I am a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies and the Asian Studies Program at Florida International University. My research focuses on homelessness in the US and Japan, exploring how urban marginality is shaped by social conditions operating at multiple levels, from the global to the individual. My first book is Better Must Come: Exiting Homelessness in Two Global Cities (Los Angeles and Tokyo) published by Cornell University Press.
I am currently leading a research project funded by the National Alliance to End Homelessness. The project is entitled “Equitable Pathways from Unsheltered to Housing: A Mixed Methods Participatory Study of Street Outreach Innovations in Miami-Dade County.” We have been collaborating with the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust and numerous community organizations to understand how to create pathways directly into housing that are equitable, efficient, and durable. In February of 2025, we released a policy brief entitled, “Housing First as an Alternative to Criminalization: Preliminary Findings from Interviews with Unsheltered and Formerly Unsheltered Persons in Miami-Dade County.” In May of 2026, we released our second policy brief entitled, “Housing Outcomes and Disparities in Miami-Dade County’s Innovative Street Outreach Programs.”
I am also leading the “US-Japan Service Hub Network,” an intellectual exchange project with scholars and practitioners working in service hubs in the US and Japan. Service hubs are neighborhoods where street homelessness, housing programs, aid efforts, and social movements concentrate. We are completing an interdisciplinary and multivocal volume called From Containment to Community: How Service Hub Neighborhoods Fight Abandonment in the United States and Japan. We argue that, in addition to their negative impacts of planned containment, “skid rows” (yoseba or doyagai in Japanese) can also serve as service hub neighborhoods that sustain life and resistance in the face of displacement through multiple safety nets helping marginalized people meet survival, social, spiritual, and civic needs. This project has been funded by the Japan Foundation.
Here are links to the Neighborhoods of Refuge PhotoVoice digital gallery and film from a collaborative project in Overtown, Miami.
Research article on the Covid-19 pandemic and homelessness
Kaila Witkowski, Matthew D. Marr, Natália Marques da Silva, and John Vertovec (2023). “Safe but Stifled: Assessing the Impact of Space and Place on Risk and Adaptive Response among Shelter Residents During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Health & Place 83.
Opinion essay and research article on public assistance and homelessness
Marr, Matthew D., Hiroshi Goto, and Dennis P. Culhane. “Addressing Homelessness: US Sweeps Versus Japan’s Public Assistance,” Think Global Health, an initiative of the Council on Foreign Relations, October 2, 2025.
Hiroshi Goto, Dennis Culhane, and Matthew D. Marr (2022). “Why Street Homelessness Has Decreased in Japan: A Comparison of Public Assistance in Japan and the U.S.,” European Journal of Homelessness 16:1(81-99).
Research articles on spirituality and homelessness
Matthew D. Marr and Natália Marques da Silva (2022). “Religion’s Roles in Community Integration After Homelessness: Supportive Housing Residents’ Uses of Spiritual Practices amid Trauma, Discrimination, and Stigma,” Housing Studies (early online)
Marr, Matthew D. (2021).“The Ohaka (Grave) Project: Post-secular Social Service Delivery and Necropolitics in San’ya, Tokyo,” Ethnography, 22(1):88-110.
Research articles on service hub neighborhoods
Marr, Matthew D., Rebecca Young, Jacquelyn Johnston, and Karen Mahar (2023). “Spatial Dynamics and Strengths of Service Hubs Addressing Homelessness in Global Miami” in Geerhardt Kornatowski, Toshio Mizuuchi and Taku Sugano (Eds.) Diversities of Urban Inclusivity: Perspectives beyond Gentrification in Developed City-regions. New York, NY: Springer.
Geoff DeVerteuil, Matthew D. Marr, and Johannes Kiener (2022). “More Than Bare-Bones Survival? From the Urban Margins to the Urban Commons,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112(7):2080-2095.
Geoff DeVerteuil, Matthew D. Marr, and Johannes Kiener (2022). “Managing Service Hubs in Miami and Osaka: Between Capacious Commons and Meagre Street-Level Bureaucracy,” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 40(6):1256-1271.
Marr, Matthew D. (2021) “Finding Security in Skid Row: Organizational and Social Ties in Service Hubs of the United States and Japan,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 693(1):301-320.
Marr, Matthew D. (2020). “Gentrification, Machizukuri, and Ontological (In)security: “Bottom Up” Redevelopment and the “Cries” of Residents in Kamagasaki, Osaka,” pp. 291- 313 in Jerome Krase and Judith N. DeSena (Eds.) Gentrification around the World: Gentrifiers and the Displaced. New York, NY: Palgrave.
マー・マシュー (2018).「ジェントリフィケーションと住まいの状況と不安：西成特区構想と地域の変化に対する釜ヶ崎住民の叫び」空間社会地理思想 21:3-14.