Down and Out in Los Angeles and Berlin: The Sociospatial Exclusion of Homeless People

Notes

Notes CHAPTER 1 1. Virtually any study on homelessness in American cities to date—too many to list here—provides evidence for public policy failures. Most notably, mainstream cash assistance and housing programs remain largely inaccessible, and the emerging nonprofit sector simply lacks the means and infrastructure to provide all people in housing crisis with adequate and ideally preventive service. 2. For information on numbers of homeless in Germany, see BAG Wohnungslosenhilfe 2010. For recent numbers in the United States, including a discussion of variations, see U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 2010. 3. Almost all surveys of homeless people in Los Angeles indicate that their duration of homelessness is shorter than that of homeless people in Berlin (Burnam and Koegel 1988; Flaming and Drayse 1997b; Husick and Wolch 1990; Shelter Partnership 1994; Takahashi, Dear, and Neely 1989). The only exception is Cousineau’s 1993 survey of 134 primarily older male street encampment residents in downtown Los Angeles, which reveals that 65.6 percent of his respondents have been homeless for more than one year at the time of the interview (16). 4. The term “workfarist” refers to the welfare-to-work programs that undergird the U.S. welfare reforms of 1996 (for discussion, see Handler 2004). 5. Between 1987 and 1993, the Los Angeles Homelessness Project (LAHP) conducted an interdisciplinary study of different aspects of homelessness in Los Angeles, producing fifty-eight working papers as well as twenty-six publications. This research is summarized in Wolch and Dear’s 1993 book, Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City. Furthermore , a longitudinal and quantitative survey, the Course of Homelessness Study (1991–1993), provides further information on homeless people’s exit chances (for an overview, see Koegel 2004). Additionally, Burns, Flaming, and Haydamack (2004) provide data on the long-term economic prospects of homeless people by following a cohort of more than twelve hundred participants in a job-training program over a period of nine years. Tepper (2004) provides a coherent overview of studies on homelessness in Los Angeles that shows the comprehensive nature of research that has been conducted over the past two decades. For Berlin, I found no studies that explicitly focus on exit and longterm chances, but I have drawn on insightful studies provided by Eick (1996), Neubarth 160 Notes to Chapter 1 (1997), Schenk (2004), Schneider (1998), and Gerull, Merckens, and Dubrow (2009). This research does not address the exit chances of homeless people. 6. Unlike U.S. cities that enforce specifically formulated antihomeless ordinances, European cities, including Berlin, use broader, preexisting public order and safety ordinances to remove homeless people (Busch-Geertsema 2008; Belina 2003). Moreover, impoverished urban quarters by no means resemble North American ghettos (for a discussion , see Veith and Sambale 1999). 7. Very few international comparative studies on homelessness are available to date. A number of studies directly compare countries in the European Union but do not include the United States (Avramov 1995, 1999; Edgar, Doherty, and Mina-Coull 1999; Edgar, Doherty, and Meert 2003). Other research uses case studies from the United States and other countries but does not provide a thorough comparative analysis (G. Daly 1996; Greenhalgh et al. 2004; Heilman and Dear 1988; Huth and Wright 1997; Toro 2007; Shinn 2010; von Mahs and Mitchell 2011). The only study that addresses homelessness in more comprehensive comparative fashion is Helvie and Kunstmann’s (1999) publication on homelessness in ten industrialized countries. Like most other studies, however, their report remains largely descriptive, providing accounts for each country but not a clear comparative analysis. 8. The following studies provide clear evidence that the German “conservative” welfare regime, despite weaknesses, provides its residents with a greater range of social rights, coverage, and benefits than does the “liberal” U.S. type: Esping-Andersen 1996, 1999; Goodin et al. 1999; Huber and Stephens 2001; Leisering and Leibfried 1999; Lewis 1992; Mishra 1999. 9. Although geographic processes, especially processes of exclusion and displacement , have been studied extensively by geographers in the United States, to my knowledge only two studies on homelessness in Germany have been published by geographers: Hundhammer 1979 and Pape 1996. 10. Wright’s (1996) unpublished dissertation on “Pathways Off the Streets” draws on results from the Oakland sample, which he complemented by conducting qualitative interviews (between five and thirty minutes in length) with 101 of the 397 respondents of the third wave to gain a better understanding of success or failure in finding housing (103). 11. A large body of literature in...