Down and Out in Los Angeles and Berlin

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright

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Contents

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pp. v-

Preface

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pp. vii-ix

At the time, I had no idea that a bright Saturday morning in October 1993 in Los Angeles would forever change the course of my life. A Fulbright student from Germany studying at the University of Southern California (USC), I was taking a course on...

Acknowledgments

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pp. xi-xiii

Considering that my research project and the attempt to write this story unfolded over the better part of fifteen years, many people were directly or indirectly involved in the research and the making of this book, and they This book and the work that went into it would not have been possible...

Commonly Used Abbreviation

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pp. xv-xvi

1. Different Welfare Regimes, Similar Outcomes? The Impact of Public Policy on Homeless People’s Exit Chances in Berlin and Los Angeles

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pp. 1-25

Homelessness is a complex societal condition that has proliferated over the past three decades in most industrialized nation-states of the global north. Moreover, nations’ homeless populations have become increasingly diverse, more closely reflecting the poverty...

2. Homeless Spaces, Homeless Lives: Using Ethnography to Assess Homeless People’s Life Courses and Exit Chances in Berlin

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pp. 26-45

Having provided a cursory overview of the different contexts of homelessness in Germany and the United States and highlighted some of the weaknesses in our contemporary understanding of the impact of policy on homeless people’s lives...

3. Not Allowed: Legal Exclusion, Human Rights, and Global Capital

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pp. 46-68

Perhaps the most pressing need a homeless person has is to generate income to ensure his or her basic survival. Income, however derived, is an important component of stabilizing homeless people’s lives en route to, ideally, overcoming...

4. Not Wanted: Containment, Warehousing, and Service Exclusion

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pp. 69-95

If, as demonstrated in the previous chapter, homeless people and some of their survival strategies are deliberately excluded from the commercial city center, what spaces remain for them? Do homeless people in Berlin, like their peers in Los Angeles...

5. Not Needed: Market Exclusion, Exit Strategies, and the Specter of Neoliberalism

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pp. 96-120

It is not difficult to appreciate that the previously discussed forms of legal and service exclusion had an adverse impact on the respondents’ immediate life circumstances and thus inevitable consequences for their ability to accomplish their long-term goals of securing...

6. Sociospatial Exclusion of Homeless People: Comparative Perspective

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pp. 121-139

The foregoing empirical chapters provide evidence for three distinct yet interrelated trajectories of exclusion that pertain to homeless people’s immediate survival strategies to generate income (legal exclusion) and find shelter and housing...

Postscript

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pp. 140-142

I often think back to the sunny Saturday morning in October 1993 when I first ventured into Skid Row with my classmates. In fact, to this day I use a virtual field trip to downtown Los Angeles in some of my classes, roughly following the path Professor Jennifer...

Appendix 1: Biographical Sketches of Respondents in Berlin

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pp. 143-152

Appendix 2: Key Informants

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pp. 153-158

Notes

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pp. 159-168

References

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pp. 169-182

Index

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pp. 183-191