Williams 1996 Geography of the Homeless Shelter Staff Surveillance & Resident Resistance

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Geography Of The Homeless Shelter: Staff Surveillance And Resident Resistance Author(s): Jean Calterone Williams Source: Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development,

Vol. 25, No. 1 (SPRING, 1996), pp. 75-113Published by: The Institute, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40553294Accessed: 22-05-2015 00:02 UTC

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Geography Of The Homeless Shelter: Staff Surveillance

And Resident Resistance

Jean Calterone Williams Department of Political Science The Johns Hopkins University

ABSTRACT: This article combines ethnographic study of homeless families and individuals in several shelters with an examination of the physical environments of the shelters. An exploration of the geography of the shelters and their stringent regulations reveals the ways in which homeless shelters serve as institutional spaces for government intrusion and surveillance of low-income and homeless people. Shelter regulations are based upon professionalized social service agency arguments that homeless people themselves, rather than poverty, unemployment, or low- income housing shortages, are the "problem" to be addressed and corrected. Through observing and recording the minutiae of homeless shelter residents' past personal histories and current activities, shelter staff attempt to control and correct the homeless client in order that he or she may become stably housed. Homeless shelter residents resist social worker control and surveillance through small acts of resistance to the construction of social worker as "unbiased expert" and of homeless person as lazy, mentally ill, or "abnormal."

75 ISSN 0894-6019, 1996 The Institute, Inc.

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76 URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(1), 1996

Angie, a sixty-year-old resident of a West City homeless shelter, painfully limps back to the shelter after camping for ten days in the mountains with Frank, an elderly homeless man who had also stayed at the shelter and with whom Angie has a romantic relationship. In the less than two weeks that she has been camping, Angle's arthritis has worsened significantly, transforming her usually belabored walk into an ago- nized shuffle. Two weeks before Angle's return, after living in the shelter for over a year without having secured subsidized housing, Angie and Frank made plans to leave the shelter and camp in state parks with Frank's sister. Since both Frank and Angie were receiving Social Security Disability payments, Angie for her severe arthritis and Frank because he recently underwent triple bypass surgery, Frank reasoned that if they camped for a year, between their two incomes they could save enough money to eventually afford housing together.

Angie and Frank left feeling hopeful about their plans and happy to be able to share a tent after living consigned to separate men's and women's dorms at the shelter. When Frank brought a depressed and discouraged Angie back to the shelter, she explained: "...after ten days my arthritis was so bad I could hardly walk so I had to come back [here]. I wanted Frank to come back with me, but I guess I didn't figure a blood relative, that he would choose his sister over me." Although ostensibly it was her arthritis that forced her to concede that she could not cope with living outdoors, Angie clearly did not en- joy many aspects of her ten days in the state park. She describes sleeping in a tent, cooking by campfire, and other aspects of outdoor life with distaste: "We got our drinking water from the town near where we were and boiled water from the creek to wash our dishes in. But we couldn't shower or wash our hair and I couldn't stand that. The first weekend we woke up and it was 29 . 1 was shaking." Notwithstanding her aversion to camping, Angie maintains that she would have stayed if she could have physically withstood outdoor life, such was


Williams: GEOGRAPHY OF THE HOMELESS SHELTER 77_

her desire to live free of the dorm-like atmosphere and shared living space, curfew and other rules at the shelter. A mature woman who has lived on her own for many years, Angie misses the simple freedoms that come with one's own living space: "I can't wait to get out of here. I had a taste of freedom [while we were camping]. Not that Fm not grateful [that I'm able to stay in the shelter], because I am. But [in my own place], if I want to watch TV all night, I can, or come out of the shower and not have to worry about getting dressed right away/7

Like Angie, many homeless women interviewed for this study express a mixture of gratitude to homeless shelters for providing a "roof over their heads" and distaste for some aspects of the communal living arrangements, staff interference, and shelter rules. Although the architecture and rules of the shelters vary somewhat, each has a curfew, ranging from 7:00 p.m. to midnight, mandatory meetings with case managers in which the clients are expected to reveal to staff their personal histories and current goals, and shared living space which makes it difficult to find time to themselves (Huttman and Redmond 1992: 97; Weisman 1992: 78). Indeed, because of shelter rules and invasive staff practices, many of the women maintain that the shelter is their last choice, resorted to only after exhausting several other options.

I began in September of 1994 to conduct research in homeless and domestic violence shelters in a large Southwestern city I have called West City. The research includes in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 35 homeless people, and ongoing participant-observation in several shelters with approxi- mately 100 shelter residents and the case managers, usually professional social workers, hired to work with them. A review of 50 randomly chosen 1995 case files at one family homeless shelter supplements the interviews and participant-observation. The larger research project upon which this essay is based examines the contexts and meanings of women's homelessness, particularly the connections between domestic



violence and homelessness. As a result, though participant- observation occurred with both men and women, most of the interviews (33 of 35) were conducted with women, and the generalizations made here pertain most clearly to women's experiences in emergency shelters.

The shelters represented in this project house as few as 45 to as many as 100 individuals; all have cumbersome sets of rules and a significant amount of contact between residents and staff. In contrast to armory-style shelters, which tend to have fewer rules and expectations of residents and to be less well-staffed, the smaller, more tightly controlled shelters offer more privacy and amenities, such as individual rooms for each family and fewer clients per case manager. Although the more comfortable living environment is accompanied by more stringent regulations, these shelters are almost always full, and many homeless people are not accepted into them due to lack of space. Moreover, staff at the smaller family shelters tend to accept those homeless people who appear most "motivated" or most likely to successfully transition out of homelessness within the three months that they live at the shelter. This may exclude some mentally ill women, although those who have been "stabilized" on medication are sometimes accepted.

This project attempts to explicate the cultural, historical, and social forces involved in the formation of homelessness as a "public problem" (Gusfield 1981), and in the attendant development of solutions to it. Like other cities, West City has defined homelessness as a problem to be addressed by social workers employed in facilities partially funded by the state (as opposed to, for example, families or housing developers having primary responsibility for confronting the issue) and has responded principally by opening temporary, emergency shelters rather than building permanent, low-income housing (Huttman and Redmond 1992; Funiciello 1993). Assigning the problem of "fixing" homeless people to social workers indi- vidualizes and medicalizes the reasons that people become


Williams: GEOGRAPHY OF THE HOMELESS SHELTER 79

homeless, since social worker as social deviance expert (Nathanson 1991: 12-14) helps people to find housing not only by advocating for them with housing programs or other social service agencies, but also by eradicating "dysfunctional" behaviors. According to a narrative of "social deviance," such behaviors have been instrumental in the loss of housing. As Constance Nathanson argues,

There is in the United States a powerful strain toward locating the sources of social conflict and social change in the failings of individuals rather than in the inadequacies of social institutions. Social dislocations that result from large-scale social and economic change are framed as personal problems and their solutions couched in terms of alterations in individual behavior (Nathanson 1991: 223).

The construction of homelessness as a problem of mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, and a "street person" or "underclass" mentality, reflects and further establishes an understanding of poverty as an individual failing and social worker surveillance and control in the shelter setting as the focus of solutions to homelessness.

In addition to exploring narratives of poverty and homelessness, this essay examines the physical environment of the shelters and the relationship of staff to client, arguing that spaces in which homeless shelter residents interact with one another and with the staff are as important as the stories that women tell about how they have become homeless. Al- though several excellent ethnographies of homeless people have been published in the past several years (Kozol 1988; Golden 1992; Liebow 1993; Wagner 1993), as Jennifer Wolch points out in her review of Elliot Liebow7 s TELL THEM WHO I AM: THE LIVES OF HOMELESS WOMEN, there have been relatively few studies that attempt to integrate homeless people's life stories with an understanding of the institutional spaces in which sheltered homeless people reside: "How does



the homeless 'industry' intersect with the biographies or life paths and daily routines of individuals to affect their ability to cope with the institutional context of homelessness, particularly to resist domination by helping institutions?" (Wolch 1995: 180). Liebow begins to examine the institutional context of homelessness by studying the effects of shelter rules, case manager philosophy and "geographic constraints" on the daily lives of homeless women in the shelters. My research intends to further explore the impact of institutional spaces on the experiences of homeless people in shelters, concentrating in particular on the constant surveillance and attempts to control the daily lives of homeless shelter residents, and resident resistance to staff control.

As recipients of government funding and subject to government operating regulations, West City homeless shelters serve as institutional spaces for government intrusion and surveillance.2 Michel Foucault has written of the advance of "dis- ciplinary technologies," utilized by the state in a variety of institutional settings to control bodies, to create docility, to "transform" and "improve" (Foucault 1995; Rabinow 1984: 17). The homeless shelter as institution relies upon constant observation and recording of resident actions, as well as their social and sexual histories, as techniques of power that allow staff to "know" homeless shelter residents and to measure and judge them against a "homogenous social body" (Foucault 1995: 184), conceived as the productive, sane, and moral norm.

Foucault has noted that the development of "hierarchized surveillance," as a tool to both objectify and control those in prisons, schools, and hospitals, created

...an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen... but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control - to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to



them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them (1995: 172).

This article examines the geography of several homeless shelters, including People in Transition, a long-term transitional housing shelter for elderly and disabled people (where Angie and Frank lived), as well as two shelters for families with children, the Family Shelter and the Lighthouse. It also will provide a picture of homeless people's resistance to case manager surveillance and shelter rules, which for some entails living in camps around the city and for others means small, daily acts of resistance within the shelter.

As a key staff tool within the shelters, the creation of a file on each resident, including a "case plan" or list of goals the resident is to work on while in the program, combines the techniques of observation and normalization to transform "the economy of visibility into the exercise of power" (Foucault 1995: 187). As the central means by which residents are "known," objectified and controlled, professional social workers in West City shelters detail each resident's past personal history and current goals, and record the resident's "progress" by follow- ing her or his activities on a daily basis. As Foucault argues, "the case is no longer ... a set of circumstances defining an act ... it is the individual as he may be described, judged, mea- sured, compared with others ... trained and corrected. . ." (Fou- cault 1995: 191). Through the shelter case plan and case file in which staff recorded client "progress," the homeless person himself or herself (rather than homelessness as a political issue or the events and issues that caused someone to lose housing) becomes the object of inquiry, control, and correction.



The Family Shelter

The Family Shelter for homeless families with children is housed in a renovated, one-story motor lodge on a street lined with similar motels, in various states of disrepair and now offers primarily week to week rentals to low-income families and others. Although the street itself has the reputation for attract- ing drug dealers and sex workers, it is flanked by low- to middle-income, tree-lined residential communities. During the day the streets are filled with people walking and bicycling to and from work and school.

The Family Shelter has 26 units, each of which houses one family. The smaller of the units consist of a bedroom and small kitchenette, and the larger contain a family room, bedroom and kitchenette. Every unit is almost always full; sometimes vacancies occur for a day or two when one family moves out and another moves in, but the Family Shelter constantly has to turn people away for lack of space. Shaped in a "U" around a grassy field, the units have separate, outside entrances and so resemble small apartments. The rooms tend to be small and dark, the carpeting and linoleum old but not in disrepair. Most residents try to make the rooms more homey by throwing col- orful blankets over dingy couches and occasionally taping a child's drawing to the wall, though they are asked in a com- prehensive list of rules, received when they enter the shelter, to avoid nailing posters or other decorations to the walls.

A separate building houses a bright child care center with a room for infants filled with toys, cribs, and high chairs, a toddler room, and a room for children age five and older with computers, books, and games. All the rooms display children's drawings and paintings and the fenced playground outside is scattered with toys and bikes. In addition to the child care area, several other grassy or sand-filled areas contain swings and other toys for children. Available from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. to residents who are working or have appointments, the on-site



child care center, which does not charge a fee to shelter residents, is a luxury that most shelters cannot afford to offer their clients. Children are fed breakfast, lunch, and a snack, and work on art projects, play on the computer, or outside in the yard, overseen by a full-time staff and volunteers.

Another building accommodates the case managers7 and "job developer's" offices and a conference room. As mentioned above, when families first enter the shelter, a case manager meets with the parents to draw up an individualized plan for securing housing and employment, facilitating entrance into GED or job training classes, or mandating attendance at drug rehabilitation counseling, and continues to meet weekly with the resident to update his or her progress and offer interven- tion and advocacy when needed. These meetings are fraught with demands by staff for information about a homeless resident's activities, feelings, and motivations (Marin 1987: 47). Indeed, such requests for information begin even before ad- mittance to the shelter, since each person must respond to a series of personal questions regarding his or her current circumstances if he or she wishes to be considered for the shelter. Once accepted, the homeless person is asked even more questions, including those about current personal relationships and social and sexual histories. Those unwilling to answer personal questions or to keep staff constantly apprised of their whereabouts (by recording the times they leave and destinations on a sign-out sheet in the office) may be considered uncoopera- tive or suspected of "having something to hide."

Residents, however, attempt to avoid sharing information with staff, some because they do not wish to reveal everything about themselves to a relative stranger, others because they are uncertain whether staff will approve of how they have spent their time, foreseeing eviction should a case manager believe they have squandered their days. Still others fear incriminat- ing themselves or another family member by giving personal information to a social service agency that will permanently



record it. For example, one case manager, Laura, warned a resident that she probably would not be allowed to stay another month at the shelter if she did not begin to talk to staff about her activities and feelings. The homeless resident, Mareia, explained that she did not talk to Laura because she "didn't know her." Laura responded that Mareia would only get to know her by talking with her, ignoring Mareia' s point that she did not wish to share her innermost thoughts and frustrations with someone who was not a friend, but rather was someone in a position of power over her. Similarly, writing about her work in a shelter for single homeless women, Lisa Ferrill describes a scene in which she assists a homeless woman, who had lived at the shelter for some time, to settle into a permanent place- ment in a nursing home:

Nancy had given us all firm orders not to keep in touch with her. She wanted to "forget about that place/' Mary and I wished her well and said goodbye, knowing we would miss her endearing personality, knowing she would not miss the invasion we represented to her. We had become uninvited participants in Nancy's life; she would have it back now... (Ferrill 1991: 73).

Echoing Ferriirs point regarding the invasiveness of the shelter system, Erin, a 28-year-old Euro- American woman in a transitional program called Endowment for West City Fami- lies (EWF), expresses anger at the constant requests for personal information she has experienced as a result of her interactions with social service workers. Arguing that homeless people are not "sick or diseased" but that they "could be anyone," she despairs of having any part of her life not recorded in agency files: "I have to answer to AFDC, Vocational Rehab, EWF. I have to tell all these people what I'm doing.... I didn't tell them [at EWF] about my relationship with my new boyfriend because I wanted one part of my personal life to myself." She complains that the distrust shown her by social ser-



vice workers has sometimes made hers and other homeless people's lives more complicated. For example, AFDC wanted Erin to look for work, but she was excused from doing so because she was taking classes through Vocational Rehabilita- tion. AFDC employees demanded that Erin come into their office to do her homework in order to prove that she was too busy with it to search for employment, until Vocational Reha- bilitation stepped in on Erin's behalf and the AFDC workers withdrew their request.

The expectations that residents should share their private lives with staff, combined with staff monitoring and regula- tion of both community and private space, allow case managers at the Family Shelter to constantly keep residents under observation. The Family Shelter has two community areas for adults, a large room attached to the staff offices and an outside covered patio. The space inside contains couches, a phone, and a desk which can be used by residents to make calls for housing or jobs. Because an open door leads from this room to the main shelter reception area, conversations can be overheard easily by the staff member on duty at the reception desk. More- over, residents may not have people from outside the shelter in their rooms, and must leave the doors and windows of their units open whenever another shelter resident visits, enabling staff to have access to resident "personal space" through unin- terrupted supervision. Weisman posits that the rules disallowing visitors at most shelters, or the lack of private space in which to entertain them should they be permitted on site, "suggests that homeless people do not need privacy, self-expression, friendships, and sexual relations, or at least that these needs should not be taken seriously" (1992: 78). Indeed, the Family Shelter regulations regarding private space and the oversee- ing of public space by case managers seem designed to dis- courage the formation of friendships or sexual relationships among the residents, as well as between residents and those not staying at the shelter.



As a result of the many rules regarding private space and staff access to the community room, socializing generally takes place on the patio. Since it is surrounded on one side with a fenced children's playground and on the others with a small parking lot, any approaching person can be seen well before he or she comes into earshot. In order for women to choose the patio over the air conditioned community room on a West City summer day (which can be as warm as 110 ), the attraction of an area relatively free from staff members' management and control must be strong. Indeed, residents seem to perceive that they are under surveillance, as conversations stop or lower to a whisper when a staff member walks by, regardless of how commonplace or innocuous the topic.

Staff and resident interactions are often framed by the dis- parity in power and authority between them. A form of easy banter sometimes exists between one case manager, Mark, a Euro- American in his 40s, and several different residents; others admit to feeling uneasy around or judged by Mark and other staff. Betsy, a Euro- American woman with three children, complains that Mark has grown increasingly "authoritarian" as the end of her stay at the shelter grows closer. She has secured a job as a seamstress paid by the piece and has found a low-rent apartment she can move to in several weeks. She describes an incident that highlights the effect of the power differential between staff and clients. Several nights previous, when Betsy discovered that another resident had not returned to the shelter by curfew (and indeed the woman stayed out all night), she looked after the resident's children. Betsy claims that when Mark discovered that she had watched the children all night rather than reporting the client, he "yelled at me, say- ing I was on his shit list in front of my sister." Embarrassed by the case manager's treatment of her in front of a family member who was not staying at the shelter, unable to respond in kind due to his ability to evict her ("verbal abuse" of staff is grounds for termination), Betsy felt that she had been treated



like a child but had no recourse that would not jeopardize her stay.

Perhaps by way of explaining his sometimes patronizing attitude toward the residents, Mark argues that many people become homeless as adults as a result of having grown up in "dysfunctional" families. He believes that people with dysfunctional family backgrounds, where drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, and dependence upon AFDC or other forms of welfare thrived, have a greater chance of having similar problems in their lives as adults. Moreover, Mark asserts, they are often unable or unwilling to keep stable employment. He claims, though, that only about five percent of homeless shelter residents' irregular work histories can be attributed to laziness. Most do want to work but are depressed or afraid to look for work or participate in interviews, or despite their best ef- forts cannot find permanent, full-time employment, or have a mental illness that interferes with employment. In addition to these other difficulties, he argues, many homeless people lack family support and others have problems with drugs and alcohol. According to Mark, mandatory parenting classes for low- income people provide a key to breaking the "cycle of dys- function," as such classes teach them different ways of parenting that avoid "passing down" dysfunctional behavior.

The Family Shelter staff's focus on dysfunctional families of origin as an explanation for homelessness helps to account for their mix of kindness, respect, and condescension toward the residents. If a person now homeless grew up in a home where violence and drug use were the norm, this way of thinking goes, then that person can be somewhat forgiven if she has married an alcoholic and neither of them can find permanent work, because she witnessed a similar dynamic as a child. This also explains Mark's inclination to treat homeless people as if they were less than adults, as he believes that they are lacking fundamental life skills that will allow them to be successful and happy, life skills that he argues are his responsibility to



ensure that they learn. He espouses a theory akin to the "culture of poverty" thesis, arguing that low-income people from "dysfunctional families," including those who are dependent on welfare, pass on this way of life to their children.

Like Mark, culture of poverty advocates claim that low- income families are poor due to inherited behavioral deficien- cies (such as laziness, inability to delay gratification, and irresponsible sexuality) that they will in turn teach their children. This would create one generation after another "who, lacking family organization and reared without consistent and close relations with adults ... are passive, have difficulty with abstract thinking and communication, seek escape from problems through relatively uninhibited expressions of sex or ag- gression, lack ego strength and are unable to plan for the fu- ture."^ Where the culture of poverty is used as an explanation for poverty or homelessness, those trying to "help" the homeless will, like Mark, insist on compulsory parenting classes and mandatory meetings with the "job developer" at the shelter. As Michael Katz argues, however, the culture of poverty thesis is ambiguous and tautological: "The pathological behavior of poor people causes their poverty, which is the source of their pathological behavior" (Katz 1989: 41-42). It precludes a focus on the patterns of "inclusion and exclusion in American life," and on "unemployment and structural dislocation," to understand why people are poor (Katz 1989: 237-238).

The Lighthouse

In contrast to the occasional warm or bright touches at the Family Shelter, and a somewhat supportive environment, the Lighthouse family shelter is stark and depressing. It too is housed in a former motel, but the bare linoleum floors and fluorescent lights, combined with rooms that open onto a hall- way rather than separate outside entrances for each room, make



for a less inviting shelter, as well as one in which homeless families have less privacy. A two-story building facing a court- yard with a pool, the family shelter is one of several similar buildings within a large Lighthouse complex. Other buildings in the complex contain an alcohol rehabilitation center and a large cafeteria. The complex is in one of the more high-crime and dilapidated areas of the city, surrounded by the occasional rundown diner or auto shop.

A bedroom and a bathroom generally comprise each family's accommodations, unless the family has several children, in which case they may have two connecting rooms. Com- munity areas are in short supply, consisting of a play room for children, a small sandy area next to the parking lot with a swing set and several picnic tables, and a small library /reading room that remains locked except during specified hours when a vol- unteer reads aloud to the children. Although the cafeteria and several meeting rooms in the complex might ostensibly serve as alternative community areas, residents may not use the meeting rooms and may enter the cafeteria only during specified meal times. During the hours when breakfast and dinner are served at the cafeteria, clients must exit from the shelter and the doors to the building are locked. The shelter does not allow families to eat in their rooms.

The Lighthouse has many of the same rules as the Family Shelter, including disallowing alcohol and drugs, weapons, and verbal and physical abuse on or off the shelter grounds. Such rules minimize chaos and ensure that life at the shelter feels as non-threatening as possible.4 Moreover, in theory, these rules provide a modicum of assurance that residents will be treated fairly, without some receiving privileges that others do not.5 In addition to rules basic to safe and comfortable communal living, however, the Lighthouse imposes others that are more stringent or invasive. For example, detailed regulations describe acceptable clothing for wearing both in the cafeteria and the building which houses the shelter. Everyone must wear



shoes at all times when outside their rooms, though men may wear sandals while women and children may not. Women are instructed to dress "modestly/7 which includes "loose fitting blouses and regular T-shirts ... short shorts and tank tops are not permissible. Brassieres are required/' Although there is no written mandate that men dress "modestly/' they must always wear shirts, and the rules disallow "open shirts showing [the] chest." In the cafeteria, neither women nor men may wear shorts of any kind: women are told to wear jeans, dresses or skirts, and men to wear jeans or other slacks.

The Lighthouse sick policy is also spelled out in some detail. Unless a client complains of illness, staff expects everyone to participate in a daily job search or employment, which entails exiting the shelter from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., as well as attend group and individual meetings at the shelter. If a shelter resident becomes ill, a case manager will take her temperature to determine if she has a fever; if she does not, she must participate in the daily activities. Should a resident continue to feel sick, she may return to the shelter and rest for 24 hours, but she must stay in her room during that time. Together the sick policy and dress code suggest that shelter residents conform to the lazy, sexually irresponsible and immodestly uninhibited "underclass" of the culture of poverty thesis; thus Light- house staff assumes that they cannot be trusted to look for jobs (they will feign sickness to avoid work), nor to control themselves sexually. Lest their libidos or laziness infringe upon their abilities to pursue employment or care for their children, Light- house rules are designed to guide residents toward the path of "acceptable" behavior.

In addition to those rules which appear overtly controlling or seem to unnecessarily infringe upon resident lifestyles, other shelter rules simply create more difficulties for residents, particularly in situations in which a job might be at stake. For instance, parents must supervise their children at all times, and unlike the Family Shelter (which allows residents to baby-sit



for one another on a limited basis and also has a day care center on site) Lighthouse residents cannot watch each other's children, nor does it offer day care. Violation of either the rule mandating child supervision or disallowing baby-sitting could jeopardize a person's stay at the shelter. However, to find jobs or sign up for vocational training, for example, residents might need to be on the phone provided for their "business" use, found on a table in the noisy main hall. As phone calls must be kept to a five-minute maximum at the risk of losing use of the phone, and the hall is filled with children and adults shouting and talking, residents have a difficult time sounding professional. To have to supervise sometimes unruly children while on the phone makes it that much more difficult to seem re- sponsible to employers, who, according to a number of the people interviewed, already do not wish to hire homeless people.

The front door leading in and out of the Lighthouse is next to the staff office, and the rules request that residents sign out whenever they leave the shelter, and sign in when they return. According to the director of the shelter, residents sign in and out so that the staff can "monitor" them after residents have been away for the day. Urinalysis or breathalyzer tests may be given whenever a client is "suspected" of drug or alcohol use. In order to ensure that staff can supervise those staying at the shelter, they keep resident room keys in the office. Upon re- turning to the shelter, residents must request to be let into their rooms and wait until a case manager has the time to do so. Freda, a 28-year-old African- American resident of the shelter, complains that the staff's continuous access to her room (as well as her enforced reliance on them for her own access) in- creases a power differential already sharply felt by her and some other residents (see also Funiciello 1993: 183):

This place is great if they didn't have assholes who felt really powerful.... The [case managers] have the key to



your room and we don't. I'd be crazy to leave my TV in my room. They make you wait and wait to get your key, even if your kid has to go to the bathroom. They unlock the door for you and the same key unlocks all the doors [in the shelter].

With such staff intrusion an established convention on many fronts at the Lighthouse, as well as the patronizing treatment of residents exemplified by the sick policy's mandate that a woman have her temperature taken by staff to prove that she is ill, it is not surprising that residents often resent their loss of independence, even while feeling relieved to have found a shelter with an opening. Freda goes on to describe an incident with staff that succinctly captures the relationship between staff and client at the Lighthouse:

What I don't like about this place are th rules and regulations, and the abuse of authority by case managers. The other night at 8:30 p.m. I was doing laundry, and I laughed loud with a woman I was talking to, and the case manager told me to be quiet, that he had made another parent go to bed at 8:00 p.m. and he could make me go too.. ..They don't respect our privacy. They talk and laugh about you, make fun of you.... They bring their personal lives into this place. If they have a bad day, you feel it.

After the incident in the laundry room, Freda asked to see her file, and found that the staff has been keeping track of the checks that have arrived for her. She conjectures that case managers are able to see the amount of the check through the en- velope and record it.

I was hesitant about getting my file. If you try to en- force your rights, they give you the message not to rock the boat. Technically they could kick me out on the street. I'd have to stay in a motel, but the motels around here really suck. The one we were staying in [prior to coming to the shelter] had two rats. A lot of people would [feel



more comfortable about] complain[ing] if they felt safe that they wouldn't be put out. You can get put out for talking back to a case manager."

In addition to the encroachment and "abuse of authority" by shelter staff, the staff's ability to "put out" homeless people combines with other shelter rules to significantly increase resident insecurity about their housing.

In every shelter, staff has the authority to admit or discharge any homeless family, a power that weighs heavily on the minds of most residents. However disrespectful or disdainful a shelter's staff might be toward clients, residents repeatedly approach case managers about their status at the shelter. A woman might ask whether, for example, she has been blamed for an argument between several residents, or whether a case manager thinks she is working hard enough to resolve her situ- ation. Others list and turn in to staff each week a record of every job application they have filed or employment prospect they have investigated to ensure that staff knows they have not squandered their time. To the homeless people living at the shelters, this is not a petty detail: their ability to remain housed depends on it. Though most shelters have funding to support each homeless family for 90 days, most admit people for less time, such as 30 days, and staff makes a decision at the end of that time about whether a resident merits an extension to 90 days. A person who staff perceives not to be working hard enough, to have broken rules, or to have created dishar- mony among other residents, might not receive an extension.

Since most shelters consistently have more requests for shelter than they can manage, with some of the smaller ones turning away more people in the course of a year than they have housed, case managers want to know as soon as possible when a current resident plans to leave. Sometimes residents simply do not return to the shelter in the evening, leaving their clothes and other personal belongings in their rooms. Some call to



verify that they do not wish to remain at the shelter, while others never contact staff again. Case managers' need to maintain current information on bed availability translates to stern warn- ings or automatic eviction for curfew violations. If, however, a resident is late only once, at most shelters she usually can count on her bed still being available to her when she returns to the shelter.

While most shelters admit people for a certain time period, for example one month, and homeless people know they can depend on housing for at least that length of time, the Lighthouse's written rules inform residents that rooms are "provided on a consecutive night basis/' and residents risk losing their rooms to another homeless family if they return to the shelter after 6:00 p.m. without prior staff authorization. When a homeless family first enters the shelter, the Lighthouse staff will indicate that a resident's program performance will be reviewed within two weeks of his or her arrival, with continued stay contingent upon the resident's activities and ef- forts. In that sense, if they comply with the regulations, residents will be ensured at least two weeks of shelter. However, case managers send a mixed message when they also state in the rules that residents must secure their rooms on a night by night basis, creating fear in a resident that she will return to the shelter in the evening past 6:00 p.m. to find that her room has been given to another family.

For residents trying to conform to the Lighthouse mandate that they complete five job interviews or applications each day, who must also pick up their children after school or day care, it may be difficult to exactly time their arrival at the shelter. Particularly for the majority of residents who are without cars and ride often unreliable buses (bus arrival times in West City may vary as much as a half hour from the posted times on some routes) or walk to appointments, the fear that their rooms may have been given away if they return past curfew adds to their considerable daily stress. A resident might be tardy due



to a delayed bus, having been unable to find a pay phone at the bus stop in order to call the shelter and let them know she would be late before boarding the bus, and afraid to leave the stop to look for a phone for fear that the bus would arrive while she was gone. However, the Lighthouse staff is prone to suspect that residents who arrive late in the evenings due to spe- cial circumstances have actually been using drugs or are lying about their whereabouts, and those who need to regularly return after curfew due to a job usually must undergo a test for drug or alcohol consumption.

The Lighthouse describes its family shelter as a "work program/' stating that if a resident does not find a job within two weeks, working regularly at least 32 hours a week and not in a position making commission, she probably will be asked to leave the program. Alternatively, if the case manager allows, a resident can participate in training programs and part-time work where hours spent in both total at least 32. The shelter does have a job developer to help residents find work, but even with his help the opportunities are limited. Many male residents have experience only in construction or other jobs typically offering work on a project by project basis or seasonal or part-time positions. Female residents may have worked for housekeeping services, in fast food or other restaurants, or as cashiers in retail stores. Juggling child care needs can preclude accepting certain jobs since some day care facilities (secured for the residents with the help of the Department of Economic Security) do not care for children in the evenings. Transporta- tion is also a problem; buses in West City do not run after 10:00 p.m., and in some parts of the city the last buses come at 7:00 p.m. and do not run at all on the weekends. A number of residents take jobs at fast food restaurants at minimum wage in order to ensure that they can stay in the shelter, and those with better-paying jobs typically make no more than $6.00 to $8.00 an hour. Yet poverty is a primary reason that people have



sought shelter, traceable in large part to low-paying or irregular jobs.

More obviously than in other shelters, some Lighthouse staff seem predisposed to distrust homeless people. One staff member, Tom, a Euro- American in his late-20s, described shelter residents in this way:

Ninety percent of homeless people don't want to work. Most shelters don't force people to work - they're like three month vacations for people. You get your rent, your food paid for - it's great! Why wouldn't anyone want to live for free? I know people who go to Alaska, then come here for three months' [vacation] and stay in a shelter for that time.

I know there are a lot of people who go from shelter to shelter - they'd rather do drugs and drink than have to work. For some of them, they make more money from benefits than they do at work; why would they want to work? All shelters should be work programs like the Lighthouse. You can't just provide free shelter to these people and not force them to work. It's like giving a fat person who's on a diet lots of food - cake and candy bars - it's too tempt- ing for them. These [homeless] people have to be taught responsibility.

With its emphasis on a mandatory work program and close supervision, as opposed to individual attention and case plans more typical of the Family Shelter, the Lighthouse program is organized on the principles that people are homeless through their own fault, because they do not want to work, or are using drugs and alcohol.

People in Transition

If the Family Shelter tends to treat homeless residents with a mixture of warmth, support, and paternalism, and the Light- house regards them with suspicion and blame, People in Tran-



sition case managers often treat their clients with neglect or indifference. Just a few blocks from the Lighthouse, People in Transition utilizes three buildings within a city public housing project. While the Family Shelter and Lighthouse are homeless shelters serving adults with children, People in Transition describes itself as a transitional living program and assists single, elderly men and women, or those over 18 who are physically or mentally disabled. Like other transitional living programs, People in Transition provides housing for up to two years rather than the three months offered by most emergency shelters. However, I have referred to it as a "shelter" because in many ways it more closely resembles an emergency shelter than a transitional living program. Rather than housing people in apartments or single-family homes as most transitional housing programs do, People in Transition's clients live together in a complex made up of several large sleeping rooms (three re- served for men and two for women) each of which houses up to nine people who share a bathroom. These "dorms/7 as the shelter refers to them, have nine beds placed around the room at different angles, in an attempt to provide a bit of privacy. Each bed has a night stand beside it and a padlocked trunk at the foot of the bed, the only space for residents' personal belongings besides several shared dressers. On top of the dressers are stacked piles of women's clothing, bedding, and personal belongings, and women also make use of the space under their beds for the possessions that will not fit into their trunks.

Other rooms in the complex host a large kitchen, community dining area, and a recreation room that has couches, several bookcases holding tattered novels, and a television. These rooms, including the dorms, are uniformly bare and drab; neither the staff nor the residents attempt to provide wall hang- ings, rugs, or other domestic touches. When, for instance, a woman moves out of the shelter and another has not moved in to take her place, the bed she used remains stripped of sheets,



blankets or comforter, with the bare, stained mattress and institutional brown metal bed frame serving as ugly and depressing reminders that this is not "home."

The area of town and housing project itself are dangerous places for the largely elderly clientele. Some residents are in wheelchairs, use walkers, or move around slowly and painfully; others have hearing or sight problems. Afraid to walk around the surrounding area, which is known for muggings (a former employee of the shelter was beaten while waiting for a bus across the street from the shelter), robbery, and sex work, many residents stay within the small yard directly in front of the cluster of buildings which house them. They are frustrated and depressed by their isolation, and even within the housing project do not always feel safe, as theft, vandal- ism, and assault have also occurred within the yard. In the winter of 1994, two residents witnessed several young men beating another person on the project grounds, and the residents called the police. As the police hauled the youths away, the young men pointed to the elderly shelter residents and threatened that they would return and "knew who they were."

The staff offices of People in Transition are in a separate building across the small yard from the dorms, and remain unlocked during the hours of 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon and 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. The office has a phone for resident use, and mes- sages and mail may be picked up as well. The two case managers and director of the shelter stay in their offices and rarely speak at length with those who live at the shelter, except during the one hour a week meeting that each resident has with one of the case managers. At this meeting, the case manager is to monitor and offer aid in a resident's search for housing, employment, benefits, or health care, and check on their mental and physical health. One case manager routinely spends any- where from five to 15 minutes with residents rather than the hour set aside for the weekly meetings. Moreover, this case manager generally emerges from his office only once during



the day, and as a result, residents most often deal with Beth, the administrative assistant. Beth speaks to residents in a rude and condescending way, and they, in turn, appear reticent and apologetic around her. One day I lunched with Beth and two female residents, Pat and Cathy, and Beth spoke as if Pat and Cathy were not present. She suggested that it would be "good for" the homeless people at the shelter to dress up in Hallow- een costumes on October 31st and participate in a talent show, because it might "increase their self-esteem."

Beth also monitors residents' mail, which they must agree to receive at People in Transition in order to be admitted into the program. When disability checks, food stamps, or pay- checks arrive, the office records the date, and the residents (who pay per month the greater of one-third of their incomes or $100) must sign for their checks and are asked to pay their fees. The system relies on the expectation that those living at the shelter will not pay in a timely manner, which supports the belief that staff should have access to their personal mail before the residents themselves do.

In August of 1994, a typical month in terms of the makeup of the shelter, People in Transition housed 31 men and 20 women, 41 of whom were Euro- American, six African- Ameri- can, two Native- American, one Latino and one Asian. Sixteen of the residents, only three of them women, were designated as having "substance abuse" problems. Anyone with a history of heavy alcohol or drug use is not accepted into the shelter without having had a three month period of abstinence or having completed a one month treatment program prior to apply- ing to the shelter. Staff might allow someone into the shelter who has a shorter period of abstinence, but such a decision is rare. Moreover, "substance abusers" must submit to random breathalyzer or urinalysis tests, attend Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and cannot drink on or off the shelter premises. Although no one can use drugs in their free time away from the shelter, the staff allows moderate al-



cohol use. However, if someone drinks and acts threatening or "uncontrolled/7 he or she will be placed in the substance abuse program and be unable to drink again. Upon their initial arrival at the shelter, staff warns residents that unannounced, random searches of the dorms will be conducted by staff; such searches occur when staff suspects a resident has been using drugs.

As might be suggested by some residents' ability to con- sume alcohol off the shelter premises, People in Transition does not have as many rules as the Family Shelter or Lighthouse. Keeping weapons at the shelter, theft from the shelter or other residents, violence or threatening behavior, and missing the curfew of 10:00 p.m. can result in eviction. On the other hand, case managers permit residents to stay overnight off the shelter grounds, as long as they submit a request in advance, a "privilege" other shelters do not offer. And though residents are not supposed to visit in others7 dorms, staff members do not closely or regularly monitor resident movement, except for a nightly bed check.

Homeless Camps

One alternative to shelters that still provides a semblance of community and mutual support exists in the organized campsites that dot the desert and fruit orchards around West City. One such homeless campsite is on state-owned property that abuts a freeway overpass. Just a half mile off a busy thor- oughfare, the panoply of rusty vans and campers which make up the camp sit in a small ravine and are completely obscured from the road by desert brush and trees. Approached by a dirt road which ends at a chain link fence, the path to the camp can be accessed only by foot through a break in the fence. A whistle hangs on the fence with a hand-lettered sign reading: "Beware! Blow whistle before entering!" The sound of the whistle will



summon whomever currently resides at the camp, surrounded by a pack of ten or so mangy dogs who have been known to bite people, particularly if visitors venture unaccompanied into the camp.

Camp residents have arranged several camper shells, an abandoned bus, and some rusty vans that serve as living quar- ters into a rough circle. Scattered about the edges of this circle are a variety of old cars, trucks and bicycles that the resident mechanic is attempting to repair or using for parts to fix other cars. One camper serves as the community food pantry, to which people staying at the camp for longer than a week are expected to contribute, according to their means.

Although some people come to the camp in search of an alternative to the shelters with their regulations, curfews, and requests for personal information, the camp has its own set of rules. Very sick people (mentally or physically) are not welcome, nor are heavy drug users or those who get violent while drunk. Such people disturb the quality of life, which at least during the day seems peaceful and somewhat solitary. More- over, they require care that the other residents do not wish to or feel capable to give, and might call undo attention to the camp in the form of visitors from social service agencies, or possibly city or state authorities demanding that the camp be vacated.

The camp has existed for five years, with different people moving in and out throughout this period, though Bruce, a 35- year-old Euro- American man, has lived here for nearly all five years. At 6:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning in September, Bruce is already awake and working on his latest mechanical project, a 1973 Chevy with chipped green paint and missing front fend- ers, muttering to himself and the dogs that range around him while he works. He sports a scraggly beard and wears only loose fitting jeans held up by a piece of rope. Bruce's reputation as a gifted mechanic often attracts people with automotive problems and limited resources to the camp. Some remain



only until Bruce completes the repairs, while others stay on for months and even years. Since I have arrived at the camp with Leon, a 30-year-old African- American social worker from a city organization which sends someone to the camps spo- radically to offer aid and housing options to the residents, Bruce is not friendly toward us, as he ostensibly might be toward people who hear about the camp through word of mouth and seek it out as a place to stay or for Bruce' s automotive expertise. Not happy about being disturbed, Bruce chats for a few minutes about his attempts to gain ownership of the Chevy, then turns back to his work. He responds to Leon's offer of blankets and sleeping bags with a gruff refusal.

We are soon joined by Nancy, a 40-year-old Euro- Ameri- can woman who is preparing for day labor on a construction site along with her boyfriend and another woman staying at the camp. The man who located the job and has arrived that morning to drive them to the site is a former camp resident himself who now has his own apartment, and occasionally drives out to the camp to visit with current camp residents. He has driven Nancy and the others to the construction job all week, and though Nancy admits that the work is physically very difficult, she and the others have been ready each morning at 6:30 a.m. This morning her boyfriend's wrist is swollen from an injury incurred the day before, but he plans to work anyway.

In contrast to Bruce' s barely checked annoyance, Nancy is articulate, funny and warm. With her hair brushed back in a ponytail, freshly polished nails, and clean shorts and t-shirt, it is difficult to tell that she lives in the desert without running water. Leon believes that she would leave the camp if he could help her enter a shelter or find subsidized housing, but her boyfriend is "a drinker" and does not wish to work with social service agencies, and Nancy wants to live with him. Accord- ing to Leon, most people at the camp had at one time or another looked to social services to help them to, for example,



find housing or receive disability benefits, but became discouraged when their benefits were cut without an explanation or disgusted with the array of case managers assigned to them, some working at odds with one another and others overlap- ping. Bruce7 s antipathy to social workers' requests for personal information or attempts to "change" homeless people that ac- company most offers for assistance probably echoes the complaints of many who live in such camps.

Nancy is in the process of "winterizing" her trailer, adding another layer to the outside walls of scrap wood, metal, and cork board, and filling in cracks and holes from the inside. Complaining that she has been cold during the increasingly cool evenings because she lacks anything but shorts to wear, she asks Leon for blankets and jeans. When we return to the camp another day, Leon brings sweat shirts and blankets for only Nancy and her boyfriend, believing that the rest of the camp residents would refuse them.

Resident Resistance to Staff Control

Not all homeless people turn to camps such as the one Bruce and Nancy live in, though many express similar beliefs about the patronizing or suspicious attitudes of social service workers. Many also complain about social worker invasiveness, which, along with maintaining "emotional distance" (Ferrill 1991: 124), has been institutionalized as part of a professional standard which is claimed to be necessary if homeless or low- income people are to be "helped" (Funiciello 1993: 182). To find "resistance" among homeless people to the discipline of the shelter and to narratives of homelessness which paint them as undeserving, one must recognize actions other than organized demonstrations, many of which are initially coordinated by non-homeless advocates or service providers. Organized uprisings may create a short-lived flurry of attention, but it is



the "everyday forms of ... resistance" (Scott 1985: 29) that best represent people's ongoing participation in creating cultural meaning, that most affect their lived experiences, the relationships they develop, and solutions to their situations that they devise.7

At the shelters in West City, resistance to narratives of "the homeless" as "dysfunctional," lazy, or mentally ill often sur- face in shelter residents' demands to be treated as human beings with particular histories and issues, or as individuals for whom a certain rule may be detrimental, rather than as a mass of "the homeless," all of whom have similar reasons for be- coming homeless and need to follow the rules in order to learn "discipline."8 Others resist the constructions of "dependent poor," which argue that the homeless can only be "helped" by social service agencies, by self-consciously taking from shelters (when available) the kind of help they feel they need while refusing to participate in the story that the shelter is "helping them to fit back into the mainstream." Although they often attempt to separate themselves from other people living in the shelter by refusing the label "homeless" and by claiming that they have better values than other homeless people, at the same time those living in the shelters utilize myriad creative attempts to resist constructions of "undeserving" and to evade the staff's personal micro-management. Their participation in construct- ing other homeless people as undeserving is tempered by the demands they place on the shelter, as well as their expectations that they be treated with dignity and humanity and not simply as a "case."

For instance, residents of People in Transition have refused to carry out the charade that the case manager as "professional" is helping them, once it was perceived that he did not take an active interest in their lives, or work on their behalf with other agencies. Residents hold an ongoing contest to see who can spend the least amount of time in the case manager's office for their weekly appointments (supposed to last an hour), the



record being three minutes. These residents may be read as refusing a narrative of homelessness which suggests that it is only with the help of a professional social worker, who needs to "change" the homeless, that such people will become permanently homed.

Just as shelter residents rarely take their complaints and demands directly to staff for fear of eviction, this practice left People in Transition residents (who had very few resources to begin with) in an extremely tenuous position. Specifically, when Sharon, a mentally ill African- American resident of the shelter, decided to switch from the case manager who did not work on residents7 behalf to another, her only choice was a staff member whose constant sexual talk "stressed her out." Sharon continues to meet with this second case manager, despite his sexual innuendo, because she perceives him as more willing than the other case manager to help her secure housing and other benefits. Sexual harassment might be more bearable than receiving no help at all; if Sharon cannot find housing and begin to receive disability payments by the end of her allotted time at the shelter, her severe memory lapses and other mental problems probably mean that she will be living on the street.

While inactive case managers can cause homeless people significant distress, so too can case manager attitudes that it is the shelter resident herself, rather than the structural reasons why she became homeless, that warrant investigation and correction. Tracy, a Family Shelter resident, protested a percep- tion of homeless people as not "equal" to others:

[People] don't look at us as the same as them. The case managers don't even think of us as the same as them. [Mark, the case manager at the shelter] got mad at me for worrying about Julie when she was sick [with a gall blad- der infection]. He said I should just worry about myself, because I have enough to do. We shouldn't have to be any different than other people ... it's human nature [to care


1 06 URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(1 ), 1 996

about a friend]. I don't have to care so much that I'd let people stay with me, but I care about friends.

Also complaining that the child care workers "look down on her/7 Tracy asserts: "If we had jobs, and those other people became homeless, we wouldn't look down on them 'cause we've been there, we know what it's like/7 She at once distin- guishes between herself and the child care workers, making a claim to moral superiority and to greater life experience, and at the same time maintains their equality, arguing that "anyone can become homeless/7 that it is plausible that someday she and the child care workers could exchange places.

Marta, a forty-year-old Latina, routinely feels disrespected by staff members at the Family Shelter, stating that the staff "gossips about people's private lives/7 and that the two main- tenance workers have "no compassion77 for the people at the shelter, acting as if people became homeless because they were lazy rather than that they had "run into crises.77 Moreover, like Erin and Mareia, Marta is disturbed by the staff's constant surveillance of shelter residents. For example, residents at the Family Shelter must request and sign for clothing from the donations room, as well as for even the most mundane or personal of toiletries and hygiene items. Marta expresses uneasi- ness about having to ask for personal items from staff members, fearing that the staff will think she is "using too much77 or is "greedy.77 She goes so far as to borrow laundry soap from her husband, who does not live at the shelter and from whom she separated due to his physical abuse, so that the staff will not think she has used too much of the shelter soap.

Michelle, a Euro- American mother of two, argues that the Family Shelter program is superior to the Lighthouse, where she had stayed five years ago, but nonetheless objects to certain Family Shelter staff practices. In particular, Michelle la- ments that staff does not approach each resident in a more individualized way in order attempt to ascertain the specific rea-



sons each person has become homeless rather the staff assumes each person's poverty can be addressed through counseling and life skills classes. Michelle's comments extend to a critique of poverty policy generally:

The only thing I don't like about this program is that I've seen them throw out five families with no place to go. Marta had bad credit so she couldn't get an apartment. Now she's living in her car.... They're no better off than when they came in here. The thing is, she has the money for a place but no one would rent to her. It wasn't like she didn't try. I'd see her on the phone all the time.

Though the Family Shelter allowed Marta to stay longer than her allocated three months when she could not find housing, and in so doing provided the individualized treatment which Michelle argues routinely should govern staff's work with clients, she was eventually asked to leave without having secured an apartment. Similarly, Michelle does not believe that she is learning from the mandatory classes at the shelter: "It gripes me that I have to go to parenting classes since I've been twice already. And in Life Skills class, we were given an exercise to budget for a man who made $60,000 a year. If any of us made that much, we wouldn't be here. I told the lady that, that she should give us an exercise to budget with $1,000 a month/' Michelle's comments make clear her understanding that most women's homelessness cannot be attributed to budgeting problems and fixed with a class on such skills. It is difficult to support a family of three on $1,000 a month, and learning how to divide up $60,000 a year, to add and subtract figures in col- umns of expenses and equity, will not help a woman like Michelle.

Gloria, an African- American mother of two who became homeless after she and her husband divorced, like Michelle has analyzed why women become homeless and how shelters and agencies could better serve them. She uses one example to



explain how shelter regulations can work to the detriment of residents:

At [the Ministry shelter, another West City homeless shelter], they don't serve breakfast, and kids go to school without breakfast. And you're not supposed to have food in your room, and it forces people to be dishonest. So if that's the little lie you're telling [that you don't have breakfast food in your room when you actually do], then what other lie will you tell just to stay in the program? I was lucky enough to have a car and I kept a cooler in it with ice. I'd take [the kids] to school and we'd sit at the picnic table and have cereal with milk.

Also, everyone had to pay $225 a month to stay at [the Ministry]. That's something a lot of people don't realize.

Arguably if the staff listened to Gloria's critique, the shelter would be more humane and able to diminish some stress in the residents' lives. However, as Dee Dee's experience indicates, most homeless people's ideas are not welcome and can result in eviction from the shelter.

Dee Dee, a Euro-American resident of the Lighthouse, claims that staff at the Ministry asked her to leave after she wrote a letter of complaint about an employee who "used to whisper in the women's ears who couldn't speak English, say- ing they need to go back to their own countries." After the Ministry evicted her, the Lighthouse accepted Dee Dee and her daughter: "This is like a country club compared to the Ministry ... they have 400 people [at the Ministry] and not enough staff. The kids ran around like animals, and were treated like animals." Contrary to some of the other women's complaints about the invasiveness of Lighthouse policies, Dee Dee asserts that "knowing everyone's business," as well as the structured nature of the program, are both aspects that make it strong:



The organizational structure and expertise of the Lighthouse is what makes them successful. The recidivism rate of their clients - people who really don't want help but don't want to be on the streets and think they're going to slide by - is not related to the delivery of the program.... This program works because everyone knows everyone's business.... People who come here are in crisis and hearing that other people's stories are similar is healing.

Dee Dee does not point out, however, that as at most shelters, homeless residents must reveal details about their personal relationships, work histories, and families in order to be accepted into the program, and their personal information is ex- changed with other staff, while the case managers strive to maintain professional distance by not sharing their own personal histories with residents. Moreover, as Tammy, a resident of a domestic violence shelter, suggests, staff members who attempt to provide counseling to residents while also controlling their access to shelter ask homeless people to divulge information that potentially could place at risk their continued residence at the shelter: "I'd feel more comfortable if an outside person offered counseling. That way I can say anything and m not afraid 11 piss staff off. There are some things I can't say to staff/7

Although she is happier at the Lighthouse than she was at the Ministry, Dee Dee still calls it a "circus on all ends/' ac- tively critiquing the program and case manager decisions. And though the Ministry evicted her for asserting her belief that a staff member should change his behavior, she remains outspo- ken at the Lighthouse: "I was told to put my 17-year-old daughter on the city bus [to go to school] on [a very dangerous street in front of the shelter] at 5:30 in the morning. I had to call some of the case managers on their advice to me. I think I can give them some unbiased advice." By asserting that she has a per- spective from which Lighthouse case managers can learn, and in particular that hers are unbiased criticisms, Dee Dee places herself in the same league with the staff, undercutting their



claims to "expert" status. Case managers as licensed social workers strive to remain "unbiased"; the position of social worker as professional relies upon the ability to remain fairly detached from people's lives while offering specialized advocacy and "objective" advice. Dee Dee, then, takes Tracy's belief that she is "the same" as the case managers (in the sense that they are all human beings), one step further. She argues that she is as capable of teaching them as they are of imparting knowledge and advice to her.

Conclusion

As Gusfield has argued in terms of drinking and driving, the construction of homelessness as a "public problem" is in- trinsically related to attempts to solve it (Gusfield 1981: 5-8; Nathanson 1991: 11). Homelessness became a problem with a "public status," or "something about which someone ought to do something" (Gusfield: 5) in the early 1980s, as academics, politicians, and activists increasingly paid attention to precari- ously housed populations, slowly changing the notion of "bums" and "vagrants" to the "homeless." However, despite current popular concern for and charitable impulses toward the homeless not directed toward "skid row" populations ear- lier in the century, representations of the alcoholic "bum" and disaffected "vagrant" have not been excised from a narrative of homelessness.

Indeed, although the growing number of homeless families is often cited as evidence of the ways in which homelessness may result from structural dislocation, examination of family shelters and long-term transitional housing programs indicates that homelessness continues to be defined as essentially a mental health and individual problem. Social workers have been given primary responsibility for "fixing" the homeless through surveillance and control of "deviant lifestyles." From the per-



spective of shelter as institution designated for "fixing" the homeless, then, it becomes imperative to analyze the architecture and regulations of various shelters. The specific context of the shelter both reflects and helps to further establish a particular understanding of why people become homeless and how responses to homelessness should be crafted. Shelter staff sometimes patronize and often suspect homeless residents of trying to deceive them; other times staff offer real assistance in a search for low-income housing or more stable employment. Regardless of their treatment of homeless people in the shelters, however, staff commonly understand the residents as "cases" to which an "expert" responds by using professionalized methods (such as demanding personal information, writing a case plan, and mandating life skills classes) in order to correct and control the homeless person.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Matthew Crenson and Suzette Hemberger for their ongoing support and critique of the research project from which this article comes, and Laury Oaks and Cass Russett for providing thoughtful comments on this essay.

NOTES

1. All names and identifying background information have been changed in order to protect the anonymity of the participants.

2. I thank Laury Oaks for suggesting this line of inquiry. 3. This quote by Eleanor Leacock was made in the context ot critiqu-

ing the culture of poverty thesis. Leacock 1967: 3-4, quoted in Katz 1989: 39.

4. Some women stated that they had been reluctant to seek housing in an emergency shelter for fear of violence from other shelter residents.

5. Ferrill's experiences with mentally ill homeless women attest to the difficulties that staff may encounter in working with them as shelter residents, and points to staff's reliance on rules to remain



consistent in their treatment of mentally ill women (Ferrill 1991, esp. 97). However, West City family shelters generally avoid accepting seriously mentally ill women or men.

6. In interviews with staff and residents of women's homeless shelters, Liebow (1993) found that conflicts between staff and clients were defined by the powerlessness of clients on one hand, and staff's authoritarianism or fear of violence from the women on the other. Some staff believed that as professional social workers, they needed to "change" the women.

7. Sherry Ortner argues that resistance studies often lack a serious examination of the politics and culture of "dominated groups." This article is part of a larger project on the culture of homeless people in shelters that explores in greater detail Ortner' s conten- tion that "culture informs, shapes and underpins resistance at least as much as it emerges situationally from it" (1995: 181).

8. In Aihwa Ong's study of women factory workers in an industrial- izing rural Malaysian town, she found little "coherent articulation of exploitation in class or even feminist terms." Rather, the women resisted in fragmented, individualized ways against what they perceived to be inhumane treatment that threatened their "moral status" (1987: 196).

REFERENCES CITED

Ferrill, Lisa (1991). A Far Cry From Home: Life in a Shelter for Homeless Women. Chicago: The Noble Press.

Foucault, Michel (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Second edition. New York: Vintage Books.

Funiciello, Theresa (1993). Tyranny of Kindness: Dismantling the Welfare System to End Poverty in America. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press.

Golden, Stephanie (1992). The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gusfield, Joseph R. (1981). The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driv- ing and the Symbolic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Huttman, Elizabeth, and Sonjia Redmond (1992). Women and Homelessness: Evidence of Need to Look Beyond Shelters to Long Term Social Service Assistance and Permanent Housing. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 19(4): 89-111.



Katz, Michael B. (1989). The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. New York: Pantheon Books.

Kozol, Jonathan (1988). Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America. New York: Fawcett Columbine.

Leacock, Eleanor (1967). Distortions of Working-Class Reality in American Social Science. Science and Society 31 (1967): 3-4.

Liebow, Elliot (1993). Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women. New York: The Free Press.

Marin, Peter (1987). Helping and Hating the Homeless: The Struggle at the Margins of America. Harpers 274(1640): 39-49.

Nathanson, Constance A. (1991). Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women's Adolescence. Philadelphia: Temple Uni- versity Press.

Ong, Aihwa (1987). Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Ortner, Sherry B. (1995). Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Re- fusal. Society for Comparative Study of Society and History 37(1): 173-193.

Rabinow, Paul (ed.) (1984). The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books.

Scott, James C. (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wagner, David (1993). Checkerboard Square: Culture and Resistance in a Homeless Community. Boulder: Westview Press.

Weisman, Leslie Kanes (1992). Discrimination By Design: A Feminist Cri- tique of the Man-Made Environment. Urbana: University of Illi- nois Press.

Wolch, Jennifer (1995). Review of TELL THEM WHO I AM: THE LIVES OF HOMELESS WOMEN, by Elliot Liebow. Urban Geography 16(2): 178-188.

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Williams 1996 Geography of the Homeless Shelter Staff Surveillance & Resident Resistance