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Postscript 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 Wolch took that day, with the goal of generating a similar response in my classroom. It works every time, for one reason—homelessness should shock us. It should make us uncomfortable. It should make us feel guilty. The research described in this book, like many ethnographic studies before it, demonstrates very clearly that it would be much too easy to blame homelessness solely on those who experience it. Personal circumstances, behaviors, and people’s life courses undoubtedly matter, but none of these lived experiences occurs in a vacuum. Societal forces—most notably market barriers, institutional obstacles and welfare state deficiencies, social stigmatization, and legal constraints—all surround homeless people’s lives, in surprisingly similar fashion whether in Berlin or in Los Angeles. Yet this study also documents that a more comprehensive welfare system can make a difference, and it is therefore important that Germany continue its path-dependent ways and not only maintain but expand its social safety net. The critiques of the welfare system in this volume, therefore, do not support the antigovernment arguments so commonly employed in the United States—quite the contrary. Unfortunately, the prospects of any productive social reform or even welfare state expansion in the United States remain grim. Bipartisan gridlock and seemingly insurmountable ideological differences will, if anything, continue to provide the basis for further neoliberal welfare state restructuring and scapegoating. To make matters worse, such restructuring occurs on the base of an already poorly developed, fragmented, selective, and underfunded system. The concurrent privatization and devolution to the private and nonprofit sector may, at times, result in excellent services but at the expense of coverage, leaving the most vulnerable and economically disen- Postscript 141 franchised permanently on the outside (market exclusion) and contained in service-dependent ghettos (service exclusion) while being simultaneously and systematically driven out of commercially important or more affluent urban areas (legal exclusion). Sociospatial exclusion, then, will continue to be a major feature of the American approach to homelessness and thus, I argue, remains relevant. The relevance and applicability of the concept of sociospatial exclusion has also found its expression in my teaching and my anticipated future research. For one thing, the concept has been quite a useful heuristic tool in classes on homelessness that I have taught, as it allows me to coherently discuss the trajectories of exclusion in separate class sections leading up to a comprehensive understanding of how such exclusions intersect to foreclose opportunities. I have also employed the concept in a course on immigration and found it useful there as well, suggesting that this conceptualization might be applied to social problems beyond homelessness. Next, I will be using the concept in new empirical longitudinal research on policy effects on homeless people in New York City, which I will be starting in 2013. In using sociospatial exclusion as a heuristic device to study policy effects over time and thus to expose the multiple trajectories of exclusion, I hope to be able to provide a more-nuanced understanding of how homeless people in New York City attempt to break the vicious cycles associated with the social condition of homelessness and their consequent inability to afford housing on their own. In expanding the empirical base by also focusing on homeless families, women, and children, I intend to test the utility of sociospatial exclusion with the goal of helping formulate local policies that more effectively address the problem. My research has also provided invaluable insight into the use of appropriate methods for a multiperspectival approach. I was, in hindsight, satisfied with the choice of methods that underlay this research and found, like others before me, the ethnographic approach to be particularly useful for understanding homeless people’s lives and their experiences. In my new research, I will consequently maintain a strong ethnographic component by developing—with the help of student researchers—a multiyear, qualitative database of individual homeless people and their families’ experiences over time. I intend to subsequently triangulate such information with existing quantitative data that the New York Department of Homeless Services collects on a regular basis. My insistence on continuing to rely heavily on ethnographic research is based on my conclusion that qualitative research is a promising way to...

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