Interim Director
Vermont Zoning Atlas
Easthampton, Massachusetts
An attorney trained at the University of Michigan Law School, Yoshi Bird has over two decades' experience working on housing and homelessness issues in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont. She has previously served as Vice President of Compliance and Quality Assurance at the Center for Human Development a $100 million human services agency providing the largest network of family shelter units in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Since 2006, Ms. Bird has worked at every level of the homelessness services delivery system, from direct service to compliance officer to executive management, serving diverse populations, including families, individuals, Veterans, and survivors of domestic and sexual violence, including human trafficking.
In 2021, Ms. Bird returned to the University of Vermont to pursue a PhD in Complex Systems and Data Science, where she learned of the National Zoning Atlas effort at the 2022 Vermont Statewide Housing Conference. She now serves as Project Manager overseeing the state-wide effort to develop a dynamic, interactive, web-based visualization of Vermont's zoning regulation distributions.
Ms. Bird's current research interests include computational linguistics approaches to proxy measurement of local homelessness rates using social media data, the quantitative analysis of the impact of chronicity on household outcomes and system flow within the homelessness services system, and the impact of zoning on the affirmative furtherance of fair housing for households exiting homelessness with tenant based rental assistance.
Saturday, April 1, 2023
3:30 PM – 4:30 PM CDT