The founding director of the Center on Evidence-based Solutions to Homelessness is Dr. Jill Khadduri. Jill is a principal associate in the Social & Economic Policy Division of Abt Associates and a former director of the Policy Development Division of the Office of Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). She has been co-principal investigator for the Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) (together with Dr. Dennis Culhane) since the AHAR started in 2007. She also co-edited Towards Understanding Homelessness, a compendium of papers sponsored by HHS and HUD that documented the research base on homelessness as of 2007.
Her research has focused on the intersection of homelessness and housing assistance, and she is the author of chapters on that subject in Ellen and O’Flaherty, How to House the Homeless (Russell Sage 2010) and in Burnes and DiLeo, eds., Ending Homelessness: Why We Haven’t; How We Can (Lynne Reiner Publishers 2016).
Jill is a senior member of the Abt research teams conducting the Family Options Study, a randomized controlled trial of interventions for homeless families, and a follow-up study that seeks to further understand the rapid re-housing approach to serving people experiencing homelessness. She was principal investigator for a study of how public housing authorities attempt to serve homeless people. She is a senior advisor to the evaluation of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation’s efforts to end chronic homelessness in the Los Angeles region and to the evaluation of the HHS Transitional Living Program for Homeless Youth.
During her years at HUD, Jill was involved in the implementation of the earliest HUD-funded homeless assistance programs. She recently authored a history of HUD, a political and institutional record of the 50-year period following its founding in 1965, based on the literature on housing policies and programs and on interviews with 30 senior-level participant-observers.