Unpacking the Discourse on Youth Pathways into and out of Homelessness: Implications for Research Scholarship and Policy Interventions Youth homelessness in Canada
Ahmad Bonakdar (2024)
Youth homelessness presents a complex and persistent challenge worldwide, particularly affecting young adults between 16 and 24 years of age in the US and Canada. This population faces elevated risks of exploitation, victimization, and various health issues upon detachment from familial support structures. Understanding the multi-faceted nature of youth homelessness requires the consideration of individual, structural, and systemic factors within the socio-ecological model. Historically, when examining youth homelessness, traditional methods have concentrated either on individual factors contributing to homelessness or on broader structural issues within society. The emergence of the new orthodoxy attempted to bridge the apparent gap between individual- and structural-level factors by considering both to be equally significant, but it faced skepticism for its theoretical framework. In response, the “pathways” approach gained traction, emphasizing the subjective experiences and agency of youth experiencing homelessness. Departing from conventional epidemiological models, the pathways approach views homelessness as a dynamic process intertwined with individual life contexts. This paper navigates the scholarly discourse on youth homelessness and examines the distinct characteristics of the pathways approach. By exploring its implications for research and policy, this study contributes to a nuanced understanding of youth homelessness and informs future prevention-focused interventions.
Homelessness and the Manifestation of Social and Geographic Inequities: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic
Ahmad Bonakdar (2024)
The long-standing presence of structural-level factors that contribute to homelessness, such as poverty, unemployment, widening income disparities, colonialism, discrimination, and a shortage of affordable housing, has significantly perpetuated cycles of inequity for individuals experiencing homelessness. Recognizing homelessness as a manifestation of systemic inequi- ties allows scholars and practitioners to explore how the intricate interplay of social and geographic disparities can generate and exacerbate homelessness.
This article stems from concerns raised during the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlighted the highly visible and extensive nature of homelessness. These issues, in part, arose due to an ill-prepared system that failed to adequately address the needs of individuals experiencing homelessness. I begin this article by briefly exploring the conceptual lineage of social equity and geographic equity, focusing on discourses that examine the normative underpinnings of these two concepts, with a particular emphasis on the notion of fairness as a critical aspect of equity. In light of the pandemic’s onset, I examine how geographic equity does not stand in contrast to social equity but rather provides a complementary framework that allows for the expansion of the concept of equity to address the nexus of social class and spatial structures. I conclude this article by drawing attention to the implications of such examination for the homeless-serving sector and what lessons we can learn from the pandemic to better equip ourselves to respond to homelessness in the face of future crises.
Navigating Pathways into Youth Homelessness: Integrating Research into Policy Interventions
Ahmad Bonakdar & Stephen Gaetz (2024)
Youth homelessness has become a complex social issue in Canada, with multifaceted implications for individuals, communities, and society as a whole. In response, mainstream research has focused on understanding the underlying causes of youth homelessness to identify optimal policy interventions that aim to prevent youth from experiencing homelessness and improve their wellbeing.
A Roof Over Your Head Is Not a Home: Youth homelessness in Canada
Cora MacDonald, Jacqueline Sohn, Ahmad Bonakdar, & Carrie Traher (2023)
This chapter explores youth homelessness in Canada, shedding light on the often-overlooked experiences of grief and loss young people live through. While homelessness among youth has become a pressing social issue, with an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 young people experiencing homelessness each year, the emotional toll it exacts remains poorly understood. This chapter seeks to address this gap by examining the nuanced challenges of grief and loss within the lives of young people experiencing homelessness. Drawing upon empirical research and the narratives of researchers working in the field of youth homelessness, this edited dialogue uncovers the layers of personal loss and adversity that young people face. From leaving unsafe family environments to enduring abuse, involvement with child protection services, victimization, and challenges in education, the reasons behind youth homelessness are numerous. Moreover, the transient nature of homelessness compounds the losses experienced, leading to the absence of stable homes, friendships, educational opportunities, and connections to family and community. Delving into these themes provides a deeper understanding of the emotional impact of youth homelessness, highlights the losses, and emphasizes the importance of supportive interventions and policies. The chapter also explores efforts to prevent youth homelessness and proposes practical steps for organizations and individuals to support youth experiencing homelessness on their path to healing and finding a sense of purpose.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Housing First for Youth Intervention for Youth Experiencing Homelessness in Canada: Protocol for a Multisite, Mixed Methods Randomized Controlled Trial
Stephen Gaetz, Ahmad Bonakdar, John Ecker, Cora MacDonald, Sophia Ilyniak, Ashley Ward, Lauren Kimura, Aranie Vijayaratnam, & Emmanuel Banchani (2023)
Emerging evidence at the international level suggests that the Housing First approach could improve the housing stability of young people experiencing homelessness. However, there is a dearth of literature in Canada on whether the Housing First intervention for young people experiencing homelessness can improve outcomes including housing stability, health and well-being, and access to complementary supports. Adapted from the original Housing First model, Housing First for Youth (HF4Y) was developed in Canada as a rights-based approach tailored specifically for young people aged 16 to 24 years who are experiencing or are at risk of homelessness.
The Making the Shift Youth Homelessness Social Innovation Lab is testing the effectiveness of the HF4Y intervention in Canada. The objective of this study is to determine whether the HF4Y model results in better participant-level outcomes than treatment-as-usual services for young people experiencing homelessness in 2 urban settings: Ottawa and Toronto, Ontario. Primary outcomes include housing stability, health and well-being, and complementary supports, and secondary outcomes include employment and educational attainment and social inclusion.
The HF4Y study used a multisite, mixed methods, randomized controlled trial research approach for data collection and analysis. Eligible participants included young people aged 16 to 24 years who were experiencing homelessness or housing precarity. The participants were randomly assigned to either the treatment-as-usual group or the housing first intervention group. Survey and interview data in Ottawa and Toronto, Ontario are being collected at multiple time points (3-6 months) over 4 years to capture a range of outcomes. Analytic strategies for quantitative data will include mixed-effects modeling for repeated measures and logistic models. A thematic analysis will be used to analyze qualitative data based on participants’ narratives and life journeys through homelessness. Furthermore, program fidelity evaluations are conducted within each HF4Y program. These evaluations assess how well the intervention aligns with the HF4Y model and identify any areas that may require adjustments or additional support.
Child protection services and youth experiencing homelessness: Findings of the 2019 national youth homelessness survey in Canada
Ahmad Bonakdar, Stephen Gaetz, Emmanuel Banchani, Kaitlin Schwan, Sean A. Kidd, & Bill O’Grady (2023)
Youth leaving or being discharged from child protection services (CPS) are a particularly vulnerable population in Canada that could be at an increased risk of homelessness, which has many adverse consequences including declining physical and mental health, school disengagement, involvement with the justice system, and substance use disorders. In this paper, we examine the extent to which youth accessing homelessness services with a history of involvement with CPS differ from their peers who have not interacted with CPS using the 2019 Without a Home: The National Youth Homelessness Survey—which is by far the largest study ever administered in Canada on youth homelessness (n = 1375). This examination includes a diverse range of life circumstances and outcomes, including quality of life, relationships with friends and family, criminal records, education, and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Furthermore, controlling for demographic characteristics, we present risk factors that are likely to be correlated with youth homelessness, including ACEs and the CPS history, and conclude by discussing policy implications and proposing future research avenues.
Does Housing First for Youth work in Canada? Emerging 24-month findings from Making the Shift Housing First for Youth Demonstration Project
Ahmad Bonakdar, Cora MacDonald, & Stephen Gaetz (2023)
Following the established body of evidence-based research on the Housing First approach, also known as the Pathways model, many studies in Canada have focused on evaluating its effectiveness, particularly among adults experiencing homelessness. Although the national At Home/Chez Soi project, which began in 2008, represented the most extensive randomised controlled trial (RCT) of the Housing First intervention in Canada,6 it is currently uncertain whether the efficacy of the Housing First intervention extends to young adolescents experiencing homelessness with varied racial and socio-demographic backgrounds.
Connecting the dots: Rethinking youth homelessness prevention during the COVID-19 pandemic using an upstream approach in the Canadian context
Karen Naidoo, Ahmad Bonakdar, Jacqueline Sohn, & Stephen Gaetz (2023)
One cross-sector approach to addressing youth homelessness that has gained traction in recent years across Canada is Upstream Canada. As an example of social innovation in action, Upstream Canada is an early preventive approach that offers support to youth aged 12 to 16 years who might be at risk of homelessness and school disengagement. Using a universal screening tool and through the collective efforts of schools and community-based agencies, Upstream Canada focuses on preventing homelessness and early school leaving.
Reflective Practice in Homelessness Research and Practice: Implications for Researchers and Practitioners in the Covid-19 Pandemic Era
Ahmad Bonakdar (2023)
This discussion paper focuses on “reflective practice” as conceptualized by Donald Schön with its particular application in homelessness research and practice. Reflective practices are slowly gaining ground among scholars and practitioners engaged in the homelessness sector since the onset of the pandemic where increasing reliance on tele-mediated communication has transformed the ways in which research and practice take place. This paper starts by revisiting the concept of reflection as propounded by John Dewey and later recalibrated by Donald Schön, followed by a discussion of how two specific reflective practices, namely reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, can be leveraged in homelessness research and practice. The paper concludes by discussing some implications of such practices for researchers and practitioners involved in the homelessness sector in the pandemic era. These implications focus on issues such as housing affordability and affordable housing, case management and support services, and barriers caused by the pandemic to homelessness research.
What Makes for a Creative-friendly Community? Untangling the Location Attributes of Creative Clusters
Tahereh Granpayehvaghei & Ahmad Bonakdar (2022)
Increasing investment in attracting creative clusters has become a quintessentially common practice at the municipal level, particularly in progressive cities, which have long been concerned with economic development. While rationales behind such investments are highly contingent on the potential economic outcomes of creative clusters, a thorough understanding of factors that help foster creative-friendly communities could facilitate municipal decision-making processes. This paper revisits factors relating to the location attributes of creative clusters that have hitherto remained insufficiently explored. Contributing to the development of creative-friendly communities, these factors complement the mainstream literature, which is overly preoccupied with the creative class theory, by addressing soft, cultural features as well as hard, material attributes, including the built environment, creative individuals, the local creative identity, networks and technology, leadership and the economic context, and the consumer market. This paper introduces a framework that incorporates those factors into three phases of creative activity, including idea-generation, production, and circulation/consumption, which operate on different tiers but nonetheless mutually interact. The paper reflects on the policy implications of the framework for local communities at large and concludes by proposing future avenues for research into how to promote creative-friendly communities.
City Planning, Urban Imaginary, and the Branded Space: Untangling the Role of City Plans in Shaping Dallas’s Urban Imaginaries
Ahmad Bonakdar & Ivonne Audirac (2021)
Drawing on notions of the symbolic economy and urban imaginary as an inherent dimension of the neoliberal public sphere, this paper examines historicized city plans and their visions, and develops a framework for understanding the role of city plans in shaping urban imaginaries and branded spaces. The paper claims that future city visions, fundamental to plan-making, help legitimize the power elites’ growth agendas and ambitions to invest in both symbolic and material flagship place-making projects heavily bolstered and publicized by the media. The study examines this claim in the American context, selecting Dallas, Texas as a unique entrepreneurial city overly concerned with its public image characterized by a long-standing legacy of place promotion and plan-making. Using archival research and semi-structured interviews with key informants, this paper finds that city plans’ visions, subservient to the civic elites’ cultural tastes, have been instrumental in rallying public support to materialize place-making projects in accord with the city’s larger preoccupation with “world-class” status showcased and widely promoted by media outlets. This study concludes by reflecting on the subtle yet tangible link between plan-making and urban imaginaries, an overt tendency of ever more commodified urban spaces, and the paradox it poses to city planning.
Opting Out of Transit: How Does Strong Local Autonomy Impact Allocation of Transit Service in a Multi-Jurisdictional Transit Agency? A Historical Case Study Analysis
David Weinreich & Ahmad Bonakdar (2021)
This study examines how the voluntary nature of local membership in transportation agencies can impact resource allocation, drawing on details from a major US transit agency in a state that lets cities opt in or out of transit agency membership. This study finds significant correlation between local opt-outs and transit service using national data. This study examines the impact opt-outs have on transit resource allocation and decision making over time, their effect on transit service over decades, and equity implications, using historical case study analysis from the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system (DART). This study concludes that authorizing legislation allowing local jurisdictions to opt out of transit districts weakens planning capacity, creates a structure making it difficult to allocate scarce transit dollars based on transit need and social equity goals, instead favoring allocation based on satisfying each municipality.
City Branding and the Link to Urban Planning: Theories, Practices, and Challenges
Ahmad Bonakdar & Ivonne Audirac (2020)
Through a critical reading of city branding theories and practices, this article identifies a nexus between city branding and urban planning related to master planning and placemaking. It brings attention to the challenges facing city branding including asymmetrical political processes, social inequity, tokenism, and gentrification. While city branding’s recent turn to participatory approaches unveils a rampant adoption of planning processes repackaged as master planning the place brand strategy, this stream of research and practice remains isolated and disconnected from urban planning theory and ethics. Recognizing this link, the article suggests, could help city branding address its challenges and develop its theoretical basis with more socially responsible and normative underpinnings.
Do Urban Design Qualities Add to Property Values? An Empirical Analysis of the Relationship between Urban Design Qualities and Property Values
Shima Hamidi, Ahmad Bonakdar, Golnaz Keshavarzi, & Reid Ewing (2020)
Urban design qualities have the potential to contribute to the sense of safety, comfort, engagement, and overall neighborhood satisfaction perceived by residents, thus can be related to higher property values. Yet, many of these urban design qualities are highly conceptual, require extensive data collection and are subject to various interpretations. As a result, there is little empirical evidence on how street-level urban design qualities are related to property values. Drawing on Multi-level Modeling, this article employs a highly cited dataset on urban design qualities in New York City to provide a statistical analysis of the direct relationship between these qualities and property values. Controlling for confounding factors, this article identifies “imageability” in the street-level environment as a featured urban design quality with the most statistically significant association with property values. In addition, research findings suggest that “transparency” of building facades are positive predictors of property values, whereas the complexity of the built environment exhibits a negative correlation with property values. Policy implications for planners, urban designers, and developers include designing guidelines and street layouts that encourage memorable civic image and identity. While investing in building facades with greater transparency would yield higher property values, complexity in the urban environment, particularly in neighborhoods seeking investment and attracting capital should be treated with care by all parties involved.
The Relationship between Regional Compactness and Regional Innovation Capacity (RIC): Empirical Evidence from a National Study
Shima Hamidi, Ahoura Zandiatashbar, & Ahmad Bonakdar (2019)
Innovation has become a key driver of economic growth, benefitting from knowledge production and technological advancements. Existing literature on the geography of innovation examines agglomeration economies, density, and the diversity of knowledge intensive firms, yet often overlooks the role of urban form. Generally, compact urban form, as opposed to sprawling regions, offers rich amenities, accessibility to public transit and a higher quality of places. Since such features attract educated millennial, the driving force behind knowledge-based and innovation economy, compact regions could be conducive to the innovation capacity. This study builds on Metropolitan Compactness Index (MCI) and examines the relationship between regional compactness and Regional Innovation Capacity (RIC) in the US. Findings indicate that all three indicators of RIC – the average number of patents, firm innovations, and the number of innovative small firms – are positively associated with MCI, while their relationships were significant in two models. Policy implications suggest that sprawling regions could hinder the innovation capacity, while compact regions could remove the physical barriers to innovation generation through offering high quality places and accessibility to urban amenities. This could facilitate social interactions and enhance social capital, while minimizing poverty and segregation. Investment in compact urban forms, thus, deserves greater attention.
The Quest for Creative Industries: A Multilevel National Study of the Impacts of Urban Form on the Geography of Creative Industries
Tahereh Granpayehvaghei, Ahmad Bonakdar, Ahoura Zandiatashbar, & Shima Hamidi (2019)
Creative industries have gained increasing attention in light of the cultural economy as viable magnets for local and regional economic development. Policy makers thus would benefit from attracting creative industries as potential economic boosters. However, it is hard to target such catalyst industries without better knowledge of the urban form conditions that may influence the location preference of these industries; do creative industries favor compact, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods with transit accessibility to employment? This paper, as one of the first national studies, answers this question using a multilevel modeling approach to control for the socioeconomic and built environment characteristics at both local and regional levels. Factor analysis is used to define a Creative Score, which captures the geography of creative industries using the number of creative firms, employment, the percentage of creative firms, and a creative employment location quotient. The compactness/sprawl index is used at both census tract and metropolitan levels as a proxy for urban form. Accounting for the socioeconomic factors, the findings suggest that, at the neighborhood level, the compactness index is significantly and positively associated with the Creative Score. Every 10% increase in compactness score results in a 0.3% increase in Creative Score at the census tract level. This is partly because compact neighborhoods provide creative industries with a stronger consumer base as a reliable source of development. Compact urban form also serves agglomeration economies by facilitating knowledge exchange, reducing travel time and costs, and giving greater accessibility to destinations by transit.