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5 Not Needed Market Exclusion, Exit Strategies, and the Specter of Neoliberalism I t 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 housing and employment. In this chapter, I detail respondents’ experiences with trying to find shelter and jobs, revealing primarily negative results with regard to employment but slightly better outcomes in terms of housing. Through a mix of assisted and unassisted search efforts, more than half of the respondents—most of them with regular life courses—found housing within one year, effectively stabilizing their poverty management; in four cases, they were able to optimize their situations by finding employment as well. Disappointingly, however, twelve respondents—most of them with irregular life courses—remained unsuccessful and thus became entrenched and dependent on public assistance. The widespread lack of success ultimately took a heavy toll on most respondents, especially older ones with previous economic integration. To explain these outcomes, I provide an account of the types of exit strategies homeless respondents in Berlin employed and how their efforts unfolded over time, while highlighting the role that public intervention played. I show evidence that the referral services provided directly by public welfare and labor offices universally failed to facilitate successful housing or labor market access, whereas case-based interventions by social workers affiliated with nonprofits accounted for half of all successful housing placements and three of the successful job placements. Ongoing welfare intervention—most notably cash assistance and housing subsidies—ensured that most respondents who exited remained stably housed. In that sense, the local German welfare state remains superior, but it contains substantial flaws that contribute to rather than solve homeless people ’s problems with accessing local job and housing markets, flaws that could intensify as a result of Germany’s 2005 neoliberal welfare overhaul and impending economic crisis. Not Needed 97 To set the stage for a discussion of the potential policy implications of these neoliberal reforms on homeless people’s exit chances in Berlin, I first provide a synoptic view of homeless people’s attempts to gain market access in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities and how workfare and other neoliberal policy instruments have failed to ensure their quest to overcome homelessness and poverty for good. In this light, more recent experimentations with U.S.-style workfare in Germany should be viewed with utmost skepticism. Homelessness, Market Access, and Workfare in Los Angeles The following cursory analysis of homeless people’s attempts to access housing and labor markets in Los Angeles demonstrates that, although the comparatively unregulated local labor market is easier for homeless people to penetrate than Berlin’s, the largely substandard incomes generated thereby are barely sufficient to maintain rental apartments (Tepper and Simpson 2003). Most commentators agree that neoliberal policy and workfare, if anything, has contributed to the problem by facilitating an increasing pool of expendable working poor. These individuals constitute a growing class of “proto-homeless,” who, largely excluded from mainstream welfare systems, remain constantly threatened by impending or recurring homelessness (Wolch and Dear 1993). Homeless despite Work? Economic Prospects of the Working Poor Over the past twenty years, a number of studies have examined facilitators and/ or barriers to exit from homelessness. The common tenor of these mainly quantitative , longitudinal panels is that homeless people in Los Angeles—and, for that matter, other U.S. cities in which homeless exit has been studied—may be able to find jobs, and subsequently housing, relatively rapidly due to less-regulated lowwage labor markets, but that such exit may be short-term, as many cycle back into homelessness after losing their jobs (for an overview, see Koegel 2004). Similar consensus exists regarding the importance of human capital as a facilitator of exit and, conversely, the lack thereof as a barrier. The Course of Homelessness Study, in particular, provides evidence that access to regular work is a main facilitator of exit from homelessness in Los Angeles . Evidence from longitudinal studies shows that three-quarters of people who exited homelessness did so primarily by generating income through regular work (Schoeni and Koegel 1998, 299–300; B. Wright 1996, 97). According to a survey among homeless job seekers, 40 percent had managed to find jobs within one year and used such income to pay for housing (Burns, Flaming, and Haydamack 2004, 37–39; Einbinder et al. 1995...

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