and saying what can we do to develop tools that will give us informations that we can make informed decisions not just have some talking points on a tv where somebody tells you what to think but let's all look together at what the zoning actually says and where where it's actually affecting us and how in a way that is accessible to people who do not have necessarily a legal background or you know aren't legislators but are just everyday people i want to know can i make can i build an apartment on my house so that my mother can come live with me or so that you know i can increase the income from my household because i'm disabled and i can't work full time so can i add that apartment i have no idea i'd have to go read the regulations or maybe consult with someone in city council and hope that they give me the right answer this will give me another tool to be able to understand that yeah and to be clear the images that we're looking at are ones that you shared with us but we can't can we go we can't yet go as civilians and look at that data yeah currently what we're working on is the national zoning atlas is building out like five or six states and then they're going to roll it out and sort of publish it um their national results we're developing our mapping information inside of their tool and then i can deliver it to the state and the state could visualize it on the vermont's planning atlas which is its own sort of atlas that captures other information like where are the downtown district boundaries uh where do we have middle or low income communities you can see that at um you can just google vermont planning atlas and we're going to put that in as a layer there so that will be publicly available anytime i'm waiting on just feedback from the zoning planners at each of the um cities to make sure that we've gotten our information correct and then we can upload that anytime and it may be kind of a detailed question but will this atlas then this atlas will then live with the national zoning atlas and who will maintain it over time that's a great question yes we would love to know that too we're working on trying to identify the right stakeholder to continue it i've already sought some funding through HUD and we've already talked to a number of different universities and different um private agencies in the community we're trying to work out what's the best way to maintain it long term so that is not that is not a settled question that's one that we're still looking at because there's not a body that's responsible overall for vermont zoning or housing in that way right it happens on a case a municipal by municipal level right right currently there's sort of a shared responsibility model in terms of updating state information they've got a data warehouse where everyone in the state every jurisdiction updates it periodically with their zoning regulations they have the geo data portal where you can also upload your geo shape files for all of your zoning district so everybody kind of does it at the municipality level and if they don't have people in their they don't have like paid or professional planning staff then the regional planning commissions can take that on so there is kind of a workflow for how information that is locally locally governed gets kind of accessible at the state level so we would probably just sort of add this into their workflow or find an entity that could kind of continue this going forward i would love it if it was a university i think there's a really easy structure in place to sort of continue that work and to the benefit of the people doing the work at a lower cost than it would be to farm it out to a state agency but we'll see we'll see what ends up happening and that is in line with evm's mission as a land grant university to to meet those goals well yesh this is really fascinating you obviously have a wide and expansive that's the word both those words mean the same thing expansive brain and a deep heart so i appreciate you sharing with us today and thank you all for watching i hope this has been interesting and illuminating about how we affect issues that mean something to us through all these various means so thanks for watching town meeting tv and we will bring you more