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4 Not Wanted Containment, Warehousing, and Service Exclusion I f, 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, find themselves contained in deprived service ghettos? After providing evidence for the impact of the spatial organization of homeless service and shelter provision in Los Angeles on homeless people and their life chances, in this chapter I reveal the results of my analysis of the geographic organization of Berlin’s homeless service infrastructure, which suggests that there are, indeed, similarities to the United States in that homeless service and shelter facilities are contained in the most deprived urban quarters. Yet rather than the containment of services per se, the warehousing into often-dilapidated multiple-occupancy shelters has the most devastating personal consequences, reinforcing the exact social problems, most notably alcohol consumption, that have contributed to insufficient income and thus displacement in the first place. Shelters therefore are places with positive and negative consequences. They provide homeless people with material and emotional support, yet they constitute a contagious environment of defeatism, alcohol and substance abuse, and (self-) isolation. Many respondents, especially people with more-regular life courses, self-isolate because of shame and cut ties with their nonhomeless social networks. Based on these findings, I propose a model of “service exclusion” that explains how, in both Berlin and Los Angeles, warehousing into primarily low-quality shelters and the containment of shelters and service facilities adversely affects homeless people’s chances to exit homelessness. I suggest that homeless people’s life circumstances deteriorate in emergency and low-quality accommodations; mid-level shelters with in-house social workers are more effective at enhancing exit chances and saving money as well. Current practices in Berlin are ultimately counterproductive and expensive and needlessly prolong homelessness. They 70 Chapter 4 serve only the interests of commercial shelter providers, who ruthlessly exploit the fact that the local welfare state is legally mandated to provide shelter yet lacks the funds and infrastructure to provide better shelter options. The geography of homeless shelter and service provision provides a key to understanding how and where homeless people spend their lives, particularly if they are deliberately excluded from other urban spaces. This sets the stage for a more nuanced discussion of the consequences of such exclusion. Los Angeles: Containment and the Shadow State Considering that this question and the relevance of geographic processes remain seriously understudied in German research, it is useful to consider research from Los Angeles and other cities in the United States, where the geography of service provision in the context of homeless people’s daily and periodic mobility has been studied in much more detail, as I discuss in Chapter 1 (for a summary, see Wolch and Dear 1993; for an update, see DeVerteuil 2003a, 2003b). Such research suggests that the displacement of homeless people is reinforced by the spatial organization of homeless service and shelter facilities, which are contained in the most deprived urban communities, often in the vicinity of yet sufficiently far from important commercial and residential areas. Such service agglomerations—three of which, in Los Angeles County, contain more than twenty facilities within a square mile—can literally be described as “landscapes of despair” (Wolch and Dear 1987) that, although offering much needed services and support, truly reduce homeless people’s long-term chances to pursue more promising labor and housing market opportunities. Thus homeless people, especially adult minority men, find themselves limited by the terms of the local “shadow state,” experiencing a spatial mismatch between the location of shelters and more promising housing and labor market opportunities and therefore further intensifying the sense of entrapment that many homeless experience (Burns, Flaming, and Haydamack 2004; Tepper and Simpson 2003; Wolch and Dear 1993). Such entrapment, it has been shown, also affects homeless people’s tenuous ties to nonhomeless people, including their families, friends, and other social contacts. In place of them, homeless people, by necessity, must forge new social networks within the context of homelessness, with positive and negative ramifications . Although such networks are valuable sources of material and financial support, they also have negative consequences in that they increase exposure to people with similar problems (see Rowe and Wolch 1990). Although relatively little information is available regarding how life inside homeless service and shelter facilities affects homeless people’s exit chances in Los Angeles, we...

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