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Housing First. Now What? Continuity of Care, Deinstitutionalization, and the Evolution of Mental Health Care in New York City
No full textMental health care in New York City has transitioned from institutional settings to a community-based model of care, with supportive housing providers now playing a pivotal role in providing treatment. This shift emphasizes community integration as a pillar of recovery; yet unlike clinical institutions, cities are dynamic, shaped by the volatility of real estate markets. This study argues that housing market instability disrupts the continuity of mental health care, undermining the Housing First model.
The central research question is: How effective is supportive housing in New York at protecting residents from displacement, particularly residents with mental health diagnoses? This study investigates how real estate volatility, housing insecurity, and displacement pressures systematically disrupt the effectiveness of supportive housing and undermine the Housing First model. By integrating ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews with residents, this research offers a comprehensive evaluation of supportive housing, exploring the limitations of the program and the lived experiences of its residents.
Supportive housing sits at the nexus of housing and mental health care, offering a microcosm of New York's psychiatric system. This research draws on the concepts of “niching” and the “life-space network” to understand how supportive housing residents acclimate to their communities. I explore the difficulties residents find in adapting to neighborhoods plagued by displacement and housing insecurity. These conditions ultimately threaten the cohesion between housing and mental health care, undermining continuity of care and jeopardizing the goals of the Housing First model
Digital Nomads and Gentrification in Barcelona and Medellín
No full text“Digital nomads” are remote workers from Western countries living abroad in (often cheaper) cities, and their lifestyle has become trendy since COVID-19 spurred an increase in remote work arrangements— with some reporting a 131% growth in digital nomads since the pandemic (Busuttil, 2024; “2024 Digital Nomads Trends Report,” 2024). However, digital nomads have become the subject of controversy, as their American Dollar-lined pockets have been alleged to make the cities they inhabit more expensive for everyone else.
Locals in Medellín, Mexico City, and Bali have reported sharp increases in housing prices and thus gentrification and displacement as a result of an influx of foreign remote workers on “Digital Nomad Visas.” However, the isolated impact of digital nomads on cities in Europe like Barcelona and Berlin, which have been undergoing touristification for years, is less clear.
This thesis will investigate how digital nomads impact different host cities, comparing Medellín, Colombia, in the Global South with Barcelona, Spain, in the Global North. Are there urban and national economic contexts that stand to benefit more from attracting remote workers, and what policies could potentially mitigate the negative effects of gentrification while maximizing national economic benefits?
This paper thus explores questions of gentrification on local, national, and international scales, as well as how urban and national economies and policies interact, with the goal of arriving at context-specific policy recommendations. Ultimately, digital nomads can accelerate gentrification, impacting Medellín more strongly than Barcelona, but they are not a key cause— policies that deprioritize affordable housing are
A “Car Free” Olympics in Los Angeles? Examining 2028 Olympic Legacy Planning, Transit Expansion, and Mobility Justice in Greater L.A.
No full textThis work is a case study examining the potential short- and long-term impacts of the 2028 Olympics on transit planning in Los Angeles County. It utilizes mapping, historical analysis, and interviews with experts to build an understanding of Los Angeles’s current plans for the 2028 Games as well as trends occurring in the expansion of the county’s rail and bus rapid transit (BRT) network. This transit expansion is analyzed within the framework of Olympic priorities and funding, transit-oriented development, and mobility justice in order to provide conclusions and recommendations.
The study concludes that while there will very likely be short-term transit improvements, mostly involving the procurement of additional buses to provide a sort of temporary bus rapid transit network, little is being done to ensure a lasting transit legacy long after the Olympic Games conclude. Los Angeles’s rail and BRT networks are expanding, though this is due mostly to public funding outside of Olympic priorities, such as Los Angeles’s many sales taxes designed to fund public transportation and other public funding at the federal and state levels.
Recommendations emphasize stronger leadership on and direct funding for Olympic legacy transportation planning, the need for more planning decisions to be made at the regional level, zoning for higher density around transit stations, improving first-and-last-mile connectivity, and an increased focus on suburb-to-suburb transit connections
The Infrastructure of Allegory: Figurations of Housing in African Diasporic Literature and Culture
No full textEverywhere you look, walk, turn on a light, or browse the internet, you rely on infrastructure—the roads, the trains, the buildings, but also the buried plumbing, the gas and electric lines, the cable, the sewers, the money.
My project touches on the figural uses of infrastructure to examine the experiential and symbolic legacies of both public and private housing in the US and Caribbean. Infrastructures are only truly visible when they do not work, break down, or people intentionally disrupt them. It is at these moments of breakdown that the questions as to who must fix, update, or implement them in the first place take on deeply symbolic significance—especially for postcolonial, racialized communities across the African diaspora. For example, the promises of urban renewal—whether in the Cabrini Green projects in Chicago or the bidonvilles around Fort-de-France, Martinique—have historically accompanied the threats of future disinvestment, urban segregation, and destroyed ecologies.
This dissertation engages housing as a symbolic and experiential nexus of multiple categories of infrastructure. It is a site where the symbolic needs of the community, as well as state recognition, meet the domestic/urban needs of running water, heat, electricity, and access to public transit and paved roads. Housing, I argue, is an expressive medium through which Black writers, artists, and architects have spoken to socio-economic imbalance, structural racism, and neo-colonialism.
I look, for instance, at the novels of Paule Marshall as she wrote across the contexts of Brooklyn Brownstones and the industrialization of a fictional Caribbean island in the 1950s and 60s. Then there is Patrick Chamoiseau’s figuration of the geopolitics of language through the confrontation of urban center and periphery in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in his novel Texaco. In the third chapter, I examine Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele’s cinematic intervention in the racial allegories surrounding the Chicago Cabrini Green Projects in the Candyman film franchise
Gravitational wave topics: black hole ringdown and instrumental noise
No full textThis thesis contributes new understanding of gravitational wave (GW) science in the formof more refined data analysis methods, possible observation of new black hole ringdown phenomena, phenomenological modeling of precessing binary black hole (BBH) coalescences, and theoretical characterization of thermal charge carrier noise in semiconductor optics for future GW detectors.
In chapter 1 (published in Ref. [1]), we lay some of the foundations for the analysis of black hole ringdowns in timeseries data. We demonstrate that the posteriors of our analysis can be corrupted if one does not carefully apply data conditioning operations such as downsampling, filtering, and data segment truncation, and we show that sharp lines in the noise power spectral density can necessitate the analysis of unusually long data segments in order to capture the entire signal.
In chapter 2 (published in Ref. [2]), we perform an analysis of an exceptional ringdown, from the GW190521 signal. We raise the possibility that previous analyses of this ringdown may not have fully characterized the signal. We propose a model of this ringdown which may make it the first known signal to demonstrate a previously underappreciated phenomenon, namely the strong excitation of certain quasinormal modes (QNMs) due to binary spin-orbit misalignment.
In chapter 3 (published in Ref. [3]), we theoretically validate our phenomenological model of QNM excitation and binary spin-orbit misalignment which we proposed in our analysis of GW190521. We demonstrate that our model seems to accurately describe numerical relativity (NR) simulations of precessing BBHs, i.e. BBHs with spin-orbit misalignment. We also show how current GW models of precessing binaries may be systematically biased.
In chapter 4 (from Ref. [4]), we expand upon previous theoretical observations of a trend in the amplitudes of overtone QNMs in NR simulations of BBH coalescences. Overtone amplitude ratios in these simulations seem to respect a strict relationship that depends solely on their excitation factors, parameters which are intrinsic to the geometry of the black hole spacetime. We comment on both the theoretical and observational implications of this finding.
In chapter 5 (published in Ref. [5]), we compute the noise power spectrum from refractive index variations induced by thermal fluctuations of charge carrier density in semiconductor optics for future GW interferometer designs. We compare our computation with a similar previous work, and show that our more general approach produces significantly different results. We conclude with a brief discussion of what next steps could be taken to build on our work
Mixed-Initiative Conversational Intelligence in the Era of Large Pre-Trained Models
No full textWith the rise of large pre-trained models, the idea of intelligent conversational agents has quickly gained attention in the public eye. Such conversational agents promise impressive capabilities in a multi-turn interaction setting, whether it be knowledge-grounded question answering, reasoning for code generation, or navigating real-world tasks like restaurant booking. Despite the greatly improved capabilities of agents to perform directed instruction-following tasks, agents built around large pre-trained models have not yet exhibited the ability to navigate mixed-initiative environments. Contrary to single-initiative settings, here an agent must recognize when it is appropriate to execute different actions to redirect the flow of the conversation (e.g. via clarifying questions or argumentative strategies) to maximize the chance of conversational success. This dissertation proposes novel methods to address core issues presenting bottlenecks to the mixed-initiative intelligence of such agents.
This dissertation is structured to address three core challenges. The first section introduces the challenges of multi-turn conversational modeling, as in-domain data can be expensive or infeasible to obtain. We propose a framework for synthesizing large-scale conversational data even for novel tasks by leveraging the instruction-following capabilities of existing large language models. In the section, we discuss the challenges of action planning. Here, we propose a seminal line of work on inference-time strategy optimization by leveraging large language model prompting for search and simulation adapted for Monte-Carlo Tree Search. We then introduce a novel perspective towards action optimization called implicit action recognition, and propose a novel model alignment algorithm called Action-based Contrastive Self-Training.
The final section of this dissertation focuses on the challenges of multimodal user modeling, as modern conversational agents rapidly look to become more ubiquitous by expanding towards all interaction modalities. This work builds on the previous sections' progress towards improved data curation and implicit action recognition. Here, we introduce a novel task for mixed-initiative spoken conversation modeling, as well as a simple yet effective approach to adapt models to different users' speaking patterns.
The methods proposed in this dissertation address tractable real-world challenges and serve as the foundation for further exploration in mixed-initiative conversation modeling
Three Essays on Publicly Funded Pre-kindergarten Policy
No full textThis dissertation comprises three papers that explore the role of public pre-K policies in shaping access to early education, families’ economic well-being, and child development.
The first paper examines whether the income-based preschool enrollment gap narrowed between 1994 and 2023 and identifies the factors contributing to the gap. The second paper evaluates the effects of New York City’s universal pre-K expansion for three-year-old children on maternal employment, household income, and material hardship. The third paper investigates how pre-K attendance predicts children’s cognitive development and educational transitions across developmental stages—early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.
The findings from this dissertation demonstrate the dual role of publicly funded pre-K programs in supporting both parents and children
Architectures of Gender and the American Haunted House
No full textThis dissertation analyzes the relationship between gender and the figure of the architecturally disturbed haunted house in American literature, cinema, and video games from the 1950s to the present. While most scholarship on the literary and cinematic haunted house understands the haunted house as a metaphor for the individual psyche and/or the gendered body, the house is a material structure that is intimately connected to the construction and maintenance of gender, class, race, citizenship, and other concerns that go beyond the limits of a stable, universalizable subject. Drawing on feminist, queer, and trans theories of architecture and space that illustrate how the architecture of the home contributes to the production of gendered subjectivity, this dissertation asks how the architectural disruption of the haunted house interrupts the production of these subjectivities, rendering their mechanisms visible—and potentially breakable.
Through readings of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Roman Polanski’s Apartment trilogy (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant), Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy, this dissertation examines several historically specific forms of domestic architecture—the suburban home, the urban apartment, and the plantation and slave cabin—to interrogate how those architectures differentially subjectivate their inhabitants, and how the experimental forms of these novels, films, and video games offer challenges to that process of subjectivation. Through these structural readings of architectural and literary/cinematic form, “Architectures of Gender” both reveals the deep co-constitutive relationship between gender and the built environment, and illustrates how the disruptive effects of horror propose a challenge to these structures, offering avenues for imagining other ways of living beyond the architectures and genders we have inherited
Authoring the Nation: Revolutions in Literary Property and the Invention of France
No full textThis dissertation explores the contributions of literary authors to discussions about intellectual property in France during the 19th century.
I begin from the premise that early legislation regulating literary property enshrined a vision of the French nation inherited from revolutionary discourse about property and equality before the law.
Next, I examine how two authors (Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo) reject or embrace this legacy in letters and speeches that they produced about literary property. I argue that these interventions can be read as the authors’ efforts to participate in nation-building. Balzac and Hugo arrive at different conclusions about the nature of literary property and subsequently endorse different visions of the French nation and the author’s place in it.
Finally, through close readings of two works of fiction (Notre-Dame de Paris and Illusions perdues), I demonstrate how many of the preoccupations about ownership, genius, collaboration that animate their conceptions of literary property also act as driving forces within their novels