Portland State Magazine Winter 2019

14 PSU has a nearly six-year history of part- nering with the city of Portland on smart city projects, and now Fink heads the new Digital City Testbed Center. Like the homelessness collaborative, the Center will draw on support from multiple departments across campus, with an emphasis on computer science and engineering. As the name indicates, the center will create testbeds for new applications of sensor technology. They will be located on college, corporate and nonprofit campuses throughout the Pacific Northwest. PERFECTING new technologies is one of the goals, but another is educating the public on their benefits. That’s part of the center’s mission, and it’s a reason why much of the research will be done away from neighbor- hoods where sensor technology will eventually be installed. It will eliminate feelings of intru- sion that residents might have about computer sensors being installed nearby, Fink says. One of the testbeds will be the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where Fink is a visiting professor of urban analytics. There, student projects have spawned startup compa- nies such as Sensible Building Science, which mines the information generated by commonly used WiFi routers to measure building occu- pancy. The more users on a router system, the more people are occupying that building at a given time. That data is used to adjust heating and cooling, saving money and energy. It’s also used to assign janitorial staff. “Having multiple campuses is part of the novelty of the Center,” Fink says. “It lets us do comparative studies in different settings, and also learn from other places that are farther down the path than we are.” The Oregon Museum of Science and Indus- try is the other campus currently involved with the Center. In the future, Fink says Intel, the Oregon Zoo and the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, may join the fold. Collaborators will work on issues such as making transportation and other city services accessible to people with physical limitations, and even helping the Northwest prepare for the long-anticipated Cascadia earthquake. But the possibilities of smart city technologies are virtually limitless. “This is the next step in the evolution of PSU’s connections to the city of Portland,” Fink says. “There’s so much expertise across campus. This is an opportunity for all of us.” The many facets of homelessness PSYCHOLOGY professor Greg Townley, research director of the new Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative, says understanding homelessness requires getting away from the assumptions many people have about the homeless population—that addiction and mental illness are the root causes. It’s much more complicated than that. Other parts of the country have addiction and mental illness rates at least as high as in Portland, but have less of a problem with homelessness. What sets Portland and other West Coast cities apart is the combination of high cost of living, steep increases in home and rental values, and wages that have not kept pace with those costs that, when combined with other factors such as addiction, make it harder to obtain and keep stable housing. Racism is also a factor; a disproportionate number of adults experiencing homelessness are people of color. It affects people of all ages, from millen- nials who were hit with the Great Recession just as they were trying to enter the job market, to baby boomers who, despite a lifetime of working, have found themselves without a safety net. HOMELESSNESS is more than tent cities. It’s people living in their cars or couch surf- ing. It includes the working poor—people who work two or three minimum wage jobs, yet can’t afford rent. It’s people who are just one traumatic event away from losing shelter altogether. And they include students at PSU. Townley’s office is one of many clustered in a part of Cramer Hall that has a central lounge area. It’s not unusual for Townley to come to work and see a student sleeping on one of the couches. These students are routinely asked to move along, but that just means they'll find some other public area to sleep. “There’s a study by researchers at Temple University and the Wisconsin HOPE Lab that shows that 9 to 14 percent of college students nationally are experiencing homelessness,” he says. “We want to do a study of students who are literally homeless and those who are in doubled-up or other precarious housing situations. From that, we want to help support community organizing