Informed Consent: Information Production and Ideology

INFORMED CONSENT I N FOWT I oN PRODUCTION AND IDEOLOGY

Lisa R. Schaff

The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Lanham, Maryland, and Oxford 2003

SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706 www.scarecrowpress.com PO Box 317 Oxford OX2 SRU, UK Copyright 02003 by Lisa R. Schiff

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData Schiff, Lisa R., 1966Informed consent : information production and ideology / Lisa R. Schiff. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8108-3903-2 (alk. paper) 1. Information theory in the social sciences. 2. Ideology. 3. Social sciencesResearch. 4. Political planning. 5. Homelessness. 6. Objectivity. I. Title. H61.8 .S35 2003 300'.7'2-d~2 1

2002156065

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO 239.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States ofAmerica.

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

V

LIST OF TABLES

vi

FOREWORD

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xi

1

INTRODUCTION

1

2

DEFINITIONS AND PREMISES

7

3

INFORMATION PRODUCTION IN CONTEXT

28

4

IDEOLOGY: T h e Dominating Conceptions of Homelessness

58

5

MECHANISMS: Connecting Ideology And Information Production

88

6

CONCLUSION

108

APPENDIX A Interview Subjects

117

APPENDIX B Key Elements of the Field of Homelessness

119

APPENDIX C History of Homelessness in San Francisco

135

...

Ill

CONTENTS

APPENDIX D Research Method

143

APPENDIX E Interview Questions

153

APPENDIX F TranscriptionConventions

155

BIBLIOGRAPHY

157

INDEX

165

ABOUT T H E AUTHOR

171

iv

FIGURES

2.I. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4. 5.5. 5.6. 5.7. 5.8. B. 1.

Certification of Homelessness Field of Homelessness The Data-Money Connection Post-Shelter Housing Options Money Management Rehabilitation in an Intake Form Substance Abuse and Forms Conflict within a Form The Dynamics of Mechanisms Difference Reinforced in Data Production Evaluating Clients Follow-ups in Forms internal and External Causes of Homelessness Codification in a Form Substance Abuse Codified in a Form Paternalism in a Form Agents by Structural Relations

V

24 30 42 52 70 74 77 78 89 93 95 96 98 101 102 103 125

TABLES

Key Elements of Homelessness and Information Production 4.1. Dominating Conceptions 5.1. Primary Mechanisms 5.2. Mechanisms, Conceptions, and Information Production Practices A. 1. Interview Subjects 2.1.

VI

16 59 89 106 118

FOREWORD

T

he questions What do we know? and How do we know it? are not new and may always be with us. In this book, Lisa Schiff provides usehl insights that help us understand both the nature of these questions and key components of the answers. But her analysis provides us with much more. By focusing on the interconnections between ideology and information, we gain insights into the nature of modern society and the nature of political and social discourse. We end up realizing that the more important question is, What determines what it is that we think we know? This remarkable work makes its contribution on two different levels. First, there is the advancement of theory that enables us to begin to understand the linkages between ideology and information. Then, there is the empirical work examining how data on homelessness are generated, gathered, and utilized. This second part complements the first and shows a remarkable understanding of the political, bureaucratic, and social forces that define the nature and extent of the hornelessness “problem,” as well as shape the policy responses to that problem. Schiff starts by taking a theoretical approach, relying on philosophical and social analyses. She uses these tools well, and we come away with a well-developed understanding of how ideology contributes to the contexts in which information is created and internalized. We also understand that this is not the result of a one-way causal path. Yes, ideology influences the creation, distribution, and use of information, but information helps in the creation and maintenance of the dominant ideology. The relationships

FOREWORD

are complex, and feedback and reinforcement are common in the processes related to the development of both ideology and information. It is not surprising that counting the homeless is a political and bureaucratic nightmare for politicians and social agencies. Despite (or maybe because of) the constitutional requirement of a decennial census having given us many opportunities to practice, we as a nation still do not agree how to count our citizenry, and we certainly, by almost any measure, do not do it well. This is not simply some bureaucratic failure to carry out a simple task. Instead, there are hndamental disagreements over how to approach the assignment, and we have come to expect a politically charged debate over both means and ends. By tying the flows of massive amounts of government expenditure-not to mention redistricting-to arcane formulae that use census data as inputs, the results of the census lead to changes in the wealth and political power of regions and constituencies. Similarly, the “results” of one count of the homeless population or another influence everything from how high the various homeless issues are on political and social agendas to the outcomes of local elections. And, of course, they also provide support for increasing or decreasing the money spent on “combating” the problem. It is common in applied social science research circles to encounter statements claiming that a certain question could be analyzed better if only one had more or better data. Variants of this statement include complaints that government agencies have cut back on their data-collection efforts, often accompanied by conspiracy-like theorizing about how this cut might be part of an effort to restrict governmental regulation or oversight. Similarly, it is also common to hear businesses complain about the burden governmental information collection policies and practices place on them. The magnitude of this effort, at least at the federal level, can be quantified. A White House agency, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), compiles an “Inventory of Approved Information Collections” as part of its “paperwork reduction” mission. OIRA currently estimates that federal agencies collect approximately 67 billion responses annually that go into just under 8,000 authorized active reports. Using the analytic constructs in this book, we realize that the debate over the general question of whether the government collects too little or too much data is ultimately only of minor interest. It is more important to ...

Vlll

FOREWORD

examine in detail the types of data, the rationales for their collection, and the ways in which they are used (and misused). It is important to understand the interplay between information and ideology, and this work goes a long way in helping us accomplish that difficult task. Yale M. Braunstein Professor, Information Management and Systems University of California-Berkeley

ix

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M

any people were involved with the creation of this book. Any success it has is due greatly to them. First, thanks go to my advisor, Yale Braunstein, at the University of California-Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems, who gave me the opportunity and encouragement to follow this line of research during its dissertation phase. Thanks are also due to Yale for suggesting I send the manuscript to Sue Easun, a true editor who could see a coherent book through the mass of words and ideas she was handed. Patrick Wilson, also of the School of Information Management and Systems, and Judy Innis, of the University of California-Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning, provided essential insights that sharpened the original presentation. Many individuals at a host of organizations gave their time to speak with me about their work. They provided me with the opportunity to begin to understand and examine information production in the day-to-day world. Among these organizations are the Episcopal Sanctuary, the Homeless Prenatal Program, Raphael House, and the San Francisco Department of Public Health. My parents, Judy and Bruce Schiff, laid the groundwork by teaching me from the start to examine everything. They have stood by me as I’ve been spurred to act on the results of such examinations. Finally, it is no exaggeration to say that this book would not have been possible without the unwavering support of my partner and personal champion, Tim Lennon. He not only sustained me with love and care during the XI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

long process of bringing this book to light but also spent hours reading each of its many drafts. His depth of understanding of ideology made him the best of critics, and he challenged me at each turn not to shy away from my arguments. In many ways, I consider this work to be only the latest, and not the last, in a string of collaborations as we travel through life together.

xii

INTRODUCTION

E

very day, millions of people read or listen to reports on the shape of our world: the number of unemployed, the percentage of people with access to the Internet, the amount of rain that day, the number of new housing starts, the rate of hate crimes. From routine and mundane traffic reports to complex and extravagant scientific theories regarding the earliest moments of the universe, we are compelled to seek information to understand and enrich our lives. Although as recipients of data we often know little about how these numbers and reports were generated, we repeat them to friends, family, and coworkers in conversation. We continually build and revise our dayto-day world using such information. This activity signifies the great power we invest in information. Information acquires such power in at least two ways. First, it is delivered to us via sources we are quick to accept as trustworthy, for example, government agencies, magazines, and news stations. These venues are taken as reliable arbiters of the quality of the information they generate and disseminate. We take for granted that thejournalist who wrote today’s front-page story has engaged in fact checking or that the Census Bureau is following a proven methodology in making population estimates. Reliable sources of information are often described as impartial, meaning that those who originally collected or disseminated the information have no vested interest in that data. The quintessential example

1

CHAPTER 1

of this image is the dispassionate scientist, conducting experiments in search of the “truth.” But while it is possible that the prototypical scientist is agnostic as to the outcome of an experiment (and this assumption is highly debatable), it is impossible to assert that the framework for that experiment does not influence the outcome. The tools at hand, knowledge (or lack) of previous work on the subject, the ideas and actions of coworkers, the interests of finding sources-all of these factors and more shape the particular way an experiment is formulated and thus its potential results. Impartiality is just one factor in this mix and is perhaps the least important because it is the most obvious. The idea of impartiality is a myth that gets in the way of critically examining and using information that we encounter. Supposed neutrality provides a misleading shortcut to assessing the validity of a piece of information, in whatever form we find it. No matter that the journalist who wants to write a good story gets “both sides,” the reader still should ask, Why these sources? and even Why this story?’The answers to these questions reveal how the topic is being framed and understood at the outset, which is far more usehl for critiquing information than the illusory quality of impartiality. This is not to say that we should not trust our information sources, but rather that our trust must not be based simply on a measure of impartiality. It should spring out of the knowledge we have of the context in which the information was generated. The trust must be calibrated by the details we have about who, how, and why the information was collected and disseminated. This will help keep us mindful that information is created in and contains within itself certain visions of the world. Thus, the understandings of those involved in generating information, by definition, must shape that information. This is the second way in which information acquires power. This book is an examination of that illusive aspect-how ideas shape information, or put another way, how ideology and information influence each other. It focuses on the interaction between information productiontaking surveys, generating and idling out forms, creating reports-and ideologies, which will also be referred to as commonly held understandings. While at first glance this relationship appears to be relatively simple to untangle, it is in fact quite complex. The dynamics at work are usually

2

INTRODUCTION

so interwoven with everyday actions that they require a concerted, critical gaze to be identified and revealed. On the one hand, there is an overriding tendency to view information and the processes by which it is generated as objective and authoritative, especially when that information is developed at an institutional level. On the other hand, even when such influence is recognized, it is often laid at the feet of a given individual’s bias and perspective, which, while indicative of differing positions and backgrounds, in no way accounts for the institutional and social imperatives that exist independent of any given person. The issue is much deeper than simply a question of personal bias and is rather a question of social reproduction and the exercise of institutional authority that facilitates this reproduction. Viewed in this light, information can be seen as the ideological product and force that it is, shaped by the social relations and interests of those who generate it. We can see also that information is likewise capable of either furthering or challenging that same ideology. It is, in other words, necessarily “impure.” Beginning with the forms we use to collect data and the reporting criteria that precede them, dominating ideologies about social relations affect both how we think about the information we want and how we get it. By shaping the questions we pose and the answers these generate, power relations and other conflicting social interests are actually embedded in the facts and figures that represent our world. But how does this actually occur? How do the commonly held understandings (ideologies) that permeate society influence, and become themselves influenced by, the process of producing information? Through the ill answer this question, tracing the relationship course of this book, we w between ideology and information generation and identifying the mechanisms by which this relationship exists. We will not just describe this relationship but will get inside and under it and identify the meanings and understandings that are either implicit and therefore less obvious or so obvious they are rendered almost invisible. From this vantage point, we will be able to see how information can be shaped by ideology, and how it is a key element in both the reproduction of ideology and challenges to it, especially at the point of production. However, to accomplish this task we must step out of the pure realm of philosophy and theory. It is essential that we roll up our sleeves and begin

3

CHAPTER 1

the hard work of digging into the everyday world, where the validity of such concepts can be tested daily and their potential usefulness brought to bear. To that end, the research on which this book is based examines a very specific realm of that everyday world-the process of generating data (such as counts and demographic information) about people without homes in San Francisco. This realm was chosen because it is of social concern and because it is an area rich with contested meanings, as can be seen in the endless efforts to count people who are homeless and the struggles over those resulting statistics. Almost every count of homeless people in San Francisco and throughout the United States has been subject to major criticism, indicating that there is both divergence in how to count and much at stake in the results of those counts. This conflict first surfaced in 1984,when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) undertook a count and made an estimate that 250,000 to 350,000 people throughout the country were homeless, which contrasted greatly with the 2 to 3 million that advocates estimated.2In 1992,the cities of San Francisco and Baltimore actually brought a lawsuit against the Census Bureau, contesting the methods and results of the bureau’s one-night count in 1990.3In almost every instance, counting has been a fractious exercise, both in terms of the methods undertaken and their subsequent results. This contest indicates that different groups are going about the countingprocess in quite different ways, and therefore they are thinking about homelessness in quite different ways. Not only do the explicit definitions of homelessness lead to differing counts, but the actual counting methods can vary, thus producing different total numbers, even with the same definitions. For instance, some have undertaken efforts to take unduplicated counts of people at shelters and on streets over a one-week period, while others have done statistical sampling based on telephone interviews assessing homelessness over a fiveyear p e r i ~ d These .~ types of counts have widely different results. The one-week count, undertaken in 1987 for the Urban Institute, produced an estimate of 500,000 to 600,000 h~meless.~ By contrast, the study looking at incidences of homelessness during a five-year period found that 3.1 percent of the population, or 5.7 million people, had been homeless during that five-yearperiod.6 Underneath this discrepancy are multiple, competing understandings about homelessness and about how to generate

4

INTRODUCTION

meaningful data, which makes it a rich arena for the investigation of meaning and information production. Our task then, will be to closely evaluate the process of generating data about homeless people in San Francisco. What sorts of assumptions about homeless people and homelessness are implicit in the forms people must fill out to receive services? What ideas are supported or challenged by the frequent surveys of homeless people? Who collects this data and why? The focus will be precisely on the generation of data about homelessness, not on the actual experience of being homeless. Taking on these specific questions ties us to the real activities of real people, grounding us and at the same time permitting us to begin to think outside the confines of the specific area of homelessness. Ifwe understand how ideology and information production interact in one arena, we are one step ahead in looking at how they interact in other arenas. Thus, analyzing questionnaires and intake forms in terms of specific, commonly held understandings about homeless people allows us to think more generally about ideology and information production in general. Our specific questions can take on a more generic character: How do ideology and information production interact? How do they influence each other? What are the implications of this interaction? Through asking and answering such questions, we can delineate how concepts are socially perpetuated and institutionalized; how those concepts serve to frame social problems; and finally, how public policy is influenced by ideology. When contradictions become clear and identifiable, changes in public policy, at least in terms of data production practices, become more likely. Our ultimate purpose, then, will be to understand how we can effectively and critically examine the tools and processes we use to develop information so that we can conscientiously alter them as needed to better reflect our intentions. Ideology may appear to be like the air we breathe, in that it is essential albeit unnoticed, but it can in fact be identified in action and thus challenged. By finding the mechanisms that link ideology and information production, we can actually pinpoint opportunities for intervention. In this way, information production processes and tools can be examined and reworked, and the hmework in which we understand the world can be recognized and remade.

5

CHAPTER 1

NOTES 1. Noam Chomsky has written extensively about how dominant frameworks are subtly and unintentionally reproduced by the media. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: ‘The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York Pantheon Books, 1988). 2. James D. Wright and Joel A. Devine, “Housing Dynamics of the Homeless: Implications for a County,” AmericanJournal of Ortho#sychiatry 65, no. 3 (July 1995): 320-21. 3. “Census Bureau Sued Over Homeless Count,” New %rk limes, 11 October 1992,18 (N). 4. Bruce G.Link et al., “Lifetime and Five-Year Prevalence of Homelessness in the United States: New Evidence on an Old Debate,”AmericanJournal of Orth@sychiatT 65, no. 3 (July 1995): 347-54. 5. Martha R. Burt, “Critical Factors in Counting the Homeless: An Invited Commentary,” AmericanJournal of Orthofisychiatry 65, no. 3 (July 1995): 335. 6. Link, “Lifetime and Five-Year Prevalence of Homelessness in the United States,” 349.

6

DEFINITIONS AND PREMISES

H

omelessness, social context, information, and ideology are the anchoring concepts that will provide the foundation for the analysis throughout this book. These concepts will help us to uncover the mechanisms of how ideology and information production are intertwined as service providers create forms and clients complete them, as advocates administer surveys, and as public agencies compile counts.

HOMELESSNESS Defining homelessness is a central task for those setting and implementing policy, as well as for those acting as advocates. It is also a problematic task because homelessness is not necessarily an easily identified circumstance. While many would agree that an individual literally camping on the streets is homeless, what about the individual temporarily living with friends or family? What about migrant workers? Or people who are temporarily institutionalized? The distance between these understandings of homelessnew is great and has tremendous implications for the distribution of resources earmarked to assist those experiencing homelessness. * The debate over homelessness has, in fact, existed for quite some time, beginning soon after the expansion of European settlement in this country. Throughout the centuries,the number of people without a permanent place to live has periodically risen and fallen (the most well-known example being ' 9

7

CHAPTER 2

during the Great Depression of the 1930s),and the face of that population has fluctuated as well, between widows, orphans, families, and single men. Community and institutional responses to homelessness have also historically varied, including aid, “rehabilitation” efforts, and incarceration, depending upon how that population has been defined.3i4i5Contemporaryresponses to homelessness continue to fall within this spectrum of responses. One such response, the 1987 McKinney Act, is the first and only federal legislative response to homelessness in the United States. The McKinney Act includes a very precise definition of homelessness, as quoted below: Sec. 103 GENERAL DEFINITION OF HOMELESS INDIVIDUAL (a) In General.-For purposes of this Act, the term “homeless” or “homeless individual” includes: (1) an individual who lacks a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence; and (2) an individual who has a primary nighttime residence that is-

(A) a supervised publicly or privately operated shelter designed to provide temporary living accommodations (including welfare hotels, congregate shelters, and transitional housing for the mentally ill); (B) an institution that provides a temporary residence for individuals intended to be institutionalized; or (C) a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings!

For its purposes, McKinneyessentially defines homelessnessas living on the streets or in shelters. To address these circumstances, the act created a number of programs to address emergency housing situations and made monies available for those programs to be administered at local levels. An Interagency Council on Homelessness was created to oversee implementation, and in 1993, President Bill Clinton gave that council the task of streamliningthe programs and procedures related to the McKinney Act. Because McKinney is an essential source of support, most of the assistance programs available to homeless people are those laid out in the act: emergency shelter programs; transitional housing; the conversion or renovation of buildings (such as surplus federal buildings) into shelters; food programs; and supportive services in employment, health, education, 8

DEFINITIONS AND PREMISES

training, and ending substance abuse. McKinney requires municipalities to develop housing strategies and to involve homeless persons in programs as much as possible. Additionally, and most important for the discussion here, because the McKinney Act is such a tremendous source of money and program support, its definition of homelessness is adhered to by a majority of organizations working with people without homes. Programmatic decisions about who can be served and in what ways are shaped by the ability to fund those programs. Thus, even though a service provider may have a different, perhaps less narrow, definition of homelessness for its target population, programs for that group will be more difficult, if not almost impossible, to realize, as the potential funding base is so much smaller. This type of influence of the McKinney Act definition will be explored throughout this book. Evidence of the concern over the implications of defining homelessness can be found in efforts to count the number of homeless people in this country and the resulting conflict over those count^.^^^^^^ lo To count something, you must first define it, so any effort at determining the number of people without homes in any given area (or in the entire United States) by necessity must draw a line between who is and who is not homeless. The most recent nationwide example of counting occurred with the 1990 census, in which there was an exploratory attempt to specifically seek out homeless people. Service providers kept tallies and census enumerators attempted to find homeless people on the streets. Because of the criticism of earlier efforts to count homeless people on a national scale, the Census Bureau arranged for researchers to conduct evaluative observations in five cities on the night the enumeration took place. Referred to as “S-Night” to denote counting people in shelters and on the streets, researchers deployed observers and observer decoys at key sites in their respective cities. These cities were randomly chosen based on lists of sites of congregation developed by the Census Bureau and augmented by the researchers. Overall, the Census Bureau did quite an incomplete count, missing from 26 percent to 75 percent of the decoys depending upon the city and thus rendering the final official count of 228,372 quite suspect. Researchers attributed this undercounting to a combination of factors: incomplete lists of street sites at which to do the enumeration (in part because the lists were primarily developed from advice from police departments only); a lack of resources to cover entire 9

CHAPTER 2

cities; enumerators who violated the protocol either by asking inappropriate questions, failing to ask any questions at all, or completely avoiding sites; and some intentional avoidance on the part of homeless people themselves.11t 1%1%147 15916 The nagging question underlying these efforts is why we are counting homeless people at all. The self-evident reasons include gaining an understanding of the scope of the problem and providing support for advocates and service providers.” Indeed, Congress has recently included directives in its legislations funding HUD for just this purpose. As expressed in a committee report,” the goal is to generate unduplicated counts of the number of people who are homeless as part of an effort to evaluate the effectiveness of the McKinney Act. But while on the face of it this task might seem straightforward,it is not. As discussed earlier, defining who is homeless and how to count them are serious problems. Even if the McKinney definition were used as it stands, different numbers would be generated if the counting were to represent the number of people homeless on a given day or over a period of time. Homelessness is not a stable state; people go in and out of homelessness, and some of those periods may be quite short, which increases the likelihood that a single-day count will miss a substantial fraction of them.lg For just these reasons, the value of the task of counting in itself has been called into question. Bassuk2’ argues that counting is problematic in that the discrepancies between counts are huge, that there are not enough resources to meet the needs of all the homeless people even if we knew how many there are, and that perhaps counting is merely a distraction from actually solving the problem of homelessness. The risk is that resources and time get spent on producing an unachievable exact tally of people who are homeless to the detriment of the production of solutions to homelessness. Shinn and Weitzman2’ refer to this last point as well, raising concerns that counts may not only be diversionarybut may in fact reinforce stereotypes. They caution that counts aid us in focusing on individual characteristics of people who are homeless, leading to services addressing those characteristics deemed problematic, as opposed to addressing structural problems, such as housing availability. Counts can also serve to simplifythe problem, by allowingus to be distracted by numbers and discrepancies instead of focusing on what those numbers (discrepancies and all) represent.22Asdifficult as they are to achieve, counts, 10

DEFINITIONS AND PREMISES

under current social conditions, are in many ways easier to accomplish than any other task surrounding the problem of homelessness. So far, we have discussed how homelessness could be and has been defined by others but not how it is defined for the purposes of this book. Because we are interested in analyzing the very process of defining homelessness, a more broadly encompassing definition is required in order to capture all of the contending meanings. To accomplish this task, we will consider homelessness to be the state of being without permanent, secure, safe shelter. This definition is thus inclusive of such situations as living on the street, living in an abandoned building, or living with fiends or family. We shall see the conflict surrounding defining homelessness appear throughout this book and will be able to identify two levels at which defining homelessness operates. The first is at the situational level-the circumstances one must be in to be considered homeless, such as living on the street. The second is at the level of personal characteristics-the more personal attributes or behaviors ascribed to someone who is homeless, such as being a substance abuser. Each of these levels provides a rich space for the interplay of ideology and information production. We will also see that definitions can appear in both an explicit and implicit manner. Of particular interest are implicit definitions. Explicit definitions are those actively made known to and recognized by people involved with homelessness. To the degree to which the creators of these definitions have authority, those definitions must be responded to and will shape the activities of others. The McKinney Act is an example of an explicit definition. It is codified in legislation and has become part of the day-to-day work surrounding homelessness. By contrast, implicit definitions are those that are embedded in documents and practices. They are implied, are not necessarily well drawn or easily seen, and thus are more difficult to identify and respond to despite the great influence they can have. For instance, many forms that service providers require clients to complete focus on issues of substance abuse, implying that people who are homeless are substance abusers. The definition of homelessness thus gets altered to describe substance abusers. While no doubt some homeless people are substance abusers, many are not, as many substance abusers are not homeless. These two situations may or may not co-occur, but if they are repeatedlyjuxtaposed whenever homelessness is looked at, they become merged, again, in an implicit way. 11

CHAPTER 2

In order to identify all of the many ways in which definitions of homelessness appear, we must confine ourselves to a specific setting, otherwise the scope of possibilities is too wide ranging to come to grips with in any meaninghl way. This “setting” can be thought of as the social contextthe particular environment that we will look at-and requires its own definition, described below.

SOCIAL CONTEXT The phrase social context is really nothing more than shorthand for a series of questions that every child learns to ask in school: who, what, why, where, when, and how. Who is collecting data? What data are they actually collecting? Why are they collecting it? Under what circumstances and with which supporting resources? Answering these questions will provide us with a rich picture of how information about homeless people is actually produced. The work of Pierre Bourdieu offers a unique suite of analytical tools for finding those answers. Bourdieu is a French sociologist interested in how societies maintain and reproduce themselves and, especially, in how power is interwoven throughout different social dynamics within the larger project of social maintenance. Ideology, as will be discussed more hlly toward the end of this chapter, is also concerned with the question of social maintenance-how ideas and concepts help to keep current patterns of power and control in place. Although Bourdieu himself has been critical of the theory of ideology because of concerns with determinism (simply assuming that all social relations can be understood as being primarily, or even solely, shaped by ideology), his work is actually quite complementary to studies of ideology, for it assists in discovering the particular ways in which power is held and articulated in a given social setting. Bourdieu’s criticisms can therefore be reformulated into a wise warning not to be determinist in our own analysis. With this in mind, we can take his approach to social analysis and amass in a theoretically consistent way the detailed understanding of a social setting in order to observe more illusive social processes such as the workings of ideology. Bourdieu has examined such disparate areas as Algerian peasant societies, the French public school system, and aesthetic sensibilities within 12

DEFINITIONS A N D PREMISES

and across classes. From this empirical work, he has developed a core set of analytical tools that can be used to analyze almost any given social arena, some of which will be used in this analysis: fields, agents, practices (informationpractices, for the purpose of this book), and capitals. These conceptual tools provide a means for taking apart complex sets of relationships and more clearly understanding them by looking at the individual elements and how they are connected to each other. We will be using the tools in the following chapters in order to develop a sense of the social context for information production about homelessness as we examine specific situations and specific forms and documents. Fields are the context in which agents operate and in which actions and resources have particular meaning and value. Examples of fields relevant to this work include housing, law, substance abuse, poverty, and politics. Pieces of each of these combine to make up the entire field of homelessness. In each of these fields, there are specific types of people (agents) engaging in certain types of behaviors with information (information practices), using and trying to obtain particular resources (capitals). Agents consist of general categories of people who populate a given field and who regularly engage in similar activities.Examples of significant agents in the field of homelessness include homeless people, service providers, clients, and advocates. In terms of Bourdieu’s positions of play, the difference is that someone can occupy more than one “game” position simultaneously,such as a “homeless person” who is also a “client” of a service-providing agency. However, depending on what activity the “player” is currently engaged in, one role may be more prominent than the other. Practices are the actions that people take on a regular basis within a given field. Information practices are a subset of practices in general and can be defined as the information activities that agents repeatedly undertake, such as generating, distributing, or using data. A particular set of practices is in part what defines an agent category, distinguishing an advocate from a service provider, for instance, and often defining the field itself. Another important element of practices is that they are fundamentally social; that is, a practice is not engaged in isolation. Other agents and aspects of the field are involved, and in many ways, a practice makes no sense if it is viewed outside of that constellation of social relations. The significance of initial intake procedures at shelters (the first information taking and “registration”process) is lost ifwe do not understand how that 13

CHAPTER 2

information is used by case managers to determine activity plans for individuals seeking assistance. Examples of information practices include conducting surveys, reporting to funders, completing intake forms, and counting homeless people. Capitals are those material and nonmaterial resources that have recognized value within the field and that agents compete for. Permanent housing is, of course, one capital in the field of homelessness, but in some respects shelter spots are of more import because they are more immediately available, though still not in sufficient numbers. Agents spend a significant deal of time seeking to gain various sorts of capitals in order to achieve or maintain certain positions in the field, to accomplish the work of the position they currently hold, or in order to change the boundaries or rules of the field. Examples of capitals relevant to this work include data, money, authority, and firsthand experience with homelessness. Because there is conflict between agents in their efforts to redefine the field, not all agents recognize or value all capitals in the same way. For instance, some advocates, especially advocates who have it, value firsthand experience very highly, while for most other agents, it has little or no value.23 Capitals can sometimes be exchanged for one another, though not always suc~essfully.~~ Funders successfully and quite frequently exchange money for data, as we will explore in greater detail later. However, advocates have been less successful in exchanging firsthand experience with homelessness for authority, simply because other agents refuse to afford it a similar amount of value. Bourdieu frequently explains his tools by using the analogy of a gamez5 in which each player has an intuitive sense of the rules and the things of value that they are trying to attain. Fields represent the context in which the game is played. Thus, a given field can be understood as an area of contested boundaries within which players (agents) compete (engage in practices) for limited resources (capitals). By delineating fields of operation, then, we can highlight those resource that players are most anxious to acquire and employ. Bourdieu’s analogy cannot be taken too far, however, since the players in the “homeless game” (or any “game”) occupy many positions and have many interests. In addition, they constantly battle over the rules of the game, whether that is in the form of the field boundaries (trying to stretch 14

DEFINITIONS AND PREMISES

or constrict what is considered relevant) or in terms of what constitutes a valued resource. For instance, within the field of homelessness, there is debate about whether or not homelessness is a problem of housing, employment, or substance abuse (among other things). This can be understood as an effort to define the problem (people without homes) in different ways. Depending on how the field is defined, different approaches to homelessness will arise. If homelessness is considered a problem of substance abuse, drug rehabilitation efforts may become prioritized, while if it is considered primarily a problem of too little housing, developing new housing may become highlighted. Also, a field may be a composite of several different fields; in the case of homelessness, these include portions of the fields of advocacy, law, politics, and housing. These dynamics clearly go beyond the definition of a game, but because of their fluid and intuitive aspects that parallel participation in a game, it remains a good starting metaphor for understanding the interconnections between fields, agents, capitals, and practices. Bourdieu’s tools can also be thought of as categories into which we can sort data; however, they are not without limitations. First, as with any analytical tool, they can only create at best a simplified model of a particular situation under examination. Second, the tools are interdependent in that they help to define each other-fields describe a coherent set of practices; practices are regular activities taken on for acquiring capital, capital only has value by particular agents in a particular field. Third, there is no hierarchy among these tools; the order in which they are discussed was chosen to enhance the discussion of the findings, but does not reflect differing levels of importance. Despite all of the above caveats, identification of the fields and their related capitals, agents, and practices helps explain relations, especially power relations, between types of people within a given area. Such identification is usehl because to understand power relations, we must understand what kinds of people are interacting (fields, agents), how they interact (practices), and which material and nonmaterial things are sources of power (capitals). To this end, table 2.1 provides an enumeration of the key fields, agents, information practices, and capitals in the field of homelessness. Each column is an independent list of the elements that appear most frequently throughout the field. These elements will be more hlly described as they 15

CHAPTER 4

Table 2.1.

Key Elements of Homelessness and Information Production

Fields

Agents

lnformation Practices

Capitals

AidIService

Homeless People Advocates Service Providers Clients

Defining Homelessness Data Sharing IntakedCase Management Counting Homeless People Reporting to Funders Surveying Database Design Analyzing Raw Data Follow-UPS Jobs

Raw Data

Government Advocacy Health Housing Shelters Money CrimePo1ice Families Substance Abuse

Police Shelter FamiIies DHS City Depts.

Money Authority Housing Social Network lime Power Over Resource Knowledge Firsthand-Experience

are encountered in the following chapters as we examine more closely the interactions and conceptions that drive the field. At this point, however, there are still several foundational concepts that require pinning down before our analysis can proceed: information and ideology.

INFORMATION The term information is highly nebulous. Does it mean knowledge? Data? Are opinions information? Is it only what is formally recorded? What about objects and actions-do they give us information? Such distinctions are important because they indicate, at the very least, the degree to which the material in question is processed and the power that may be embedded in it. For instance, Michael Buckland26delineates three types of information: information-as-process( learning); information-as-knowledge (that which you acquire in “information-as-process”); and information-as-thing (objects that can be used to impart knowledge, such as data and documents). However, even simplifyingour working definition of information to objects (raw data and data in reports), it is inescapably clear that these objects are also in fact embodied knowledge (information-asknowledge, if you will). Thus, our understanding of information must be multifaceted, allowing for the co-occurrence of attributes. 16

DEFINITIONS AND PREMISES

Sandra Braman’sZ7four-tiered definitionalmodel of information meets this requirement quite well. She argues for a pluralistic approach to defining information, encompassingall of the ways it exists in the world. Starting from the most straightforward to the most complex, her levels are information as a resource (a tool or ingredient for decision making); information as a commodity (a thing that can be exchanged, similar to a service); information as perception of pattern (that which helps us make sense of our perceptions or, alternately, that which we perceive as being ordered in a way that has meaning for us); and, finally, information as a constitutive force in society (information affects and is affected by the surrounding environment). Taken together, these levels provide the robust definition of information that allows us to recognize the objectlike nature of information (data) produced through processes, such as surveys and form completion, as well as the potential that information has for creating an effect in the world. We will primarily be focusing on the basic levels of information as defined by Buckland and Braman, information-as-thingand information as a resource, because we will be examining the initial phases of production of information. For the sake of simplicity, the terms data and infomation will be used interchangeably. One final aspect of information must be addressed-what do we mean by information production? Information production includes activities that generate raw data-taking surveys, filling out forms about a potential client to determine if services can be provided, or simply counting the number of homeless people in a given location. Such activities occur over and over again in the arena of homelessness. Because they occur in this regular way, they can be considered practices that are windows into the social context in which this data collection occurs. Using the analytical tools described in the previous section, we will identify information-productionpractices and build our understanding of them by asking the following sorts of questions: who is involved in producing this data? for what purposes? what resources do they expend and gain from collecting it? and, finally, in what sorts of experiences and frameworks do they do this work? Answers to these questions will reveal the roles information and information production have and will establish a base from which we can look for the more camouflaged threads of ideology. 17

CHAPTER 2

IDEOLOGY Information, like any other human creation, reflects the social relations that surround its creation and use. For instance, the federal unemployment rate does not include “discouraged workers,” those people who are unemployed and have stopped looking for work but who would take ajob if offered one. While counting this group separately allows for more precision in understanding the different types of unemployment, it also serves to reduce the overall unemployment rate, since, again, discouraged workers are not considered unemployed. So, it is possible for the rate of discouraged workers to move independently from the unemployment rate, disguising, for instance, that there may be an increasing number of people who have been without work for a considerable time, despite a low unemployment rate. And, it is the unemployment rate, not the aggregate of statistics of people who are not working, which gets used as a marker of the state of the economy. The figure focuses our gaze only at the technically unemployed and allows us to ignore the unofficially unemployed who, though they fall outside the scope of the current definition, still have no work. Thus, information about unemployment reflects not only something about who is not working but who is making decisions about unemployment and what unemployment means. To reiterate, information is indeed a social product, shaped by the social forces at work in the time and place of its generation. The concept of ideology-representations of the world that reflect, explain, and promote specific social interests-provides a powerful framework for understanding the dynamic between information and social relations. Ideology offers a means for individuals in society to accept “lived relations’’ in that it describes, explains, and justifies “the way things are.” It exists within and is part of our social structure, allowing us to construct and reproduce this social structure by creating conditions that encourage us to accept the existing distribution of power and resources, both in the material sense (e.g., the disparity of spending between infrastructure for private versus public transportation) and the nonmaterial sense (e.g., citizen review boards for police departments that have no enforcement ability). Justification is in part the act of masking social relations, especially relations of domination. This masking is achieved through various types of 18

DEFINITIONS AND PREMISES

social discourse and through the construction of social institutions. For example, homelessness can be criminalized through discourse by conflating the criminal activities of some people who are homeless (such as illicit drug use and abuse) with causes of homelessness and publicizing those descriptions in newspapers, radio broadcasts, and television shows. Institutional mechanisms can also play a role in this process ofjustification; for example, laws have been created that specifically target the survival actions of homeless people. Through these means, some fundamental causes of homelessness-poverty, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs with living wages-become obscured. If these causes were instead highlighted, they could challenge (though not necessarily successfully) the legitimacy of the existing social order. Bias and perspective are fiequently drawn on to explain the types of situations described above, and at first glance they may appear to be the most obvious answers. It can appear to be a relatively straightforward task to identify when an individual’s speech and actions are forcefully shaped by his or her particular point of view. When such forceful speech is criticized, it is often referred to as speaking “ideologically” or sometimes as speaking from prejudice. This usage, though popular, is misleading, reducing the notion of socially developed understandings to one of an individual’s specific understandings. But while bias and perspective certainly do exist, they can only account for the beliefs and understandings of a particular person, not of large portions of the population. An obvious example of this distinction is racism. We may be able to say that a given person speaking or acting egregiously is prejudiced, but individual prejudice does not explain the social phenomenon of racism, which can be seen in the use of racial profiling by police departments, the greater number of people of color sentenced with the death penalty, and even productions of “black” and “white” television programs by television networks. Arguably the best-known theorist on the problem of perspective, Thomas Kuhn2*examined this issue in the scientificarena. He felt that the development of scientificknowledge was both enabled and constrained by the paradigm of the individual scientist. Consequently, the very data he or she generated and analyzed are the products of a paradigm they also reinforced. The view of the world implicit in a given paradigm, and the associated set of intellectual and practical tools available to scientists working 19

CHAPTER 2

within that paradigm, would not only determine which questions were asked and how they were answered but how the answers and the phenomena they described would eventually be understood. However, Kuhn’s analysis has a hndamend weakness, which is that paradigms are presented as relatively autonomous in their competition with each other for authority and dominance and that they occur independent of history and one another. Still, it is possible to take from his theory support for the notion that the surrounding culture highly constrains how we see and thus what we see and what we produce. From our discussion so far, bias and perspective can be attributed to specific individuals or particular entities, for instance, a talk-show host or magazine may be known to have a particular “slant” that can be taken into account and thus accounted for. The understandings they spawn remain localized and discrete. In contrast to this scenario, ideology is a socially constructed representation of the world, simultaneouslygenerated by society at large and heavily shaped by specific formal and informal institutions, such as schools and the media. It is a project that is always being worked on in the background of our day-to-day lives in an almost effortless way as we talk with each other, go grocery shopping, watch a movie, and teach our children what we consider appropriate and good. Embedded in these routines are the predominant, sometimes contradictory, ideologies extant in our culture-wealth and beauty as ultimate goals; the importance of working hard; the value of helping others; the importance of achieving success independently; equal opportunity for anyone to become famous, powerful, or rich,just to name a few. Such themes bounce around us on billboards, in movies, in school textbooks. Because we encounter them so much, from so many sources, we ultimately, and almost effortlessly,use these notions and others to make sense of and act in the world around us. They are part of the fabric of ideology and are the means by which ideology is able to explain, obscure, or deny the inevitable contradictions that crop up regularly. The ultimate result is that by resolving such contradictions, ideology serves to reproduce an existing distribution of power and resources. An important question arises at this point in our discussion: How is ideology perpetuated and maintained throughout such a diverse, complex, and relatively “free” society such as we find in the United States today? This persistence and power may be especially anti-intuitivewhen we 20

DEFINITIONS AND PREMISES

consider ourselves to have a high degree of freedom of expression and of association. Two key theoretical concepts help to explain this apparent codict. The first is the idea of the problematic, as described by the French philosopher Louis Althusser. The second is the idea of hegemony, as defined by the Italian philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci. Althusser’s notion of a problematic can be thought of as an ideological framework through which we experience life. Our problematic is developed by our time spent in what he called ideological state apparatuses ISA AS).^^^^^ ISAs are foundational social institutions, both formal and informal, such as schools, families, labor unions, court systems, and social clubs. Within the field of homelessness, ISAs include shelters, advocacy organizations, government agencies, and the police department. As we travel through these institutions, we observe and experience specific social orderings, absorbing them into our understandings and expectations of the world. We come to understand what is considered good or bad, important or unimportant, and our actions correspond to this understanding. We become informed of what society expects from us and what we can expect in return. In this way, we develop deep tacit knowledge about what our society values. This knowledge, and the things that it both reveals and occludes, is our problematic. Similarly, Norman Fairclough, a contemporary thinker who has drawn on Althusser’s concepts of ideology, posits that the maintenance of existing power relations is accomplished by the everyday, naturalized use of what Fairclough describes as “institutional practices which people draw upon without thinking” that legitimize those relation^.^' Despite the existence of ISAs and problematics, a given ideology will not necessarily be uniformly accepted; variations and conflicts will undoubtedly appear. Contradictory forces exist even with a dominant ideology, reflecting the relatively diverse and sometimes conflicting nature of interests within a given social group. A dominant ideology does not result simply from mechanistic bureaucratic thinking but emerges because it is able to provide a compelling explanation for phenomena, successhlly reinforcing the existing distribution of power and resources. These dominant ideologies, examples of which were mentioned earlier, promoted by the individuals and institution^^^ with the most to gain (materially,socially, culturally,politically) from maintaining current conditions, are effective precisely because those with power have greater ability 21

CHAPTER 2

to assert ideologies at institutional and social levels. As Stuart HallSSputs i l l always be about it, ideology does not operate by being false because it w “real relations”; rather, it operates by using partial simplifications of situations to explain a person’s lived life. Because dominant ideologies are so ubiquitous and because they sufficiently explain social relations (meaning they make sense of conflict and contradictions) as we experience them, they become generally accepted throughout society. An example of a dominating ideology that we will encounter is the idea that people are homeless because they are financially irresponsible. This ideology appears constantly, both in discourse and in the actual tools used to collect data. Even though ideology powerfully shapes how we see the world, we are continually afforded the opportunity to recognize ideology as we encounter contradictions and become aware of them, becoming aware of dominating ideologies at the same time. Going back again to Althusser’s problematic, he felt that we could become aware of this ideological framework throygh a dialectical process of comparison between experience, preexisting knowledge, and given explanations. In other words, our day-today experiences are an unending opportunity to reveal, challenge, and change our problematic. For instance, one of the dominating conceptions about homelessness is that individuals are homeless because of some type of incompetence on their part. However, if we know by direct experience or through the accounts of others that in San Francisco it has become more and more difficult for people ofall but the wealthiest backgrounds to afford housing, this undercuts the idea that the condition of being homeless is simply a matter of individual irresponsibility. It does not negate the role of individual choices but adds a context (an extremely high valued and tight housing market) to our understanding of why someone might be homeless. Dominant ideologies are also critical in establishing and maintaining hegemony, the acceptance of the existing social order by consent as opposed to by force. Italian philosopher and politician GramsciS4developed the idea of hegemony as part of an effort to understand why people seem to accept and support the very institutions that maintain unequal living conditions. He made a distinction between political hegemony and ideological hegemony. Political hegemony is more explicit and is articulated in laws, party platforms, and government programs. It reflects the degree to which any given group has control over these venues. One demonstration of political hegemony in the United States is the consistently low voter 22

D E F I N I T I O N S A N D PREMISES

turnouts for any and all elections, indicating high levels of apathy and disenfranchisement-voting appears to some, it seems, to be an ineffective way to shape political conditions. In contrast to political hegemony, ideological hegemony exists when there is widespread acceptance throughout society of explanations or narratives about why things are the way they are. In other words, dominating ideologies help to create ideological hegemony. Gramsci termed this idea “consent.” However, Gramsci’s use of consent does not imply an active choice but rather an accumulation of belief built up over time as we participate in social institutions such as schools and families and perpetuated through day-to-day experiences such as reading the newspaper, watching films, and talking with friends. The well-known, almost mythical phrase “You can’t fight city hall” is an excellent example of ideological hegemony. Folded into this expression is the acknowledgment of and acceptance of the disparity of power and injustice in society and a lesson about the futility of trying to make change. Ideology shapes our lived experience. How we understand the world-how we live in the world-is influenced by the ideological framework in which we exist. A dominant ideology posits a representation of the world that encourages us (and sometimes forces us) to accept the way things are as accurate or inevitable, which is not to say that individuals are inextricably locked into a worldview forced upon them by those with more power. While possible, it is equally possible to think critically, to constantly test one’s given understanding of the world against lived experience with an eye to apparent contradictions, and to eventually transform the very questions we ask within this process. The trick is that we must actively undertake this process. We must choose to question the ideas we encounter and be open to different understandings. This possibility is what makes ideology such a slippery concept, because in many ways we are engaged in a daily project of ideological struggle, more or less successll or unsuccessful as the case may be.

SUMMARY Figure 2.1 is a form used to certify that an individual is indeed homeless and is often required to qualify for federally hnded homeless services. At 23

CHAPTER 2

CERTIFICATIONOF HOMELESSNESS (on application agency Icttemesd)

DATE: TO:

MeKinnev - F

FROM:

Agency (print name)

RE:

~ Continuum of Care Ccrtification of homelessness for M c K ~ MFunded Homeless Services

of Care

This will certify that (name of applicant, social security number) meets the McKinn9 Funded Continuum of Care Homeless Services guidelinesdefining homelessness. This applicant was living in the following situation at the time that she or he tirst oontscted the application agency (please check the category that best describes the applicant’s living situationand attach appropriate dccumentation): Street, park, abandoned buildings 0 Emergency shelterhergency voucher 0 Domestic violence shelter 0 Transitional housing facility* 0 Psychiatric facility * 0 Alcohol or drug treatment facility* 0 Hospital* 0 Jail* 0 Supportive housing** 0 Signed: (Signature of application agency repmtative)

Figure 2.1.

Certificationof Homelessness (Reprinted with permission.)

first glance, this document appears to be nothing more than an innocuous form used to collect very basic data about an individual’s circumstances in order to make sure that limited homeless emergencyhnds are actually getting to individuals who need them. Now, having gone through and defined the foundational concepts that are at the basis of the analysis to come, we can see that a series of more detailed questions driven by these concepts are now possible. These questions reveal that there is more going on in this form, and we can thus see the need for critical examination of the obvious in order to get at the other powerful meanings that lie beneath the surface. Looking at form 2.1 again, we are now in the position to ask the following: What is meant by homelessnessin this form? Who falls in and out of that definition? Who is making this definition? Who is determining the 24

DEFINITIONS AND PREMISES

degree to which a given individual meets the definition and thus gets certified? Who uses this certificate and why? What do they gain and lose by its use? What frames of reference are involved in this certification? What ideas about homelessness are stated in this form? What ideas are implicit? These questions and others will be answered in the next chapters.

NOTES 1. William R. Breakey and Pamela J. Fischer, “Homelessness: The Extent of the Problem,”Journal of Social Zssues 46, no. 4 (1990): 31-47. 2. Kim Hopper, “Definitional Quandaries and Other Hazards in Counting the Homeless: An Invited Commentary,” American Journal of Orth@sychiaty 65, no. 3 (July 1995): 340-46. 3. Carol L. M. Caton, “Homelessness in Historical Perspective,” in Homeless in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 4. Charles Hoch, “A Brief History of the Homeless Problem in the United States,” in l%e Homeless in Contemfioray Society, ed. Richard D. Bingham, Roy E. Green, and Sammis B. White (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1987), 17-18. 5. For an excellent discussion of tramp life, see Nels Anderson, “lie Hobo: “lie Sociology of the Homeless Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923; Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books Series, 1965). 6. Public Law 100-77, sec. 103, 100th Cong., 2d sess. (22 July 1987),

Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act. 7. Interagency Council on the Homeless, Priority: Home! “lie F e h a l Plan to Break the Cych of Homelessness (Washington, D.C.: Interagency Council on the Homeless, 1994): 19-20. 8. Roger B. Straw, “Looking Behind the Numbers in Counting the Homeless: An Invited Commentary,” American Journal of Orth@sychiaty 65, no. 3 (July 1995): 330-33. 9. Bruce G. Link et al., “Lifetime and Five-Year Prevalence of Homelessness in the United States: New Evidence on an Old Debate,”AmericanJournal of Orth@sychiaty 65, no. 3 (July 1995): 347-54. 10. Christopher Hewitt, “Estimating the Number of Homeless: Media Misrepresentation of an Urban Problem,”Journal of Urban Afaairs 18, no. 3 (1996): 431-47. 11. James D. Wright and Joel A. Devine, “Counting the Homeless: The Census Bureau’s %-Night’ in Five US. Cities,” Evaluation Review 16, no. 4 (August 1992): 355-64.

25

CHAPTER 2

12. Kathryn Edin, “Counting Chicago’s Homeless: An Assessment of the Census Bureau’s ‘Street and Shelter Night’,” Evaluation Review 16, no. 4 (August 1992):365-75. 13. Kim Hopper, “Counting the Homeless: S-Night in New York,” Evaluation Review 16, no. 4 (August 1992):376-88. 14. Michael R. Cousineau and Thomas W. Ward, “An Evaluation of the S-Night Street Enumeration of the Homeless in Los Angeles,” Evaluation Review 16, no. 4 (August 1992):389-99. 15. Louisa R Stark, “Counting the Homeless: An Assessment of S-Night in Phoenix,” Evaluation Review 16, no. 4 (August 1992): 400-8. 16. Joel A. Devine and James D. Wright, “Counting the Homeless: S-Night in New Orleans,” Evaluation Review 16, no. 4 (August 1992): 409-17. 17. William R. Breakey and Pamela J. Fischer, “Homelessness: The Extent of the Problem,”Journal of Social Issues 46, no. 4 (1990):31-47. 18. House Committee of Conference, Departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development, and Independent Agencies Appropriations, Committee Report 106-988, sec. 226,106th Cong., 2d sess., 18 October 2000. 19. Link, “Lifetime and Five-Year Prevalence of Homelessness in the United States,” 348. 20. Ellen Bassuk, “Dilemmas in Counting the Homeless: Introduction,” AmericanJournal of Orthofisychiatry 65, no. 3 (July 1995):3 18- 19. 21. Marybeth Shinn and Beth C. Weitzman, “Research on Homelessness: An Introduction,”Journal of Social Issues 46, no. 4 (1990): 1-1 1. 22. Breakey, “Homelessness: The Extent of the Problem,” 31-47. 23. Bourdieu defines several broad, general categories of capital, which seem to operate in all types of fields. These include cultural capital, which can be defined as a sense of knowing how things are done; social capital, which comprises mainly social contacts and connections; symbolic capital, which can be considered material items that express one’s position and capital holdings within a field; and finally economic capital, which is money capital. These categories can be more specifically defined for a given field, as well as augmented. 24. The prototypical example of capitals being exchanged is the individual seeking to blend in to a new social setting by attempting to exchange economic capital (money) for symbolic capital (clothing). However, if he or she does not have the required cultural capital (the sense ofwhat is appropriate to wear in that sphere), the effort will be wildly unsuccessll and will in fact mark that person ever more clearly as being an “outsider.” 25. Pierre Bourdieu and Lok J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

26

DEFINITIONS AND PREMISES

26. Michael Buckland, Infrmation and Information Systems (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1991): 3. 27. Sandra Braman, “Defining Information: An Approach for Policymakers,” Zlecommunications Policy (September 1989): 233-42. 28. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientijiic Revolutions: International Encycl@edia of Unaji’ed Science, vol. 2, no. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 29. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards and Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosofihy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 30. Louis Althusser, “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and Ideological Struggle,” in PhilosOphy and the Sfiontaneous Philos@hy ofscientists and Other Essays,ed. Gregory Elliot (New York: Verso, 1990). 3 1. Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (New York: Longman, 1989), 33. 32. Examples of such institutions include the courts, the military, the educational system, and cultural institutions. 33. Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 28-44. 34. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

27

I N F 0W T I 0 N PRODUCTION IN CONTEXT

I

n the previous chapter, we laid the foundations for the analysis to come by defining precisely what we meant by homelessness, social context, information, and ideology. With those elements now in place, we are poised to analyze in detail and thus attempt to understand the complex world of homelessness. We will identify key information practices, dominating ideologies, and ultimately the manner in which these two elements interact. Our immediate task is to complete this first portion by uncovering the important information activities that regularly occur (practices), finding out who is involved (agents), which frameworks they operate in (fields) and which resources are involved (capitals).' Identification of dominating ideologies and the connection between them and information practices will be addressed in the following two chapters. We can best proceed by trying to untangle some of the key centers of activity in the field of homelessness, places where many agents, capitals, and practices come together and that have consequences beyond the immediate completion of an action. It is here, through the day-to-day practices that problematics are developed, maintained, and challenged and that hegemony is forged. In order of discussion, those key centers will be: the profile of homelessness, the value of homelessness, intakes/case management, and power relations.

28

INFORMATION PRODUCTION IN CONTEXT

T H E PROFILE OF HOMELESSNESS The field of homelessness requires a recognizable homeless person who can easily fit into program and hnding definitions. This profile grows out of the problem being solved-is it people sleeping on streets? People living in cars? People who are living in a series of cheap hotels? Depending upon how the problem is cast, the definition of the person who is homeless varies. Thus, who should be considered an “official” homeless person becomes an issue of central importance in the reproduction of the field of homelessness. Such a standard is difficult to come by in situations of scarce (or seemingly scarce) resources, where people with different goals and tasks (agents) fiercely compete for them. It is not surprising, then, that multiple definitions have arisen, reflecting in turn varying desires to extend services to narrower or broader populations. For example, some agents (for example, some advocates) involved with housing will say that anyone who is doubled up (essentially living as a long-term guest of a family member or fiiend) is homeless, while others claim that only those living on the streets or in shelters are homeless. One reason for these multiple definitions is that the field of homelessness is an uneven composite of many other fields, such as advocacy, law, politics, and housing. Depending upon where someone is situated within the field of homelessness, several of these other fields are also in operation. For instance, a legal-advocacy group operating within the field of homelessness will also be embedded in law, poverty, and politics. Consequently, a private shelter that focuses on substance-abuse treatment will understand homelessness differently because, in addition to the field of homelessness, this shelter also operates within the fields of substance abuse, poverty, and housing. These sets of fields are similar to core samples taken from a given geographic unit in an effort to discover the location of sediment types that lay under an area that appears homogeneous on the surface but that is varied underneath.* Figure 3.1 is a general illustration of this p h e n ~ m e n aNote .~ that the field of homelessness encompasses portions of the fields of poverty, substance abuse, law, housing, and politics, as seen at regions A

29

CHAPTER 3

Figure 3.1.

Field of Homelessness

(poverty), B (poverty, politics, and housing), and C (poverty, housing, substance abuse, and law). If we further consider regions A, B, and C as agent locations, then we can gain insight into the differing understandings, resources, and goals that coexist within the field of homelessness. These differences in turn explain (though not completely) why to some homelessness appears more clearly an issue of substance abuse and to others simply a matter of housing. Not surprisingly, these definitions of homelessness are not of equal weight. In each case, the definition’s significance greatly depends upon the resources (capitals) associated with that definition, especially one we shall call authority-capital. Authority-capital is the institutionally grounded ability to make decisions that others must follow. This capital often appears in the ability to set definitions that others must follow or that have widespread effect, such as with the McKinney Act definition of homelessness. Authority is different from a similar concept-legitimacy, which has less to do with the ability to make decisions than with recognition that is derived from other capitals, namely those having to do with experience. For instance, among certain agents, such as some, but not all, advocates, if one has the capital of firsthand experience with homelessness, one also has a certain amount of legitimacy. It is possible to have both authority and legitimacy or one and not the other. For example, one agent had authority due to his position as the head of a city ofice responsible for trying to develop plans to address homelessness. The authority was derived from the fact that he was appointed by the mayor and that he had a budget and staff at his disposal for the implementation of special programs he could initiate to 30

INFORMATION P R O D U C T I O N IN C O N T E X T

study and address the problems of homelessness. This authority was also reflected in his role as spokesperson for the city on issues of homelessness. However, despite this official capacity and the authority it conferred, he lacked legitimacy in the eyes of almost all categories of other agents due to his lack of knowledge of homelessness, either firsthand or secondhand. In interviews with these other agents, they independently criticized him, arguing that he had shown himself to be incapable of designing and implementing any usehl projects, due, they felt, to his lack of knowledge. His authority was so endangered by this sentiment that an assistant, who had firsthand knowledge and thus legitimacy recognized across the field by all agents, was hired in order to boost the official’s authority. Going back to the example of the McKinney Act, we can see the tight coupling of authority-capital and the information practice of defining. The McKinney Act both defined homelessness (as essentially those living on the streets or emergency shelters) and established programs and h n d ing for addressing homelessness. Although referenced earlier in chapter 2,the formal McKinney definition bears repeating here: Sec. 103 GENERAL DEFINITION OF HOMELESS INDIVIDUAL (a) In General.-For purposes of this Act, the term “homeless” or “homeless individual” includes: (1) an individual who lacks a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime resi-

dence; and

(2) an individual who has a primary nighttime residence that is(A) a supervised publicly or privately operated shelter designed to provide temporary living accommodations (including welfare hotels, congregate shelters, and transitional housing for the mentally ill);

(B) an institution that provides a temporary residence for individuals intended to be institutionalized; or (C) a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human being^.^

Because McKinney Act hnding is a primary source of hnding for homeless programs of all kinds, it carries a great deal of authority-capital. Consequently, many service providers and government entities automatically 31

CHAPTER S

accept the McKinney definition in order to get that funding, as expressed by “Michael,” who works in a city funded research project: We used a McKinney definition because virtually all homeless programs receive some type of funding from McKinney, and they have to justify where those dollars are spent. And usually the city and local monies are tied in with . . .monies and matching funds and so on.

But the McKinney definition extends beyond individual projects and defines the field of homelessness itself, for McKinney brings together the capitals of authority and money (yet another driving capital within the field), spawning the majority of activities that take place within the field. The institutional support for these activities in turn generates the agent types who must realize them and at the same time populate the field. Thus, McKinney creates a self-perpetuatingsystem. The power of the McKinney definition is further reflected by the fact that some service providers require an actual certificate of homelessness before they will provide services. Figure 2.1, which has been discussed several times now in previous chapters, is an example of such a certification. In such instances, authority-capital from McKinney invests the service provider with what we can call power-over-capital in relation to the person requesting assistance, as described below by “Kathy,” who works as a housing coordinator: So, we might say, “They’re on the streets.” OK, so, because that’s what they said. We record it that way. When they get referred over to the provider, someone has to certify they truly are homeless. Only authorized agencies and people can sign the certificate. So if they don’t get that certification,the person can’t be put there as a homeless person. Another thing, some programs, some providers, have hired a housing specialist who does the certification and then HUD or housing authority audits them once a year. Then there are other programs where the housing authority actually literally meets the client to do the certification. So, it’s harder to get past that once-a-year audit. They might be able to; I mean, they’re not lying, it’s just how they interpret it. They’re more flexible in interpretation. Whereas the other program, there’s no flexibility at all because there’s that housing authority person sitting there, making that decision. So it’s really hard you know, for a person who’s homeless to really get that homeless bed. 32

INFORMATION PRODUCTION IN CONTEXT

As we can see in this example, power-over-capital is similar to authoritycapital in that the agent who holds it is able to shape the circumstances of others. The distinction is that while both capitals are institutionally derived, power-over-capitaloperates more at the individual level, and it especially comes into play between service providers and homeless people/ clients. In this relationship, the service provider staff member has great control and can mandate the client’s use of time and ability to interact with others, challenge his or her parenting style with the threat of calling in Child Protective Services, lengthen or shorten shelters stays, and m01-e.~ Despite the fact that, as it stands, McKinney affords some agents a great deal ofpower, many feel its definition is too restrictive because it does not clearly include cases where people are doubled up with fiiends or relatives for extended periods of time. Other agents feel it is too inclusive and should deal only with people who lack immediate shelter. However, while agents may have differing notions of what constitutes a homeless person, those opinions are relatively insignificant for those working within an institutional structure that is based around a codified definition such as the McKinney Act. Only if they are willing to either openly challenge the definition or seek other sources of financing and resources is it possible to use alternative definitions. Furthermore, only if they are able to gather the requisite authority-capitalwill those alternative definitions have the possibility of taking hold. In one such situation, two men in the law-enforcement field, “Dan” and “Rick,” found themselves arguing for a more restrictive definition based on an implied need for triage. In their discussion, we can see the clashes over capitals come into effect as they interact both with people who are homeless as well as service providers and advocates. The authority-capital of McKinney overrides what they see as common sense, which makes them interpret the McKinney definition as a tool for maintaining service and advocacy organizations working in the field, as opposed to ending homelessness. Dun: Before we can even talk about a subject we have to define what it is. Our perception of what homelessness is seems to be quite different from the perception other people in these professional groups have. Their definition is if somebody’s been in jail for seven years, is out for two weeks, and hasn’t yet established a residence, or is even out ofjail for a few days, is a homeless person. 33

CHAPTER 9

Rich: They like to use the HUD [McKinney] definition. Everybody uses a definition of homelessness that fits their needs. What we’re talking about here are people who are shelterless. Because homelessness by the HUD definition is basically a HUD-devised definition. I don’t have it here; it’s in a book. Dun: If I lost my job and moved back into my parents’, they [professional

groups] would consider me homeless. Any family members living together, that’s homeless. Well, is it?

Rich: If you’re living in a residential hotel and getting food stamps and welfare, you’re considered homeless, because it’s not considered temporary housing. We’re talking about people living in shelters, living in their cars, living in parks, but it also includes people.. .

Rich: At risk of being homeless! And, while I applaud the “Homelessness Review Project,” it’s a poverty review [not a homelessness review]. All right, poverty is the leading cause of homelessness, and then drugs. But with the HUD definition, they come up with ten, eleven thousand homeless living in the city. And that’s not true. They may be by the HUD definition, but without shelter are what I would consider homeless in the city. But if you have an advocacy group, and you depend on funding,you’ve got to reach out there. If you have conflicting political agendas, you’re gonna have different numbers. Rich: It homfies me when some city official says, “Yep, there’s eleven thousand homeless people in the city.” I think as a city employee you have a duty to clarify who you’re talking about. The whole “Homelessness Review Project,” the hundred and fifty-four people that they talked about dying on the street last year, that included the people living in residence hotels or the guy who gets out of San Quentin, goes on a two-day crime spree in the city, and gets killed holding up a liquor store. Dan and Rick are describing the enormous power of definitions in general, and the McKinney Act definition in particular, to shape activities within the field. Thus, we can see that definitions of homelessness (and the information practice of defining) are important because they are tied to the ability to control the field, the ability to get funding, the ability to get resources, and the ability to present cases as to the size of the population itself. Further, definitions strikingly shape our problematic of homelessness, by giving it contours and boundaries. T h e more we accept and use a definition such as McKinney, the more our assess34

INFORMATION PRODUCTION IN CONTEXT

ment of homelessness and homeless people will coincide with it. For instance, even though we may consider those who are involuntarily doubled up as homeless, the more we work within the McKinney framework, the more likely we will be to create a new, discrete category for those people.

THE VALUE OF HOMELESSNESS: LEGITIMACY AND PERPETUATION As we just saw, definitions drive the field of homelessness, giving it shape, but more importantly giving it purpose and the ability to exist. Obviously, without the ability to say “this is what it means to be homeless” and “this person is homeless,” the field of homelessness cannot exist. Thus, the field of homelessness is dependent upon the existence of homeless people (both individuals and families) for its reproduction. Oddly enough, then, homeless people can actually be considered a capital themselves, with two primary values. First, homeless people can confer legitimacy on the practices of agents. Agents need to show numbers of homeless people they have assisted in order to obtain other capitals, such as money and contracts for service providers and reputation for advocates. Second, homeless people give service and advocacy organizations their reason for being-without people who need services there is no need to h n d services and no need to advocate for those services. The result is that a degree of homelessness must be maintained, albeit unconsciously and unintentionally, by the very institutions that aim to eradicate it. Both of these points are more hlly illustrated below.

Homeless People Conferring Legitimacy The involvement of homeless people helping other homeless people and addressing homelessness itself is both necessary and laudable. For example, in its homeless service contracts, the San Francisco Department of Human Services (DHS) includes the objective of hiring a percentage of an agency’s staff from the population that it serves. T h e formal inclusion of this objective both recognizes the value ofpeople within a certain community helping each other and the difficulty or resistance they might 35

CHAPTER 3

encounter if they were to attempt to do so without institutional backing. This effort on the part of DHS is important because of the agency’s powerful role. More than other city departments involved in homelessness, DHS has tremendous control over financial resources and has great policymaking abilities within the larger plans of the city. DHS contracts out all of its homeless services, thus positioning itself as a major broker, for it is still the agency that directly applies for most federal funding. The participation of homeless people in such activities can also lend an air of credibility and bring a level of legitimacy to these activities not only because of the homeless-people-capital they carry but also because of another capital, firsthand-experience-capital.Firsthand experience is a particular form of legitimacy. It is recognized in different ways across the field, depending upon the agent’s perspective about the cause of homelessness. For some, it provides a symbolic value, while for others it represents knowledge that should be used for problem solving. For instance, the practice of surveying homeless people before the development of citywide plans appears to be more of an appeasement measure; often, the plans themselves are already well underway while these surveys are being conducted. Thus, the results of the surveys can have little impact on the plans. Even within some advocate groups and service agencies, opinions about shelters and hotels, if not dismissed, are often seen as beside the point, since the need for places to stay overwhelms all but the most extreme concerns. Legitimacy, then, is a double-edged sword. It can be easily sidestepped and turned into mere “tokenization,” if a homeless person’s firsthandexperience-capital is not valued by the other agents he or she is working with or if he or she is unable to actually effect processes and outcomes. “Dana,” who works as an advocate trying to help homeless and lowincome people organize, describes below her frustration with how homeless people were treated during a citywide survey: I would have clients have input into the design of the survey. Because I think that the clients, quite frankly that they had, like on the continuum of care plan, were very token. And we see this a lot, like, they [city officials] were always advocating that they put clients on their committees,and they put someone on boards of directors . . . but, oftentimes they picked the people that are [sic] very silent and don’t [sic] understand the process

36

INFORMATION PRODUCTION IN CONTEXT

that’s happening before them, and they [city officials] don’t empower them to understand the process.

Here, participation and capital are rendered relatively meaningless. Legitimacy is generated and measured by the mere presence of homeless people on a project as opposed to their actual participation. So, while a certain patina is desired, it does not reflect a commensurate feeling that homeless people are credible, that they have valuable contributions to make. Thus, it is easy for homeless people to be turned into tokens as opposed to equal participants. Dana elaborates on this use of homeless people and their capitals. According to her, tokenization occurs on a widespread scale and is, at least in part, spurred on by a fear of homeless people: They [people heading committees and organizations] say, “Well see, our board reflects our client population.” They think then they [homeless people] can really act. I think they [homeless people] can adequately critique reforms. Whatever surveys, or whatever systems are involved, then they can more than adequately critique it and know more about it than some of the people that are working on the other side of it [i.e., people who are not homeless]. And so because of that I think there’s a real fear. And I think the fear comes from, they know this shit’s fucked up! They got to know it’s fucked up, theyjust don’t know what the hell to do about it and when you start exposing it, then they’re gonna have to, they’re gonna have to start thinking what to do about it, and .. a lot of these bureaucrats do not know what to do about it.

.

Fear of homeless people is clearly a factor. On one level, those who are articulate are viewed as a threat. Those who are not articulate are ineffective “representatives.” In either case, tokenization allows other agents to simultaneously involve homeless people and neutralize their impact. This effort to neutralize homeless people can be seen in the structure of social relations in the field of the shelter. Shelters play an interesting role that is constantly at odds with itself. For a given individual who is homeless, shelters provide some forms of short-term stability by offering immediate housing, food, and access to other resources. At the same time, they can add a significant degree of turmoil, by imposing external rules, structures, and goals. At the institutional level, shelters ultimately play a

37

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stabilizing force within the field of homelessness because the resource they offer, shelter spots, is so scarce that they become a focal point around which almost all other activity within the field is organized. This organizing effect is true for people who are homeless, advocates, service providers, funders, and others. They provide justification for the continued use of resources in part because there are not adequate numbers of shelter spots to fully meet the need for emergency housing, as each winter proves so clearly. “Adam,” a shelter staff employee, describes a dramatic example of social structure of a shelter and how authority-capital and power-over-capital come into play: I’m supposed to be doing community development through community organizing with the clients, and I haven’t really started doing that yet, for a number of reasons. One is that it made the shelter management a little bit nervous to have me doing that. So, I was originally going to call it a . . . client organizing group, and that made them [the shelter management] very nervous. . . . Well, it’s one person in particular who’s nervous about this ...the director of the shelter. So, I’m gonna rename it and try and make it sound more like it’s trying to organize the volunteers to do a better job and then trying to do some community development within that context. There’s always a kind of a trade-off between enabling the clients and controlling the clients. There are 250 beds in the shelter in a very small space and another 30 in the cots downstairs, and very few staff people. So control of the clients is always something they’re very concerned with. In my opinion, they are overly concerned with control of the clients. But I can understand where they’re coming from ’cause it’s . ..difficult to control 280 adults. Some of them are crazy; there are all kinds of different reasons that people are homeless. [But] I’m really not sure exactly what they’re afraid of.

This amorphous fear is directly tied into perceptions of who homeless people are and why they are homeless. In this example, we can see a direct conflict between the director and the staff person and an indirectly expressed conflict between the director and the clients. Clients are essent i d y people who are homeless who are receiving some service. The client identity implies a relationship with some sort of professional who is trained to or has authority to iix some sort of problem. This relationship means that homeless people who are clients are constantly having power-

38

INFORMATION PRODUCTION I N CONTEXT

over-capital used against them, as in this example, and it also explains why some people who are homeless may choose not to receive services if they can avoid it. The Perpetuation of Homelessness

In the previous section, we saw how homeless people provide legitimacy and a reason for being to the rest of the agents in the field. In this section, we will examine more closely how advocates can actually be one of the ingredients that perpetuate homelessness as opposed to eliminating it. Advocates engage in a wide range of practices, most of which entail either speaking on behalf of homeless people (both as individuals or as a group) or creating opportunities for homeless people to speak for themselves (primarily through surveys and focus groups). Additionally, they often attempt to help homeless people connect with potential service providers. Finally, they often play the role of coordinator or facilitator by bringing together a variety of agents to discuss homeless issues, for example, by serving as chairs for citywlde task-force committees. Advocates vary in the degree to which they work within existing city structures, the amount of direct experience they have had with homelessness, the degree and manner in which they include homeless people in their work, the sources of their funding, and the types of changes they hope to see. In other words, there are many types of advocates. They understand homelessness differently and correspondingly have different goals that they are working to achieve. The common link between them is that they believe they are working to eliminate homelessness and are using the means of organizing and activism to achieve this end. However, even within this group, which appears to be so clear about its ultimate purpose, there is an ultimate contradiction about the extent to which advocacy efforts in their current forms can achieve this goal. For instance, “Richard,” a legal advocate, identified the dependency of his organization and others like it on the presence of homeless people and discussed how that dependency shifts the work away from actually eliminating homelessness: Unwittingly many of us are so busy working with the victims of this, this system, that we’ve become unconsciously dependent upon the continuation

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of the problem to justify our continued existence. We’re not trying to put ourselves out of business. If we were, we would be activating the homeless and speaking out.

Similarly, ‘games,” who was formerly homeless and now works within the government realm, points out how advocates in general are dependent upon the continued existence of homelessness: By fighting for substandard rights for homeless people and by speaking for people instead of organizing them to speak for themselves, advocacy can actually perpetuate homelessness. There’s a real big profit in disorganization,you know. I’m not blaming anybody for anything, people just naturally take advantage of other people. I love the advocates for some things and don’t [for others.] It’s not really about keeping people who are homeless safe. You empower those people and you educate them about how to get there and meet that goal.. . You don’t keep them walking around, unhealthy, unsanitary; you don’t make it a right for them to be that way. Not if you know it’s unhealthy. You don’t make a platform for yourself; you make a platform for them. [The newspapers,] as soon as they start talking about homeless, go to key people and ask them things. They take pictures of homeless people, and they don’t ask them nothing! And that’s the tragedy. Because they got more to say than the advocates do! They do. They got more to say than advocates do; they got more to say than the mayor does.

.

Neither Richard nor James is describing an intentional effort to maintain homelessness. Rather, they are describing the vexing situation of institutional limits and institutional momentum combined with certain notions of who homeless people are, coming together to impede other activities that perhaps might be more effective at ending homelessness.

The Data-Money Connection One curious phenomenon in the field of homelessness is the chameleonlike nature of data. Original data are highly convertible into other resources (capitals), rendering them perhaps the most important currency in the field of homelessness. Here we see information truly in the form of information as a commodity, as was discussed earlier in chapter 2 when

40

INFORMATION PRODUCTION I N CONTEXT

we developed working definitions of information. For example, a person seeking publicly funded shelter services must participate in at least one intake process (filling out forms and answering questions concerning personal, work and medical history) in order to obtain a bed. If the service provider has a contract with the city, it must provide data in order to get or maintain that contract. The city in turn must provide data to the federal government in order to qualify for federal funds; it can also use that data to review the performance of the contracting service provider. At the federal level, data generation and reporting are legally tied to issues of accountability (though it is not clear what data collection actually makes one accountable for). In some instances, the reporting structure has become so complicated that the federal government must set up special workshops and hire consultants to train service providers on how to fill out the required forms.‘j In this process, data are created and get exchanged for something else-a shelter bed, contracts, funding, authority, and legitimacy. We can also follow this transition in reverse, starting with the holder of money, who at each stage of the process purchases data and thus legitimacy (perhaps) in the eyes of the lawmakers who authorized the funding. As mentioned above, original data are the most important currency in the field of homelessness, but ironically, not for the potential knowledge that could be gleaned from them. Instead, they are prized for their exchange-value, as outlined in the process in figure 3.2.Though in theory the data would seem to be quite useful for program planning and program evaluation, they are in fact the easiest means to many other ends, such as funding or legitimacy. The data-money connection is further cemented by the scarcity of another capital, time. “Brian,” a consultant, describes these interrelationships, specificallyhow data winds their way through the hands of various agents across the field; at each level, data are exchanged for another type of capital: In fact, here’s how I’d break it. I would say, once again, remember different organizations work different ways. Mostly, organizations are so overwhelmed and understaffed and underfunded, they’rejust trying to meet the minimal reporting requirements put on them by funders. At the next level up, funders, particularly DHS, tend to be somewhat more active in wanting

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to get more information because they have to renew their funding every year; they have to defend the programs against budget cuts, all this kind of thing, so they tend to be more active. And at the top end of the scale, you have advocacy groups [that are] very interested in getting their hands all the data they can because they’re out there talking to newspapers, talking to media, talking to political groups, talking to the city council all the time.

Homeless Person Searchingfor Shelter

Homeless Person’s Intake Data

-------

Shelterbed

Shelter

Shelter’s Total Aggregate Intake Data

------

City Contracts

City Government

City’s Shelter Data

- - - - - - - - b Federal Funding

Federal Government

National Aggregate Homeless Data

Key ------Figure 3.2.

----

*Federal Budget Allocations *Authority

b Data ccmverted to another capital The Data-Money Connection

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Brian has outlined how different agents-service providers, hnders, government agencies, and advocates-require differing amounts of data to obtain the other capitals they are seeking. At one extreme, the service providers (those who are providing shelter, food, health care, and more directly to clients) are the originators of much data and struggle to generate the bare minimum of information that keeps finders happy. At the other extreme, advocates attempt to amass as much data as possible in order to gain recognition and legitimacy. Brian also describes an example of how the hnding source “purchases” data. The data are generated first to feed the desires of hnders and second to help understand the work: But to give you an idea, I mean, once again, it’s not being driven [so much] at the federal. DHS, for example, funded a project that I work with, including all the family shelters that they fund. And we actually got people from all of these programs together and, someone from “Agency Y” and tried to put together what we thought would be pertinent information that would promote not only the needs of funding sources to get demographic information but help indicate over time the change in population that we were seeing: the change in presenting problems, change in family makeup. The number of questions that we ask in the family shelters now is quite extensive.

The purchasing of data by hnders occurs at all levels: at the local, state, and federal governmental levels and in the private realm as well. For example, one agency, while primarily an advocacy organization, also serves to place homeless people in hotels and offers special payee services that allow these clients to obtain better room rates. This relationship is worked out, in this case with DHS acting as the hnder, and thus impacts the advocacy organization’s data-production efforts, as “Susan,” a staff member at the organization, describes: We have to keep track ofgender, ethnicity, and whether someone was homeless and who refers them to us. We also keep track of whether someone’s a veteran, education level, and we keep things like emergency contacts.

The power of finders through money-capital is not restricted to the public sector. “Diane,” who works for a health service provider that 43

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receives only private foundation money, still has data production requirements put forth by her financial supports. When asked if funders ever requested summaries of information about the clientele, for instance, the number of homeless women seeking prenatal care, she commented that funders were more interested in data about housing, substance abuse, and birth weights. Further, she could only recall funding organizations requesting this data; it was not generated for any other audience. In each case, data production occurs primarily to manufacture a currency for exchange as opposed to a planning or evaluative resource. While data can be and are used for this latter purpose at times, the impetus to gather them is generated by the funders and not the agents in the programs themselves. The data are proof that the agency has lived up to its part of the bargain. This reasoning renders both the data and the means of producing them more of a constraining mechanism of control instead of a potential source of understanding about the situation of homelessness.

INTAKES AND CASE MANAGEMENT We can see how data are used for control by examining intake and case management procedures, when much of the data we have been discussing are generated. Because of their centrality in collecting data and organizing the field, intakes should be considered one of the primary information practices in the field. Intakes and case management are two highly coupled practices of central importance within the field of homelessness. An intake is essentially an interview with a client or prospective client about his or her background. Intakes vary in their degree of detail depending upon the organization, the resources it has available to conduct the intake, and the purpose of the intake itself. Some organizations have several intake processes, beginning with a very general set of questions in order to gather basic demographic data. Subsequent processes, when they occur, are more detailed and can take one to several hours. They are usually tied to the production of a case management plan, which is a program created by the client and the case manager (the formally or informally trained social worker helping and monitoring the client) that outlines specific goals for the client and actions 44

INFORMATION PRODUCTION I N CONTEXT

the client must take to achieve those goals. Such intakes go into great detail concerning the client’s history, focusing in particular on those aspects seen as potential contributions to the person’s homelessness, such as substance abuse. Lengthy intakes most frequently occur within the shelter system, both for families and individuals. The intake process as it is used with case management (the discussion between client and case manager) and the data taken down during the intake process are the primary example of how data are gathered and used within the sphere of a service agency. When intake forms serve primarily as the means for gathering the data required to satisft funders (as opposed to serving program development services, for instance), they illustrate the authority-capital that funding institutions have. When intake forms are mechanisms for furthering the case management process, they illustrate the power-over authority that service providers have over clients, because clients cannot receive needed services without completing this forms The quotation below summarizes how “Rachel,” a shelter caseworker, conducts phone interviews with potential clients. At this point, the potential client has filled out an initial intake form at the centralized location and is now undergoing his or her second intake process, as described by that same caseworker. This phone intake is still shorter than the final intake: Well, I would ask if they could tell me a bit about their [current] situation: Why are they are in the situation they’re in? Why do they need shelter? Where have they been staying last? What’s their source of income? When is the last check they received if they have AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children], which is the main source of income for the families that we serve. Where’s the last check? How many kids do you have? Are you pregnant? Some very preliminary health concerns. Sometimes if we have chicken pox, we have to quarantine for a couple weeks, all the shelters do. If it’s a woman, see if she’s fleeing a batterer [and] if so, is he actively pursuing her ’cause we’re not a safe house, this probably wouldn’t be the best place for her to be. I also ask about someone’s history with drugs and alcohol. How often, what drugs? When was the last time, how frequently? If it seems like there’s been a history of substance abuse, [I] see if they’re willing to be in a program, either a fdl-time, like a day-treatment program, or, if they would just need something like AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] or NA [Narcotics Anonymous] for maintenance.

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Intakes such as Rachel’s are required to determine the potential client’s eligibility for a program or for the eligible client to receive particular services. Regardless of length, then, all are expressions of powerover-capital, both because of their gatekeeping nature and because of the self-exposing aspect of the process. When service providers are either dependent on each other or are cooperating to serve the needs of a large population, they will work to create common intake forms. Such cooperation occurs in the provision of family shelter and housing for homeless people with HIV/AIDS, as described below by “Christen,” a housing coordinator: We’re basically the information source for people while they’re sitting on the list. When their name comes up, we try to find them to do the comprehensive intake. When the system was created, all the housing providers got together created one intake form that we all agreed on and felt that was the information we all needed to make our own assessment. So we see the person, ask these questions, and do a pretty intensive assessment so that when the client is ready to be referred over to the housing provider, they can read it [the intake form] before the person even shows up. Then when they see the person, they’ll do a final assessment to make sure the person actually meets the eligbility and are appropriate for their program, and then they either move in or not. So it’s sort ofa negotiation on that end. All we do is assess based on the criteria the program gives us.’ In this instance, the data-production process is streamlined, making it less burdensome for each organization to collect the data that are required by finders. T h e process is also maintaining a consistent information background for the potential client and eliminating the need for duplicative intake processes. We begin to see in this instance how the intake process is tied to the case-management process, as it provides initial information for case managers and can inform clients of the availability or requirements of case management. “Scott,” a case manager in a shelter, puts it this way:

So they actually complete two forms in terms of information that we generate or that we need to do ourjobs. When they come in they do a shelter intake. All clients do that. It’s kind of a general demographic: name, next of kin, age, race, sex, cause of homelessness, how many times have you 46

INFORMATION PRODUCTION IN CONTEXT

been homeless in the past year, have you ever been here before, very general information. And they also sign a client agreement on the back, basically: “I agree to follow the rules of the shelter. I agree, I understand that I will be offered case management, and I will be given a certain period to get in it, and if I’m to participate in case management I need to do it during this eligibility period.”

Case management is perhaps the most interesting practice within the entire field of homelessness because it is the most focused concentration of power between people who need resources and people who have access to those resources. The case manager is a quintessential gatekeeper, who has the authority to decide the rules of the game and interprets the results. Case managers are in charge of the detailed intake process, and case managers together with the client make up the client’s case-management plan, setting goals for the client to work on to remedy his or her various problems. In addition, case management includes determining whether that plan is being followed adequately and, consequently, rewarding or punishing the client based on that determination. We can see how this power gets exercised in case manager Scott’s description of the process in the shelter where he works: Case management is an option for all of them, but it is available to all of them also. So on Fridays I assign case managers, and everyone who has come in for the past week gets [one]. It’s up to the client to establish a case-management relationship. So they’re given a window, a period of opportunity to contact the case manager that they’re assigned to and indicate “Yes, I’m interested in case management. I want to work with you.” If they decide they want to do that, then the case manager schedules the intake and that signals the case-management relationship has begun. If they don’t come during that eligibility period, which is about ten days from when they’re assigned, then they’re not in case management. And when they get outside of the eligibility window, the clock continues ticking towards their thirty days. Whatever the original outdate will be their firm outdate.

Case managers are invested with a tremendous amount of power-overcapital. They collect very personal data, focusing on individual flaws and weaknesses, and can in reality mandate what a client must do to

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remedy those weaknesses. They have the authority to provide or extend services, for example, lengthening the time someone is allowed to stay in a shelter. Finally, they review the progress a client has made in the casemanagement process to determine what happens to the client next. “Alex,” a current advocate who was formerly a caseworker, was unusually conscious of the power-over-capital he held in that position. In the quote below, he describeshis discomfort with holding this capital and his strategy for relinquishing that power by circumventing as much as possible the intake process, which as we have seen, is how power-over-capital is generated: The system’s set up where nine out of ten people that came to me for intakes would lie. You just know it. So, what I would do is change the way I did intakes. And all I would get from you the first time we met was your name, you know. I didn’t ask you for your date of birth and your social [security number]. I didn’t ask you for anything I didn’t need in order to determine [if3 you were eligible for [the hotel program] or not. And then once I determined that you were eligible, I’d show you your room, get you settled in, and then we’d fill out the intake. Because you were already in, you didn’t have to bullshit me anymore. You didn’t have to tell me what you thought I wanted to hear in order to get the hotel room that’s behind me. And that’s where you want to be. You don’t want to be here talking to me. You want to be in that hcking hotel. So, you’re gonna tell me whatever you need, and you’re gonna be looking over there the whole time. So [once I] get you settled in, let you hcking see that you got the room. Then I would sit down with you and say “OK, now, you know, what kind of shit you working on? Are you seeing a therapist?’’ And then you could start going through all that because the guard was down, and you already had the room, so then it was like “How can we support you, to keep it?” You know.

Dana, another advocate who was formerly homeless, provides an example of how power-over-capital works fi-om the perspective of a client in case management. I mean, every time I had one of those meetings, finally I got to the point where I was like, “That’s it. That is it. If she comes at me one more time with this shit, I’m just gonna lose it.”You know, I was afraid I was going

48

INFORMATION PRODUCTION IN CONTEXT

to get kicked out, that was always a constant threat, like, “If you don’t do this, then you’re going to get kicked out!” And that’s a real threat when you have little babies, when you have to make sure have at least some semblance of housing. I mean, it’s not just an implied threat; it’s a verbal threat. And the stress is unbelievable. A lot of people relapse going through homelessness. Especially if they’re trying to be clean and it’s really early in their recovery. Those people that make it through are really, really strong people.

The denial of self-sovereignty-the right to decide what to do and when to do it-is inescapable. Related to this situation, and perhaps because of it, we can see how the relationship with the case manager can be quite antagonistic, and at least in this instance, it comes across as punitive as opposed to constructive. Ultimately, it is unclear whether a case manager can necessarily effect any long-term change in a homeless person’s housing status. The availability of all types of housing is so limited that frequently a client simply runs out of time at one shelter before getting to the top of a waiting list for more permanent housing. The fact that this situation is more or less ignored within the case-management relationship typifies the paternalistic attitudes within the field of homelessness toward homeless people-wanting to assist, seeking places to assist within the individual’s personality or behavior patterns, but unable to bring about significant change for that individual due to structural problems in the world outside of the shelter system. Thus, the relationship is somewhat ineffectual and the process rather ludicrous since such great power is asserted to so little effect.

POWER RELATIONS

All fields have a thread of power woven through them. Within homelessness, power is alternately exerted and fought over through control over such resources such as money and housing, as well as the identity parameters through which discrimination (subtle or overt) often acts. Other researchers have in fact identified that the ethnicity, race, and gender of an individual experiencing homelessness greatly influences the types of services and assistance provided.8

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Resource Control Several resources are essential sites of power: specifically, data, money, and access to services (including housing). Data have been discussed earlier in this chapter. Here we will discuss money and access to services. The creation of the McKinney Act intensified the institutional nature of the homelessness field. Although institutional responses to homelessness have existed almost as long as homelessness itself, the resource base the McKinney Act represents, such as hnding and institutional structures and procedures, changed the dynamic. The influx of money and resources spawned a professionalized response to homelessne~s.~ Formerly homeless and later a staffmember in a shelter, Alex described his experience during this period of change: The McKinney [passed 3 in ’86; the funding really started kicking in ’87. All of a sudden we weren’t qualified for those jobs anymore. And, we didn’t have the skills necessary. “The system’s changed. ...The skills necessary to run the system have changed” are what we kept hearing. And it was bullshit. The only thing that changed was the amount of money and the amount of documentation required. And the shelters really started going into a case management mandatory, we started hearing about life-skills training, and what used to be about 11:30 check-in at night, now is eight o’clock, and these are adults. Our feeling was, and still is to this day, that government started funding the homeless programs as a way of relieving themselves of responsibility to deal with the socioeconomic causes of poverty and homelessness and to focus all of the attention of the community-based organizations onto rehabilitating homeless people so they can tit back into society. And by that very statement they’re saying there’s nothing wrong [with] society; it’s the homeless people that are messed up. That’s a bad philosophy. It ignores three-quarters of what [has] created homelessness, which is socioeconomic. At that point I was making about twenty-eight grand a year, running a hotel program. Being a white boy from Long Island certainly helped, but it was mainly [based on] seniority and just knowing the system inside.

Thus, as more resources became available, and as more data production (“documentation”) was required in exchange for those resources, 50

INFORMATION PRODUCTION IN CONTEXT

control shifted away from those without legitimized training into the hands ofprofessionals, such as licensed or accredited social workers. This professionalization changed the environment for homeless people within the field as well: formalizing procedures, instituting behavioral rules (e.g., in-and-out times), and revamping attitudes regarding homelessness. The McKinney Act also brought the federal government into the field of homelessness and with it, a new type of authority-capital, with its own set of rules, practices, and money-capital. Both changed the field, causing certain other capitals to be revalued. Consequently, professional training, money, and data became highly valued and connected, and old capitals, such as first- and secondhand knowledge of homelessness, devalued. Additionally, certain agents, such as homeless people and service providers became re-identified. Homeless people needed to be rehabilitated, and service providers needed to be professionalized as caseworkers. Housing, or rather the lack of it, is another central resource that plays a role in the continuation ofhomelessness. While more than one advocate has said that solving homelessness requires more housing, low-cost housing stocks are diminishing, virtually eliminating the possibility of affordable permanent housing at this particular historical moment. Temporary shelter beds and transitional housing (originally designed as a holding point until permanent housing could be achieved), continues to proliferate. One would think that housing would be the main driving capital within the field of homelessness, yet it is not. Though people are homeless because they have no permanent housing, the scarcity of housing capital is so great that finding permanent housing, while highly desirable is not considered a realistic priority. Although it is a key component of the longer-term solution and seems ever present in everyone’s minds, it is often nothing more than an illusion in the short-term. Figure 3.3, part of a shelter exit form, illustrates the housing crunch and subsequent conflict. Of the seventeen types of housing a client can be expected to go into after leaving a shelter, only two are permanent housing. This ratio, not the expectations that are set out in case-management plans, truly reflect the realities of homelessness. Despite debates over whether or not housing itselfis the only necessary solution to homelessness, there is widespread agreement that there is not enough low-cost housing to meet the needs of those who are homeless or 51

CHAPTER S

Neighbahood(in SF only):

Cootdwngt Address:

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Figure 3.3.

CW

Jbb

a

Phone:(

Post-Shelter Housing Options (Reprinted with permission.)

vulnerable to homelessness. In turn, such high demand for an obviously scarce resource immediately raises the stakes in battles over resource control. Turning again to Alex, an advocate for homeless people, we can see that he felt that the issue was essentially reducible to an unwillingness to expend resources on poor people and those of color. In his opinion, poor people and people of color don’t control enough capital within the fields of housing, homelessness, and politics to have their needs attended to over those of competitive interests: We destroy enough of it [housing], you know. We did it with Moscone Center, and this is the only city in the world that’s so fucking hypocritical that it can destroy three thousand units of low-income housing and put up a memorial to Martin Luther King. You know, I mean, how much more fucking hypocritical can you get? You know. And yet, there was no replacement housing. We knew that the projects were gonna be torn down, we built two units of housing, affordable to AFDC families, as a city. We built two fucking units. So then HUD starts tearing down all of the projects, and 40 percent of the families end up in the East Bay. Gee. That was on purpose. You can’t tell me, that was benign neglect.. .. We were fucking giving them reports and talking about it and talking at hearings about it, you know. And the feds passed a law that said, “We don’t have to replace what we tear down one for one” and exempted themselves fiom the responsibility of having to build replacement housing, and San Francisco said, “They can’t afford to live there anymore.” These were families that have been here for generations and overwhelming &can American and Latinos. And [now] they can’t afford to live there anymore.

52

I N F O R M A T I O N P R O D U C T I O N IN C O N T E X T

When they talk about the ballpark, or some dumb-ass shit, it’s “we,” “we as a city,” and “our self-esteem as a major city.” But when it comes to poor people and homeless people it’s always “they” and “them” and “those people.”

Identity: Race and Ethnicity Ethnicity and race are a constant factor within the larger field of homelessness, as they are a part of contemporary life everywhere in the United States, and they play a particular role in data production. For instance, almost all intake forms ask for specification of race or ethnicity along traditional lines: Caucasian, African American, Asian, Latino, Native American and other, in addition to questions regarding age and gender. This sort of data not only fulfills funders’ needs but can assist in programmatic goals. However, Christen, a housing coordinator, is often fmstrated by this situation because she cannot distribute housing resources evenly throughout her target population. Because resources are scarce, she views current strategies to deal with race/ethnicity as a direct impediment to her work. In the situation highlighted below, she describes how the positive value placed on race-capital at the institutional level ensures its conversion into housing at the individual level: The only transitional-housing programs are for people who are African American. So, [for] people [who aren’t African American] who need transitional housing, there’s really nowhere to send them, and it’s really difficult to get people interested in that [transitional housing], ’cause they’re much more interested in permanent housing. Transitional housing should take people off the streets or from shelters right away, not have to be sitting on a list, waiting for that bed. [It’s] the city [that] makes that decision.

Because not enough of her clients are African American, and because in general people prefer to wait for permanent housing instead of transitional housing, these spots are difficult to fill. But because at the city level there’s a push for a transitional-housing model as part of the solution to homelessness, she must keep culling through potential client lists, trying to find candidates for intakes. Conversely, when race-capital operates at the individual level, it is valued negatively. James, a formerly homeless man who now works within 53

CHAPTER 3

city government on homeless issues, explains how race-capital is used to segregate and marginalize certain populations: There’s a lot of homelessness because despite all these great employment programs some people are viewed as untrainable. There’s a lot of racism going on. Sheltersare like prison because all the blacks are on one side and all the whites are on one side, and all the Latinos on one side; it’s like that.

Identity: Gender and Transgender Gender is clearly connected to homelessness, through lack of child care, domestic violence, and divorce; in terms of types of services, for instance, women with children, or women who are close to giving birth, have special shelters just for them. Thus, gender-capital is positive for some women and at best immaterial for men and childless women. “Ellen,” who works as an advocate for homeless people, delineates the issues of gender, which she describes in terms of family issues: There are other broader issues like the lack of affordable housing, which is especially significant for families, because if you have more people, then you need more space, and it’s going to be more money, and you want a good decent place to live because you have kids. And it’s [homelessness] [about] welfare reform, but I don’t separate the two. It’s all about poverty, you know. Child care that’s flexible and meets the needs of families and for younger children, for children under two, is really hard to find and to access. The kids have to be potty trained and they have to be over two, so you’re kind of out of luck if they’re younger. Thus, the two biggest issues that her clients identifjr as causes of homelessness are the lack of affordable housing and the lack of affordable, flexible child care. Sexual orientation and identification are also factors to be considered. Evidence of their importance to people working within the field exists in the provision of hormones as part of homeless health-care programs, the inclusion of “transgender” in gender categories, and through the tension between people of different sexual orientations in shelters. In the last case, not being heterosexual continues to be a negative capital both in terms of

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access to resources and relations with other homeless people in the field. This tension is described below by James, a formerly homeless man who is now working for the city on homeless issues: You know, there’s a particular shelter that’s [being] built for different sexual orientations, but unless you’re transgender or something really obvious, then you go on [pretending to be]. There’s no real counseling or anything like that for gay men and women in the shelters.

SUMMARY This chapter has focused on several “centers of activity” within the field of homelessness. By examining them and identifymg some of the primary fields, agents, information practices, and capitals that are involved in these activities, we have been able to develop an understanding of the nature of the field of homelessness as a whole (at least in terms of information-producing activities). We now have a richer sense of the social dynamics that are at work and will be able to use this understanding as a key to identifying the dominating conceptions that are interwoven throughout the field. If we look again at figure 2.1, the “Homeless Certification” form that’s been our reference point throughout this book, answers to some of the questions posed at the end of chapter 2 now become apparent. The language in the form gives us the clues. Who is determining the degree to which a given individual meets the definition and thus gets certified? Who uses this certificate and why? What do they gain and lose by its use? What kames of reference are involved in this certification? What ideas about homelessness are stated in this form? What ideas are implicit? Homelessness is explicitly defined quite narrowly as “living on the streets or in an emergency shelter.” Thus, anyone who is temporarily living with friends or family to avoid living on the streets or in a shelter is not homeless. Anyone who is currently institutionalized and is facing living on the streets or in a shelter is also not considered homeless unless he or she has been on the streets or in a shelter just before being in an institution. The form indicates that the definition comes directly from the McKinney guidelines, which makes sense since the purpose of the form is

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to determine whether or not someone is eligible for McKinney-funded services. The information practices involved are explicit-creating and enforcing definitions and basic data generation. The agents involved, then, are funders and government agencies, represented by those administering McKinney Act funding itself; service agencies, embodied in the agency representatives who complete this form; and finally, the individual homeless person. Of all three agent types, the homeless person is the least empowered to define his or her status as homeless, and even the agency representative has no ability to modify the form, for instance, filling in an “other” box to define the applicant’s current living situation. Thus, a high degree of authority-capital is invested in this form, stemming from the power of the McKinney Act to define homelessness, to determine who is in the field, and to shape service practices within the field. Additionally, power-overcapital is present here because the homeless individual cannot complete this form independently, but must totally rely on a third party. In terms of the frames of reference, or fields, that are involved, many are indicated, especially by the check boxes used to gather more information about current living situations and the notes associated with them: money, housing, shelters, substance abuse, families, government, housing, crime, health (mental and physical), and, of course, power. For instance, the check boxes concerning domestic-violence shelters and jails imply that the fields of family, violence, and crime are all contributing elements to the context of this form. The field of crime is also invoked in another, more indirect way. It is implied by the fact that there is a need to actually certify someone’s living situation as homeless. This implication indicates an assumption about homeless people and is an example of the type of analysis that will be done in the next chapter, when we identify dominating conceptions. At that point, we will be able to answer our last two questions about form 2.1: What ideas about homelessness are stated in this form? What ideas are implicit in it?

NOTES 1. For a complete description of the key fields, agents, practices and capitals, see appendix B.

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2. Thanks to Mark Butler for this analogy. 3. The field size is merely illustrative and does not reflect significance. 4. Public Law 100-77, sec. 103, 100th Cong., 2d sess. (22 July 1987), Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act. 5 . There is some effort to remedy the imbalance ofpower in this relationship through the establishment of a grievance procedure that all city-funded shelters must follow. The grievance process includes requiring shelters to notify clients of the shelter rules (which was not done regularly until the grievance procedure was put into place in January 1993) and has also resulted in the appointment of a cityfunded advocate who represents clients throughout the grievance procedure. 6. Described by an interview subject who is a government service provider. 7. This instance is one of the few in which data is actually used for programmatic purposes as much as for funding purposes. 8. Joanne Passaro, The Unequal Homeless: Men on the Streets, Women in Their Place (New York: Routledge, 1996). 9. A similar response took place in the post-Civil War period of the nineteenth century but on a smaller scale. See Charles Hoch, “A Brief History of the Homeless Problem in the United States,” in The Homeless in Contemporary Society, ed. Richard D. Bingham, Roy E. Green, and Sammis B. White (Newberry Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1987), 21.

57

IDEOLOGY THE DOMINATING CONCEPTIONS OF HOMELES SN ES S

A

t the end of chapter 3, we were able to look at the homeless-certification form and identifjr the key elements: who was involved, why, and how. Now we must look between each of those pieces to identifjr the ideas about homelessness that are strewn among them. We had a hint of what these ideas are likein the association between criminalityand homelessness that is implied in the certification form. Our task will be to identifjr the dominating conceptions (ideologies) that are most pervasive throughout the field of homelessness as people are engaged in information practices.

THE NATURE OF COMMON UNDERSTANDINGS Ideology can be understood as common understandings and conceptions that serve to explain issues such as homelessness. It is important to remember that these beliefs are not imposed from an external source. They are part and parcel of our everyday lives. For instance, no one authoritative body has ever said that all homeless people are substance abusers, and yet, as we shall see, the image of homeless people as substance abusers is quite prevalent. It is usell to consider ideologies as “common understandings” because they are in fact the background understandings that are commonly shared by most people. Thinking of ideologies from this perspective helps ground us in the day-to-day banal, and therefore invisible, nature of ideology. 58

IDEOLOGY

In chapter 2, we discussed the idea that there may be contradictions within and between these understandings and that they may not remain logical over time. Instead of being cohesive and permanent, they are modular and temporal. They help us make sense of a given problem as we confront that problem. In other words, so long as they serve the purpose of explaining away circumstances as they appear, ideologies need not be coherently integrated with one another. The common understandings that appear most frequently surrounding information practices in the field of homelessness are summarized in table 4.1. They culminate in a pervasive dominating ideology that homelessness is the fault or responsibility of the individual experiencing it. Individual conceptions vary, from implicit suggestions that homeless people are biologically different from housed people to a more paternalistic view that homeless people need just a simple helping hand to get their lives in order. Either way, the result is an “individual responsibility” ideology that assists in maintaining the existing organizations and activities surrounding homelessness. One of the aspects of ideologies that make them so powerhl is that they can ovemde both internal contradictions (e.g., logical flaws in the argument) and contradictions that are presented by external evidence. This adaptability most definitely occurs within the field of homelessness with the individual-responsibility ideology. As asides within statements that Table 4.1.

Dominating Conceptions

Dominating Conception

Description

Difference

People who are homeless are different from housed people, either naturally or through learned behaviors. People who are homeless are incompetent and must be handled strongly but sympathetically. People are homeless because of personal weaknesses which can and should be fixed. Substance abuse or mental illness is the primary cause of homelessness. People who are homeless are living on the streets. People who are homeless are irresponsible and dangerous and need strict rules with strong consequences.

Paternalism Rehabilitation Substance Abusers or Mentally I l l Street People Discipline

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were overwhelminglyin line with the dominating individual-responsibility ideology, most agents offered ideas that flatly contradicted this notion, particularly when discussing causes of homelessness. In addition, those agents who did not initially focus on the individual-responsibilityideology but instead referred to an alternative understanding that emphasizes social responsibilities eventually mentioned some variant of the individualresponsibility ideology. Thus, efforts to circumvent the dominating ideology still are defined by it. We will see the particulars of these contradictions as we go on to discuss each of the common understandings that are at work in the field of homelessness: difference, paternalism, rehabilitation, substance abusers/ mentally ill, street people, and discipline.

DIFFERENCE Difference is the notion that homeless people are somehow dissimilar from the rest of us (i.e., housed people) whether by predisposition or conditioning. The resultant understanding surfaces in two ways. First, the actual conception that homeless people are different influences an agent’s understandings, as is evidenced by the way they discuss homelessness and people who are homeless. Second, agents who are homeless clearly perceive that conception being applied to themselves. Brian, a consultant, discusses how differences between housed and nonhoused people are not so much “genetic” as learned from dyshnctional family life: That’s the only time I’ve heard of corporations being really proactive in trying to get involved, find out what’s going on, make a difference. And I think they were surprised that some of these homeless families are so out of the mainstream ofwhat they think American life is that they were unable to help. I mean some of these mothers, they’ve been on welfare, never [had] ajob; they’ve never been in the professional world. They don’t know how to schedule their time so that they get their kids to child care and get to work on time and do that and come home, and how to deal when something upsets your schedule. These are not skills these people were taught by their parents or ever had to have. So corporations think, “Well, if they get a job.” Get a job? They don’t even know what it means to have a job. 60

IDEOLOGY

While this statement is partly confounded by Brian’s individual perceptions and a discussion ofwelfare recipients, there is still an identifiable thread of feeling apart from the “rest of us.” According to Brian, skills for participating in the work world are not getting passed down through generations, from parent to child, within this specific segment of the popdation. The difference is clear cut. There are also degrees of difference. Rick, a man who works in law enforcement, expresses his shock at people who do not behave according to his expectations of “normal” behavior. Because the people he encounters do not want to take any shelter, no matter how crude, he considers them strange, abnormal, and uncooperative in their own assistance. People [have got] to meet you halhy. They have to have some motivation to want to change their lifestyle. And a lot of these people out here have absolutely no motivation to change their lifestyle. So, it’s like throwing help at someone who doesn’t want it and is not going to take it. And it’s like “Well, we can put you in a residence hotel. It’s not very glamorous¶but. ...” “Oh, no, no, I don’t like the hotel.” “We could take you to a shelter, why don’t you use the shelters?” “Oh, no, ’cause you have to be sober. . . .“Well that, the shelters, that’s another thing.

Yet this same agent later acknowledged that typical shelters are often unsafe places to be; a rational person might very well choose to stay outside of them, even if it meant sleeping on the street. However, it is the prohibition against alcohol that Rick first identifies as a homeless person’s reason for rejecting a shelter and not the safety considerations. This statement implies that people who are homeless do not have the luxury to consider their personal welfare and safety in the same way that housed people do. Such labeling of “different” is perceived not only by the agents who assign the label but by those receiving it, which is the second way in which the difference conception appears. Dana, a woman who had been homeless and is now an advocate, discusses her understanding of this process: Because there’s, because in the city they don’t think that homeless people are normal. Like, that they’re so, homeless people are so dysfunctional, and they’re homeless because they’re stupid or crazy or on drugs, or whatever. This is the mindset, that we need to control their behavior. 61

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In this instance, the conception of difference is shown as linked to several other strong conceptions, such as homeless people as substance abusers or mentally ill (which will be discussed later on in this chapter). Independent of these links though, people who aren’t homeless identify people who are homeless as a consistently damaged group of people. Clearly, being labeled and identified as “homeless” distances those so labeled fiom the rest of the population. “Ted,” a man who works in a health-clinic setting, considers what should be done regarding homelessness. In this case, “difference” is seen as a way to dehumanize people who are homeless. What individuals can do may be limited, he says, but prompted by the opinions of a homeless person with whom he has worked, he advocates rejecting the “homeless” label and the language that perpetuates it: It’s a really exciting project . . . supportive housing. If people’d only understand it’s not “the homeless.” One person I know refuses to use “the homeless.” Homeless is an adjective; it’s not a noun. At least say “homeless person,” or say “homeless individual,” or “homeless person.” Humanize this individual. Understand that it’s a big issue.

Similarly, “Francine,” a woman who works in an education setting, describes the reaction teachers have when they discover that a particular student is homeless. The initial reaction is shock because they could not tell that there was a homeless student in their classrooms. But once the “homeless” label is applied to someone who has previously been considered in terms of scholastic achievement, they are conceptually distanced fiom the rest of their classmates: Well, sometimes, a teacher will come in with shock on his or her face and say, “Oh, my god! I just found out one of my students is homeless [hits the table]! “ or “One of my students is going to be homeless [hits the table]! I would never have known.” One guy called in and said “I can’t believe it, my best student is homeless!” So it’s like, “Oh, only your worst students are homeless, or your no-show students are homeless, or ...”Every time it comes up I say, “Well, yeah.” So I try and use the position for education. It’s just a lot of assumptions, really [that the teachers are making].

The examples discussed above demonstrate a belief in some sort of indicator, usually behavioral, that marks someone who is homeless as dis62

IDEOLOGY

tinct from the rest of the population. The “difference” conception therefore works to intellectually segregate those who are homeless from those who are housed. This segregation provides an explanation for why some people are homeless and not others-the people who are homeless are different; we can see how they make choices and act in ways that are not the same that housed people make. Only when this conception is directly and immediately challenged is the conception revealed as the ideological force that it is, as in the case of teachers discovering that their “good” students are also homeless. PATERN AL I SM The paternalism conception asserts that homeless people are incompetent; it is this incompetence that has brought them into the situation they now face. Paternalism takes a variety of forms but tends to fall on the sympathetic end of the individual-responsibilityideology spectrum. It primarily materializes as infringements on an individual’s intellectual or physical control under the guise of benefiting that individual. Many of its aspects, for example, identifying knowledge gaps (e.g., money-management skills), can be tied to the conception of rehabilitation, which will be discussed in the next section. A striking example of paternalism can be found in the focus on parenting skills. Within the family-shelter system, a standard part of both the intake form and the shelter stay is a focus on parenting skills, though the intensity of this focus seems to vary from shelter to shelter. The purpose is both to evaluate those skills and improve them against a particular standard approved by the case managers. Paternalism appears as the conception that people who are homeless are by definition inadequate parents and is another example of the power-over capital that case managers hold. Dana, a formerly homeless person who is now an advocate, provides her understanding of the conflict over parenting that this conception engenders for those staying in shelters: And they don’t check their staff members. They’re gonna throw you out first, with your kids. I mean there’s a lot of fear for families that are lowincome, A) for becoming homeless and B) for becoming involved with

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child welfare, most especially if they’re homeless. Because the shelter makes so many CPS [Child Protective Service] reports against parents because of shit that they just don’t understand. I think it’s really wrong to have a bunch of families like in a congregate shelter because families have different styles of dealing with their children. And it can be perceived badly. Nobody deals with their kids the same way. And you know one parent might not like what that kid did to their kid, and I mean it creates a whole lot of shit. I mean, you’re literally like “this close” to people.

Paternalism also appears in more general, nonspecificways. Richard, a man who works in legal advocacy, discusses how clients are allowed to address their own problems as identified at the agency. This practice contrasts to the practice of other social service agencies, which tend to prescribe what clients must do. Paternalism here surfaces in the idea, and in the practice, of permitting or not permitting someone to act on his or her own behalf: We work here on a task-centered-mode.We analyze problems instead of people and get them motivated towards solving their problem. If it seems like there’s some kind of a psychiatric problem that makes it really hard for them to follow through, then we try hooking them up with a therapist. But mostly, we’re very task oriented, goal focused, action oriented. We see clients really appreciate that, and they’re allowed to take action on their own problems and show that they can do it.

“Bill,” a businessman who employs homeless people, places clear limits accompanied by realistic flexibility, which is what he feels is required for people who are homeless. Without such limits, he argues that his employees would be unable to hnction successfully in this work environment: We have to compete as a business. On the social-mission side, we provide an atmosphere that’s a little bit flexible. Someone needs to go get some therapy, or they need to go bail their son out ofjail or whatever, we usually work around their schedule, as long as it’s reasonable. We think it would be a disservice if we provided too much flexibility. So if they went fiom us with tons of flexibility to another place with normal flexibility, they’re gonna fall quick.

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Finally, in a last example of paternalism, Adam, who works with residents in a shelter, discusses the shelter policies that position residents as teenagers who needed to be taken in hand. In this shelter, clients earn privileges in exchange for free labor to the shelter. The privileges, for example, later curfews and the ability to mix with people of the opposite gender, are issues that adults who are not in shelters can decide for themselves: They get to come in later. They get to come in at ten instead of six or seven. They get one night when they don’t have to come back into the shelter. What I’m trying to push is that it’s also being involved in the shelter, and it’s being part of the place that’s your home, right now.

These instances of paternalism occurred with a variety of agents, from advocates to service providers. In all cases, these agents expressed a custodial, as opposed to a blaming, attitude. It is as if homeless people were cloaked in childlike vulnerability. Agents enacted paternalism by setting boundaries, being understanding, and rewarding certain defined behaviors. Underlying the paternalism conception is the assumption that homeless people are irresponsible. This notion not only allows agents to blame homelessness on the characteristics of people who are homeless but also avoids questioning the practices of service providers. For instance, Rachel, a woman who works as a case manager in a shelter, describes how homeless people are charged a nominal fee for staying in the shelter because they are considered irresponsible: It’s [a] necessity on our end as an income source, but I think probably more important than that is the family’s sense of responsibility and ownership over being here. That it is a choice that they’re here, and it’s not a hotel stay, a voucher stay, or something.

Paternalism is conceptualized by other agents as simply not knowing what is good for you, as demonstrated by the description Dan and Rick, law-enforcement officers, gave of someone they encountered on the streets. These two agents used a “tough love” approach by punishing the

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individual, whom they had grown fond of, through citations in order to get that person to make changes they thought he should make: Dan: We had a guy living in a refrigerator box with his wife, right down here in front of Otis and South Van Ness. She’s HIV positive and diabetic and got a spastic colon, and he’s been using heroin for forty years. It’s just a mess. And he’s panhandling, and we said, “Look, we got to, you don’t want to live like this.” And they’re both getting SSI [social security income], $740 a month. Rich: It’s all going to the dope dealer. Dan: Right up his arm and they’re out of money by the tenth of the month, something like that. And meanwhile, she’d just give it to him. . . .So, we took him up to Fort Mylie and got him on a methadone program and cleaned up. It worked. Rich: He got a hotel room. Dan: We were on him every day, “Bob” [the homeless man].

Rich: We probably gave him forty, fifty tickets. And what we said to him is, “If you want to get cleaned up, if you want to stop doing this, if you want to straighten out yourself, we’ll go down to court with you. We’ll testif>.in front of the judge. We will get these tickets dismissed.” Dan: There’s no guarantee; we can’t work out with him. Rich: But we felt we would have influence on the courts saying, “This was the situation he was in. This is what he’s had to resolve, the situation has been corrected.” And we felt that the hammer, the tool that we could use, was [to] give him a citation. Because then, I was very adamant about that, even when we befriended him and became friends with him and told him “Bob, you can’t do this.” Dan: “But we’re giving you a ticket, Bob.” Rich: “But we’re giving you a ticket, cause you’re still doing it.” It worked until he got comfortable. They were in a hotel. He wanted to buy a TV. He wanted to go to the movies. He was cleaned up. He was gaining weight. He was looking good, and he got bored. Dan: About forty days. Rich: So what do you do? You go back and you start chipping away at heroin again. And then you’re right back in the rat hole you started in. Paternalism can also discredit and short-circuitwhat homeless people do in what they consider their own best interest. UJanine: a woman who 66

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works for an organizationthat coordinates service delivery explained why clients were not allowed to make choices about where they received services. Even though clients would opt for what most would consider a better choice-a private room for their family as opposed to a barracks atmosphere-that choice is subtly critiqued as not being in the client’s best interest because of other problems they may have. Note that this critique distracts from the fact that there are an insufficient number of private rooms available: We don’t automatically let the family choose where they get to go, and that’s part of our policy because in the population we serve, there are people who believe that one shelter is nicer than another. [One] communal shelter [has] bunk beds, kind of in a dorm-room setting, versus [another], which has private rooms. And so, people usually prefer the private rooms and so everyone wants that shelter. If you let everyone choose, they’re automatically going to choose the one they see as better as opposed to the one that provides shelter but that they don’t like for whatever reason. So, if you give them the option of choosing, we already know what’s going to happen, so we’re very careful about advocating for people to go to one shelter, because they have other triage reasons that they need to meet.

Alex, formerly homeless and now an advocate, described with great hostility the paternalistic attitudes he has witnessed. From his perspective, the hndamental problem is a clash of class values and realities, where middle- and upper-middle-class people with access to resources evaluate the decisions of poor people with fewer resources, without taking that disparity into account. Paternalism in this case works by stripping away the material differences between individuals and allowing decision makers to then compare decisions without that context: Except, the most important part of it, and it’s not like, well, I guess I am a process freak, but I believe in one process, and I think it should be duplicated everywhere, which is if you’re gonna fucking talk about a group of people, you should talk to them. That’s really the bottom line. And the mayor’s office and United Way, they don’t do that. They don’t believe themselves, honestly, they don’t believe that homeless people or poor people are intelligent enough to decide what’s in their best interest. And you see that the most in family programs. You see that overwhelmingly in family programs, the way that these women are treated, and the 67

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way that the middle-class value systems of LCSW [licensed clinical social worker] hcking college graduates, no offense, are put on to poor people. And yet, they’ve never experienced living under that kind of pressure, under that kind of fear, and in that kind of congregate environment with their hcking children. [They] have no relationship to the way that [these] people are seeing the world, and the way that they’re feeling about themselves, and the pressure that they’re living under, and yet you’re putting these hcking Mayberry RFD values on the way that they interact with their children, or the way that they talk to each other. It’s the most condescending, hypocritical, bullshit hcking process I’ve ever seen in my life.

In addition to the general types of paternalistic attitudes, the paternalism conception often focuses on the area of money management. This area is the subject of much critique and retraining, based on the type of evaluation described above by Alex.

Money Management Service providers, program administrators, and some advocates throughout the field of homelessness typically share an assumption that homeless people are homeless because they do not spend their money wisely. The corollary to this assumption is that the problem of handling money can and should be addressed by teaching money-management skills and through savings programs, which in fact are sometimes a mandatory part of receiving services. What is so powerful about the money-management version of the paternalism conception is that it efficiently and almost eloquently negates questions of income insufficiency and poverty as sources of an individual’s homelessness by focusing on an individual’s behavior with any amount of money, however insignificant. “Janine,” a staff member of a service-provider agency, in discussing why she thinks there is homelessness, discussed substance abuse, money issues, and housing. Poor spending habits reside as the central issue of the three, obliterating mentions of income and low-income housing. The sense I have is substance abuse is one of the main issues. Spending money on a habit instead of spending it on necessary items. And then also, poor money management, in general, and lack of housing. It’s very tight here, so if people lose it, it’s very hard to get it back. 68

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Money management is an effective carrot-and-stick technique for managing people in shelters. Another service provider, Scott, described how money management fit into the case-management system. Money management was tied to the individual’s ability to stay in the shelter, determined by how well he or she stuck to the money-management scheme, along with other case-management requirements: So money management is kind of required. The initial client agreement [states] that “I understand that if I’m in case management I’m expected to save 60 percent of my income.” So a client comes in [with] zero income, [which means] 60 percent of zero. Sometimes that makes clients less willing to come to case management, and one of the things we try to get out is, “NO.It’s basically zero of zero. If you’re not making income, it does not mean you have to come up with money just to stay in case management; it means that you’re immediate priority with the case manager,” who is going to be identifying some source of income, be it applying for GA or getting day labor or casual labor, whatever. So 60 percent is kind of a general guideline.

Scott went on to describe how the “formula” for determining the savings goals took into account a client’s pre-existing financial obligations, such as storage-locker rentals, which are viewed as a necessity. In addition, clients often cycle through shelters on a more or less regular basis, so their history of savings is familiar to case managers, who would evaluate and set money management goals in relation to past shelter stays. In these descriptions, Scott reveals a certain flexibility in moneymanagement programs, such as an ability to take into consideration a client’s “legitimate” expenses (yet another example of power-overcapital). Again, the formal money-managementprograms reflect the paternalism conception by assuming that people who are homeless are incapable of making their own financial decisions. Money management is embedded in intake forms as well. The ideas contained in forms hold a great deal of authority-capital simply by being printed and used on a regular basis. They set a standard of practice and meaning. Thus, forms dealing with money management reinforce the notion of the need for money management in both the minds of the case managers and those being brought through the intake process. Below is an excerpt of a shelter form that instructs the person staying in the shelter 69

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Whatever Income or resources I have moy only be used to meet the most important needs of my family.

I will make a budget with my SociolWorker that includesspending for n e c d e ? ,such as transportation.medicine or diapersand to pay the programfee. A# addmonOl money and fccd stamps will be saved to obtain housing and provide for my family when I leave

Figure 4.1.

Money Management (Reprinted with permission.)

how their money will be handled. Here again, money management is required in order to obtain shelter services: Dana, an advocate who was formerly homeless, describes her experience of being on the receiving end of money-managementprograms. In her account, we can see the conflict over spending and housing decisions, reflecting different values and strategies on the part of the case manager and the homeless individual. Dana feels it is important to wait to get long-term, safe housing she can maintain on her income, while her case manager feels any sort of immediately available housing is a better option. Additionally, meeting the nonimmediate material needs of her children is frowned upon, underscoring the perception that she is hndamentally irresponsible: It was better than some because it wasn’t congregate, and I stayed there, and every time I went to a case-management meeting, they yelled at me about the layaway I had on for my kids’ Christmas. I wasn’t worried about getting into housing ’cause I was actively seeking subsidized housing and subsidized takes a long time to get. So, I realized really clearly that I wasn’t going to be able to maintain [on] 80 percent of my income. I have three kids! And what was that going to get me? A studio apartment in the Tenderloin? Forget that; that’s ridiculous. Because they don’t know how to help someone get into subsidized housing, I was [perceived as] being noncompliant. I would get shit for having layaway, the first time in my kids entire life that I have been able to buy them anything for Christmas. I was clean and sober, and I was going to make it the best damn Christmas they ever had, regardless of the fact that we were homeless! And they had lost all of their toys; they had lost all of their clothes. None of that shit had ever been replaced. They maybe had a weeks’ worth of clothes by this time. We’re doing everything we’re supposed to do. We’re in on curfew, we’re attending the stupid case management meetings, we’re doing every hcking thing they tell us to do. Not to mention on top ofthat, I went to rehab every 70

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single day! And they could do nothing but berate me about something that was so personal to me and important to my kids.

Participating in money-management programs can also provide access to non-shelter housing as well. But, in order to get this housing, homeless people must assume the identity of someone who requires money-management training and support. This “false identity” assumption is described by Susan, who works in an advocacy p r o p providing this service: About 75 percent of the people who come into the program come in homeless, anywhere &om a week to five years, six years. They come in because they want to find a room in a residential hotel that’s affordable for the GA or SSI income levels. We have worked with hotels all over the city for years, and they have basically given us vacancies and below-market rents with the understanding that we would provide the money management and support services to sort of stabilize the tenant population.

Paternalism, whether it appears in the specific format of mandated money-management programs or in more generalized attitudes and ways of interacting with people who are homeless, comprises both an attitude toward homeless people and an identification of behavior associated with homelessness. The next dominating assumption to be discussed, rehabilitation, is more active in nature, focusing on making changes that are connected to the same sorts of issues that give rise to the paternalism dominating conception.

REHABILITATION Rehabilitation is the understanding that individual homeless people can be “fixed,” returned to a “normal” state (“like the rest of us”), and not be homeless. This approach identifies the cause of homelessness in the individual’s personal makeup. Rehabilitation is closely tied to paternalism, except where paternalism identifies personal weaknesses; rehabilitation attempts to transform those weaknesses into socially acceptable strengths. As we have seen, this rationale has had a long history, stretching back to the latter part of the nineteenth century when middle-class reformers, threatened by the large numbers of tramps, felt the need to push for 71

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personal transformation or incarceration among this population. In order to do so, they developed formal institutions in which homeless people might live, and they hired professionally trained staff to work with these “inmates.” Such power relations live on in contemporary times, when the influx of funds from the McKinney Act ushered in the professionalization of staff who worked in shelters. This substitution of trained social workers for untrained people strengthens the rehabilitation attitude in shelters. Rehabilitation not only has an identity construct for those who are homeless (i.e., in need of profound alterations) but for service providers as well. People working in institutions focused on these sorts of transformations become “rehabilitators,”equipped with the skills to identify and help change troublesome aspects of an individual’s behavior or psyche. This identity can be perceived internally within the institution as well as externally by outsiders who may or may not agree with the rehabilitation conception. “Colleen,” a woman who works with homeless people who have been arrested, describes how the jail staff sees her. In this instance, the idea of rehabilitation is viewed negatively, implying that people who are homeless need profound change but are incapable of it: You know, we’re the “damned rehabbers.” Some deputies will call us that, but that’s OK, you know, as long as they know that we work responsibly there.

Thus, the conception of rehabilitation is placed onto the advocates or service providers by the very nature of their work. Rehabilitation is yet another way of avoiding or reducing in importance the questions of housing and income as causes of homelessness. The quotations below are derived from a variety of service providers, each of whom expresses different degrees of need for rehabilitation as a way to reduce homelessness. First is Christen, a woman who works as a housing coordinator. She identifies housing and rehabilitation as equally necessary to eliminate homelessness. Paternalism, surfacing in her description of homeless people in need of care, works in concert here with rehabilitation, portrayed as the need to learn basic social skills: Housing is not the only answer, and that’s one of the things I really stress because our subsidy program is not just [about] housing. It’s actually a mandatory case-managementprogram. In all my years of experience, once

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someone gets a place to live, things don’t stop there. It wasn’t only that they didn’t have housing that they were homeless. So once they’ve got a place to live, after about a month, that’s when all the other issues start surfacing [and] we realize, “Oh, [these are] some of the reasons why people are homeless. .” You know, a disorganized life, substance abuse, mental health issues, education level, literacy level,job skills.

..

Christen now goes on to invoke the “difference” common understanding, identifying specific ways in which homeless people are different from “the rest of us,” and how these differences indicate a need for rehabilitation: We know how to work; we know how to go get ajob. We know sort ofwhat it takes, the social skills to maintain a job. [But] some people have never learned those social skills. That’s why I thinkjob training and employment assistance is really important. It’s notjust helping someone with a rksumk, with how to interview, or get the job. ’Cause there are certain skills that it takes in order to maintain your life in a stable way. Just [because] somebody’s got money now and housing, we can[‘t] leave them alone. Two months later they’re in your office again. “Well, what happened?” “Well, I lost my housing. I lost my job.” “Why?” No one’s there to sort of help them along. People need a little help, they need some support. It doesn’t have to be mandatory, but you should be available to people. T h e second quote is by “Liz,” a woman who works in a service agency. She discussed the primary need for more low-income housing to end homelessness. Note that although she stresses the need for housing, she concludes by expressing rehabilitation in terms of personal transformation around drugs, money, and mental health: I’m pretty sure everyone believes low-income housing is one major way to do it. I also think, perhaps, longer-term case management to work with people and help them with, you know, managing money and getting services they need, such as substance-abuse programs, thiigs like that. Rehabilitation is a subtext in many forms. Figure 4.2 is part of a shelter intake form. In filling out this form, the potential client is asked to identify one or more areas in which they would like to improve. Hobbies and extracumcular activities are mixed together with life skills such as money management and parenting.

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2. Why have you come to

?

3. What do you hope to accomplkh?

4. In which of the following areas do you want to improveyour skills and knowledge during and after your stay at ?

-Child Development -Health and Medical Care Readingand Writing -Math -Money Management Nutritionand Cooking -Stress Management -Physical Fitness / Exercise -Art -Music EnglWI Language -Job skills SpimUailty -Recovery and Sobriety from Drugs 1 Alcohol -RelationsNpS to Communicate better -How UnderstandingMyself -other(specifY)

-

-

-

mank YOU far taking me tbne to compwe mis m. Figure 4.2.

Rehabilitation in an Intake Form (Reprinted with permission.)

IDEOLOGY

One of the most interesting choices in this form is “Understanding Myself,” which clearly asserts a need for self-reflection. Things that would be fun to learn about (cooking and music) are combined with things that are identified as weaknesses tied to homelessness (substance abuse and money management). Co-mingling these choices normalizes the rehabilitation conception, both for the case managers who work with the forms and for the potential clients who must fill them out. The need for rehabilitation becomes viewed as a fundamental for leaving homelessness and thus becomes part of the process of getting shelter.

SUBSTANCE ABUSERS AND T H E MENTALLY ILL Another conception is that the majority of homeless people are addicted to some substance and/or that they suffer from some type of mental illness. In both cases, substance abuse and mental illness are considered primary causes of the individual’s homelessness. This perception exists in all realms of the field of homelessness. Brian, a consultant for service providers, expressed this conception in discussing causes of homelessness. He estimated that “probably half of homeless adults are that way because of either mental illness or substance abuse problems.” Two law-enforcement officers, whose work is not primarily with homeless people but who encounter homeless people on a regular basis, had a similar perspective. They, too, perceive substance abuse and mental illness as the primary causes of homelessness and that the general population perceived and accepted the same:

Rick: I think these people have to understand it’s, “He’s a drug addict, poor guy.”It’s like “NO. Sorry.”“Right,you want to get offdrugs? You have to make the determination. You’re the one making the decision.”

Dun:Society has to draw the line somewhere. If society chooses to accept this, as I believe society right now is doing, then that’s the by-product. If the guy’s living on the street corner, a heroin addict, he’s an alcoholic,he’s HIV positive, whatever, and society thinks it’s OK for him to be on the sidewalk, then it’s OK to be on the sidewalk.

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As with the issue of money management, these conceptions can be found codified in the intake process of service providers. Rachel, a case worker, describes the intake procedures at her shelter, which includes routine detailed questions about substance-abuse history and potential treatments: I ask about someone’s history with drugs and alcohol. How often, what drugs? When was the last time, how frequently? That sort of thing. And if it seems like there’s been a history of substance abuse, see if they’re willing to be in a program, either full-time, like a day-treatmentprogram, or, something like AA or NA for maintenance. If someone has had a history with substances, I may say, “OK, we will do an intake, but call me back next week, and I want to see documentation that you’ve gotten yourself into a substance abuse program.” So, we may set up some steps they need to take in order to .. .demonstrate their commitment to being here.

The substance abuser/mentallyill conception is also embedded in forms, as shown in figure 4.3. This registration form for receiving health care asks for information about HIV and tuberculosis status and substanceabuse and mental-health history. Thus, both types of problems-physical and psychological-gain equal status and a sense of routineness. Contradictions within the substance abuser/mentally ill conception also come through in forms. For instance, in figure 4.4, a follow-up survey for clients of a service provider, the client is asked to list reasons for homelessness that are mostly tied to housing availability and income. The next set of questions does not specifically ask about causes of homelessness but begins with a series of questions on substance abuse. The co-occurrence of these two topics-material causes of homelessness and substance abuse-implies that there are other forces at work in contributing to the individual’s homelessness other than those stated by the client. Advocates, especially those having experienced homelessness firsthand, tend to reject the substance abuser/mentally ill conception at its first mention. Yet, they too cite substance abuse and mental illness as causes of homelessness. The substance abuser/mentallyill conception is so powerfd it impinges on countervailing experiences and beliefs. Dana, a formerly homeless woman who is now an advocate, exemplifies this

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Figure 4.3.

Substance Abuse and Forms (Reprinted with permission.)

9.

HOUSING HISTORY. Please answer all that apply to you. a. I have been homeless in the last six months Yes No b. I have lived in a shelter or hotel in the last six months Yes No C. I have lived with friends or relatives in the last six months Yes No d. I consider my living situation satisfactory Yes No e. How many times have you been homeless in the last five years? E When was the last time you lived in stabldpermanent housing? Date: g. If this applies, how long have you lived in stabldpermanent housing? h. How long have you lived in San Francisco? months years Please circle the main reason why you are homeless now or the last time you were. I lost my job 1 My partner lost hisher job 2 I was evicted 3 I could no longer afford rent 4 I lost my benefits 5 Domestic violence 6 Other (explain)

10.

HAVE YOU EVER USED DRUGS, CIGARETTES OR ALCOHOL? Yes No If you answered "yes", please fill out the chart below. If you answered "no", please skip

11.

to question number 13.

a. b. c. d. e. E

g.

h. i. j. k. 12.

Now Past For how long When did you stop Tobacco 1 2 Marijuana 1 2 Alcohol 1 2 HeroinMethadone 1 2 Speed/Crank 1 2 Cocaine 1 2 Crack 1 2 LSD 1 2 Other Would you l i e assistance with any substance abuse problems? Yes No If you wanted assistance, would you know where to go for help? Yes No DESCRIBE YOUR MOST RECENT PARTICIPATION IN RECOVERY PROGRAMS Entered program but did not complete it 1 Entered program and graduated 2 Attended several programs 3 Residential treatment 4 Outpatient treatmentlsuppon groups 5 Did not participate in any programs 6

Figure 4.4.

Conflict within a Form (Reprinted with permission.)

IDEOLOGY

position. In this first statement, she identifies the use of the substanceabuser conception on the part of service providers: When you go to get in any of the shelters, it’s automatically assumed that you’re homeless because of drugs. And if you’re not homeless because of drugs, a lot of people are homeless ’cause they lost theirjob. The last time I was homeless it was because I had a fire in my house, and I lived in public housing and I wouldn’t go back because I felt like the environmentjust wasn’t safe. I mean if somebody set my house on fire once, they could damn sure do it again. But while I was an admitted substance abuser, that really honestly had nothing to do with the reason why I was homeless. But since the same service providers were around for my last round of homelessness that had happened two years previous, they just automatically assumed that this was some sort of pattern that I had. However, in her next statement, she herself gives reasons also shaped by the substance abuser/mentally ill conception. Note that the first two factors she cites are the very ones she previously rejected as overstated and false: Obviously there’s substance abuse and mental health issues. When we had Reaganomics, a lot of people that were in mental institutions were turned out into the streets, and thus became homeless. I think substance abuse is a thing that plagues low-income communities, and it plagues society, period; it’s not even a low-income person’s problem. But, the perception is that it is. The media portrays this as a low-income person’s problem. Similarly, another formerly homeless woman, “Theresa,” who is now an advocate, both rejected and drew upon the substance abuser/mentaUy ill conception. In describing results &om a survey of homeless people and discussing causes of homelessness, she mentioned substance abuse first and housing prices second. Her analysis is especially interesting because it shows the authority of the substance abuser/mentally ill conception to override the statements of the survey respondents. So even an advocate (and a formerly homeless one at that) who in general values the firsthandexperience-capital of people who are homeless over the authority-capital

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from institutions that put forth dominating conceptions that individuals are responsible for homelessness is influenced by that conception. [Lisa:What were they asking for?] Theresa: Housing, education,jobs. Without stable housing, it’s really hard for you to go get an education or any type of training. [Lisa: So is that pretty much the biggest reason you think people are homeless, or what in your experience are the biggest reasons?] Tl’wresu: A big reason is a lot of people choose to use. Not enough housing is probably one of the reasons. I think if a lot of people did have stable housing, they wouldn’t be out using drugs, you know. So that, I think that pretty much is the key, having stable housing.

From these previous statements,we can see the power of the substance abuser/mentally ill conception to override an individual’s direct experiences and beliefs. We can also see degrees of ability to contest this conception when one knows it not to be true based on real-world experiences. This ability to challenge a conception is illustrated in the three quotes that follow. James, a formerly homeless man who now works as a professional in a city office, recognizes the contradiction between his lived experience and the conception. In this case, he is attempting to revalue both his own firsthand-experience-capitaland the authority-capitalof the statistics that describe homeless people as substance abusers. The authority-capitalof the statistics almost completely devalues his firsthand-experience-capital: You know, there is different degrees of homelessness. A lot of people think homelessness is just like what you run into in downtown areas and stuff like that. It’s going on in outer communities too. And you’ve got your homeless people who are sleeping on people’s couches every night, and stuff like that. And you’ve got your homeless people who are living in vehicles, and you’ve got your homeless who camp out in parks. You’ve got your homeless people that are just walking around all the time. You’ve got your drug abusers. Also, I’m starting to find that in a lot of agencies, if you’re homeless, you’re instantly tagged as a substance abuser. Now I’m sure you saw in many articles how the high numbers of substance abusers statistically are charted as being high among homeless people. And I don’t know if that’s true or not? 80

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I know it’s a real easy way to get funding, you know [laughs a little]. I mean, the more damaged the goods are. .the easier it is to have an excuse for not being successful. I was a substance abuser when I was homeless. But, I have met a lot of people who aren’t.

.

Richard, who works in a legal-advocacy progam, doesn’t hesitate to label the substance abuser/mentallyill conception for what it is and proceeds to show it to be a dominating ideology as opposed to an accurate analysis. He cannot do so by drawing on firsthand-experience-capital,because he has never been homeless. So, in an effort to match types of capital in order to more successfdly challenge the conception, he disregards the secondhand-experience-capital he has from his direct work with clients and instead draws on the more formal and widely recognized authority-capitalof statistics: There’s a lot of interestingstudies that go unnoticed by the media, [such as] the onset of morbidity over time. We find that the media portrays the homeless population usually around 30 to 40 percent are crazy and 30 to 40 percent are drug addicted. And that gets the rest of the population off the hook, they thmk,“Well, what can we do?” But studies show that at the onset of homelessness, that’s simply not true. The primary cause ofhomeless, homelessness, is economic and that’s usually due to some government or corporate policy and downsizing and service cutbacks, et cetera et cetera. And so when a person loses theirjob, they have no savings to sustain them [or] family able to accommodate them and their needs for any time that’s necessary to find new work, and often there is no such thing as new work.

Finally, ‘yoan: an advocate, immediately recognizes the substanceabuser portrayal as ideology and deconstructs it by drawing on personal experience and analysis. In this case, she is confident enough in the value of her own firsthand-experience- and secondhand-experience-capitals from a variety of fields to her offer her own critique: So, I don’t see this [homelessness] ending. People always say it’s drugs or alcohol and all of that. And I, you know, I tell people, “You know, when I first came to San Francisco in 1980,you’d go to a party in Pacific Heights, and there was drugs all over the place.” The difference is that when a person has a job that’s making a fairly decent income, what they usually do is they make enough money for the drugs and the house. In San Francisco 81

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now, if you get General Assistance it’s not enough for housing, what are you going to do with the money? You get $345 a month from General Assistance, what kind of housing wiU that get you? So, I mean, you don’t really have an option. I don’t really know of anybody that’s making enough money [for housing] that don’t want to be in housing. I really don’t. Even a junkie wants to be housed.

STREET PEOPLE The notion that all homeless people are street people-actually living on the streets-persists, as discussed earlier in chapter 3 in the review of public attitudes toward homeless people today. This persistence is due at least in part to the general discourse in the media and in living rooms and workplaces that surrounds homelessness. Using the term “street people” as a synonym for “homeless people” both perpetuates and formalizes the understanding that homeless people are those who live on the streets. Bill, a businessman who hires people who are homeless, explains how a television station did a story on his business and the people working for him but misrepresented his employees by prefacing the story with images of people pushing shopping carts, which in turn extended the streetperson identity to all homeless people: Unbeknownst to us, they [the television station] put a segment at the beginning of the tape that showed folks pushing around shopping carts, and my employees were pretty offended. I think the public wants to see the issue of homelessness [as] the guy pushing his cart downtown with needles hanging out of his arm. And then they go into the black-box program, and they come out in a suit and tie working for Hewlett-Packard. That perception needs to change. . . . They’re [homeless people] highly intelligent. They’re highly willing to get back into the mainstream. They just need some opportunities. They need a place where they can come that’s going to be a little bit flexible. A place where they can really build their selfesteem. [Then] they can build some real-time skills, and uh, um, and over a period of time.

Though researchers and analysts reject the street-people conception, it has not only media value but also political value. “David,” who works

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on a city-funded research project on homelessness, discusses how the street-people conception can be used by the media and politicians to refocus the public’s attention on only the most obvious but unrepresentative part of the homeless population: For the longest time, in the ’80s especially, many public officials, and the public in general, assumed, and this is a fact, that once you’re in a shelter, or any kind of homeless program, you’re no longer homeless. They had in their head that if you’re out in the street, you’re homeless. Well, that’s not the case. Now it’s public officials who agree that if you’re in any kind of homeless program, you’re homeless, unless it’s a permanenthousing program. Public perception still lags behind. And I would argue that that has been a major failing of the media. I think they feed into that public misperception. Bill went on to describe how a former mayor created a public fear of homeless people in his efforts to garner support for laws and programs that removed people on the street from public view. These political moves served to narrow the public understanding of homelessness to those who are, as Bill put it, “lazy, crazy, living-in-a-box type of people. That’s what the public saw; that’s what they assumed.”

DISCIPLINE This version of the individual-responsibility ideology contains more blame than sympathy, in direct contrast to paternalism. Discipline assumes that people who are homeless will not behave in appropriate ways without having sets of rules that must be followed and consequences for breaking those rules. These rules are intended to assist people in becoming more responsible, thus helping to bring them out of homelessness. Discipline is harsher than paternalism in that it focuses on personal weaknesses, with a punitive edge to it. Scott, a case manager, describes how the clients are punished if they do not follow the rules at his shelter: If there is a problem, if there is something that’s off track in the case-management plan, the client will get initially a written warning, saying, “This is part of your plan. This did not happen. This is just a warning to say if this

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continues then you’re going to be denied service.” And that of course this prevents folks from getting extension beyond thirty days, but not really doing anything that’s going to help them achieve more independence or more stability. The case manager is the only one that can extend the client’s stay. So, uh, I mentioned to you kind of the minimum thirty days that you automatically get that unless you violate some shelter rules that will cause you to be suspended. Beyond the thirty days, that’s left up to the case manager, and it’s totally dependent upon how they’re doing on their plan.

According to Scott, a case manager can extend a client’s stay if the case management plan is being followed, so the shelter can use this possibility of extension as a way to reward and punish behavior. If a client feels he or she has been treated unfairly, he or she can initiate a formal appeals process, which too can be used as part of the case-management relationship, as Scott continues to describe: We sometimes use appeals as an engagement process, particularly with mental-health clients. With most clients in this population, engaging is the key. Many times the case manager will get them in an appeals situation to open their eyes and say, “This is serious. And ifwe can get it on track, I’m willing to work with you. But we’re at a point where if you continue doing what you’re doing, I can’t continue to offer you a bed because there are other people who may want to work.” So, sometimes it’s used in that way. It’s not always a negative.

A more stringent approach is taken with homeless people who have been arrested for a crime. In such instances, agents assume that because the person who is arrested is homeless, he or she will not be responsible enough to show up for a court date and therefore must be kept in jail until such time. “Colleen,” an advocate, describes one such scenario: I got involved in this issue [when] I started working in thejail,doing a misdemeanor-release program, back in ’89, and noted a high number of homeless people that were in custody for very minor offenses. At that point, the sheriffs department had a policy where they were not releasing homeless people on those kinds of offenses.

As it turns out, the sheriffs department felt that homeless people could not be relied on to come back for their court dates on their own, and fur84

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thermore, the department knew that the chances of charges being dropped were quite high, so it was almost beneficial to hold homeless people in j a i l until the district attorney looked at the charges. If somebody gave an address, they would be cited out, given a court data a month from the time that they were released. And at that point there was a big kind of sweeping going on around an event called the [inaudible] and so I became active in the XXX Organization and.. .we went from there and you know, tried to document people who were being injail, who were being held injail. That developed into the sheriff allowing me to do a pilot release project, where, you know, I submitted a concept paper saying, “You know, you don’t need to, to hold these people, you know,just give me a chance, let me see if I can get them to come back to court,just by explaining what the situation was.” And the reasoning was that they’re not, they’re not going to make their court date and it was like almost, “We’re helping them out. We’re holding them in custody overnight. The next morning the DA’s going to kick out the charge anyway. They can walk out of here with nothing over their head.” And, so that kind of thinking was what was going on. In another articulation of the discipline conception, homeless people are viewed a priori as criminals. Assuming that homeless people are criminals is demonstrated by Dan and Rick, two men in law enforcement:

Rick: Because [an advocate] understands that a lot of the people he repre-

sents are nuts, are criminals, are reallyjust bad people. Not a lot of’em, but some of’em, all right. And he takes that into account when he’s presenting the whole picture because certain people want to [say], “Oh, they’re just laid-off aerospace workers from Silicon Valley.”

Dun: We can’t talk about specifics, but the majority of these people are serious felons. If we are issuing a citation for a crime that somebody commits, we will do a warrant check on people, and that will also give us their criminal record. And that’s the only way; we deal with authorized access to these files. When we do that and these files are accessed, and again not talking specifics, but in generalities, there are serious criminals. Basically, at the end of their careers because of their drug addiction or whatever; it’s the end of the rope for ’em. And they’re, they’re a dangerous group of people to deal with. Dun: In their prime. But once the drug has been in ’em for so long, all they can do is hold up the signs, and, opportunist crimes.

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The criminal conception is sufficiently powerful to have motivated Colleen, an advocate, to do a study to disprove it. As her authority-capital as an advocate is limited outside of her agent category, she attempted to extend it through the study to combat the conception outside of the circle of advocates: I think that I got a pretty good snapshot of what was happening. What to do with those numbers was a little bit harder. At the time, the administration didn’t want to make some changes, at the mayor’s office. And it was harder to sell the numbers, ’cause if you look at the study, there was a high number of homeless people arrested for felonies. Which doesn’t fit into what [former mayor Frank] Jordan at the time was saying, which was that all homeless people were undercover drug dealers . . . which I was personally very offended by. What I would then see is that the DA would then kick out the felony. So, I mean, the arrest was a bad arrest. So, but, it could play either way. I mean, they could, you know, you could say, “Oh, well look, they really are a bunch of felons.” Well, you could say, “Well, no. Actually what’s going on here, and there’s FBI reports that backs this up, is that, you know, homeless people are more likely to get brought in on charges or trumped-up charges because they’re very vulnerable, they’re out there, you know. They have no home, right, to sit in.” So there was a high number that were being kicked out for, like, lack of evidence or in the interest ofjustice, but that kind of takes, like, a more in depth reading of it, and so it was, it was, it didn’t, we didn’t really push the study more. But I think it gave both the sheriff’s department and the different policy makers a better understanding, and I think that, you know, I’m glad that I did it. I think it was useful, and I feel pretty confident that it’s probably good numbers, from what I see.

SUMMARY

This chapter has identified the dominating conceptions (ideologies) that circulate through the field. The conceptions, which come together as the individual-responsibility ideology, include difference, paternalism, rehabilitation, substance abusers/mentally ill, street people, and discipline. We have discussed how they surface with specific agent categories and the capitals they draw on, both positively and negatively.

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We can return once more to figure 2.1, the homeless-certification form and add in the dominating conceptions to the other elements (fields, agents, information practices, and capitals) that we had been able to uncover previously. There are three dominating conceptions at work in this form. The first is that homeless people are “street people,” in other words, that they are primarily living on the streets or in shelters. This conception is indicated by the choices of living circumstances presented in the check boxes. A second dominating conception is paternalism, and it is made apparent by the lack of a first-person voice in the form. The implication is that homeless people are unreliable sources and are unable to document their own circumstances. They require assistance if accurate information is to be had. The third and final dominating conception has been alluded to earlier, namely, that homeless people have a criminal nature and require a thirdperson to confirm that they are actually homeless. This conception is a variant of the discipline dominating conception and can be inferred from the very existence of the form. At this point, we are almost done with our analysis, yet one final piece is missing. We have identified the information-production practices, and we have identified the dominating conceptions (ideologies) in and among those practices. What still remains is identifjmg how these two elements actually interact. The next chapter will take this task on, uncovering the mechanisms that link information-production practices to the dominating ideologies we have found.

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MECHANISMS: CONNECTING IDEOLOGY AND I N F O M T I O N PRODUCTION

A

picture has now been drawn of ideology at work: We’ve heard various people who collect data describe how they do so; we’ve examined the forms and procedures involved in these processes; we’ve identified the primary information production practices; we’ve identified the primary dominating conceptions (ideologies). Only one question remains-how do these ideologies actually shape and in turn get shaped by information production practices? It is one thing to see these pieces independently, but it is quite another to see the details of their interconnection. Dominating ideologies and information practices connect through processes we can refer to as mechanisms. Through mechanisms, ideology and information production are able to influence or conflict with each other, as illustrated in figure 5.1. As the diagram indicates, mechanisms serve as a bi-directional conduit between ideologies and information practices. Ideologies can influence information practices-what questions are asked and how, and information practices can influence ideologies-supporting or contradicting the ideas that ideologies spread. Mechanisms can also be considered signposts of a sort, markers that, if we are attuned to see them, offer us opportunities to see the boundaries of our problematic, recognize the influence of ideology, and, as we become aware of it, go past it, changing how we think and what we do. Thus, mechanisms offer us opportunities for awareness and change. 88

MECHANISMS

I

Ideology b + -

Mechanism

4 b -

Information Production

The Dynamics of Mechanisms

Figure 5.1.

Table 5.1 summarizes the primary mechanisms that exist within the field of information production concerning homeless people. Every mechanism is related to one or more ideologies and information-production practices, respectively. Each mechanism will be discussed and demonstrated below.

IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION Identity construction is the primary means by which all dominating ideologies are reinforced and acted out in data production. It involves the creation of a homeless identity, in essence, a model of what a homeless person is in contrast to a nonhomeless person. In turn, the existence of this model identity serves to naturalize the existence of homelessness by creating a seemingly organic category. The significance of identity can be found in the value agents place on terms used to describe homeless people. Labels are necessary for the practices of surveying and counting, as there must be a distinction between Table 5.1.

Primary Mechanisms

Mechanism

Definition

Identity Construction

Creating homeless types that set expectations and standards about homeless people. Hyper-focusing on individual circumstances to explain homelessness. Defining pertinent categories in the field. Embedding conceptions in forms that are used on a day-to-day basis. Determining the value of knowledge based on the agent who provides the knowledge. Over-exposing information on homelessness, such that it becomes less striking. Focusing attention away from central issues to more peripheral issues.

Individuation Definitions Codification Hierarchy of Knowledge Desublimation Distraction

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what or who is included or excluded. Consequently, there are significant distinctions between the terms homelessness, homeless pe@le (or homeless person), and the homeless. They vary in the degree to which they attribute the condition of being without stable housing as a problem to be solved (by finding housing) or as a defect of the individual in question. “Homelessness,” then, is used to describe a phenomenon that both society and individuals confront, while “homeless people” and “the homeless” describe individuals who are defined and categorized by their housing status. In particular, the expression “the homeless” individualizes the phenomenon of “homelessness” and supports efforts to identifjr reasons in that particular person’s past that seem to explain his or her homeless status. While all categories are by definition created, the category of “homeless person” serves an almost overdetermining hnction, wiping out most other aspects of those who fall within it except as they support that category. For example, a person labeled homeless could also be labeled or even subcategorized as a “minimum-wage worker,” “divorced woman,” “veteran,” or any of a number of other labels; but, and this is the telling point, he or she is not so labeled. Instead, a person’s identity is shoved into this one confining category, which is supported by the tremendous data collection efforts throughout the social-service and direct-service fields; efforts are geared toward documenting highly detailed accounts of people’s personal histories and weaknesses in order to find the key points for transformation and rehabilitation, or “mainstreaming,” as many service providers say. Such a process clearly resonates with Gramsci’s discussion of the need for any type of state (in other words, not limited to capitalist-based systems) to create categories as part of the necessary process of developing an appropriate sort of civilization and citizenry. These elements are necessary for the establishment of hegemony. Such categories serve to discredit and marginalize those who don’t fit into the “good citizen” categories: If every state tends to create and maintain a certain type of civilizationand of citizen (and hence of collective life and individual relations), and to eliminate certain customs and attitudesand to disseminateothers, then the Law will be its instrument for this purpose (togetherwith the school system, and other institutions and activities). . . . For once the conditions are

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created in which a certain way of life is “possible,” then “criminal action or omission” must have a punitive sanction,with moral implications, and not merely be judged generically as “dangerous.”’ The “prize-giving” Activities of individuals and groups, etc., must also be incorporated in the conception of the Law; praiseworthy and meritorious activity is rewarded,just as criminal actions are punished (and punished in original ways, bringing in “public opinion” as a form of sanction).‘ In other words, categories such as “homeless person” or “the homeless” help separate the good citizen from the bad. For example, at a meeting in a San Francisco neighborhood that was developing a plan to address its own issue of homelessness, the explicit conflict between the notions of “citizens” versus “homeless people” arose throughout the meeting. Within this admirable plan, “citizens” became those housed people who were taking care of the neighborhood and “homeless people,” those who were not “respecting” the neighborhood. However, the “citizen” versus “homeless person’’ issue was not made explicit until a formerly homeless woman brought it up. After much discussion, all agreed that the contrast was indeed implicit, albeit unintended, in the proposed plan. Again, a person who does not have a place to live becomes transformed into a specific type of person who behaves in certain ways. This transformation was possible even in the context of a group of people who expressed a critical understanding of the distribution of resources in their neighborhood, the city, and the country. In the specific issue under debate, the problem of urination on doorsteps, it came out that the “perpetrators” of this action were primarily (though not entirely) drunk people from the many bars in the neighborhood. However, public urination was at a gut level associated with homelessness, so that association temporarily trumped the reality of the situation. The category of “homeless person,” with its associated activities, was strong enough to write over the residents’ own knowledge of the neighborhood. Identity construction is not always as smooth or as obvious as in instances where someone self-identifiesas homeless in order to receive a service. For example, “Frank,” a man whose job in a city department has nothing to do with homelessness but who is still indirectly in contact with

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homeless people, illustrates the highly constructed and context-dependent nature of “homeless.” We prefer to use the term illegal camfiers to homeless, [as] they’re difficult to identie. There are no real park ordinances that deal with homelessness. [Although] there are some that deal with illegal camping. In this case, both a definition and label are required for a mandated daily count of people who are illegally using parks. It would be easy to classify these “illegal campers” as homeless under the widely used definition of the McKinney Act. However, both agent and institution are confronted by the fact that they cannot really distinguish between those who lack shelter and those who simply choose to camp in the park, albeit illegally. Further, though the park does not apply the term homeless, its data are used by others in the field, including DHS, the police department, and journalists, to discuss the presence of homeless people in the parks. Thus, the identity is constructed according to the needs of those interacting with people without homes. Identity construction can be found linking the practices and conceptions of those sympathetic to homeless people as well. For example, figure 5.2 is part of a long-term city hnded research project to understand the effect ofbeing homeless by looking at homeless deaths. By distinguishingthe deaths of homeless people from nonhomeless people, this study inadvertently establishes yet again a “home1ess”versus “the rest of us” distinction. The category “homeless person” can also be used to differentiate between such a person and those who are housed based on such assumptions as drug dependence or mental illness. When asked why homelessness occurs, all categories of agents cited substance abuse, often as the first reason. Yetjust as frequently,when individuals who had been homeless talked about their personal experiences, other reasons (such as lost jobs and catastrophes) were given equal weight. Thus, the category of “homeless person” is both fleshed out-drug user, disrespectfkl of private property, intellectually impaired-and made powerful, not only by agents who accept it as a reasonable description but by those who, in varying degrees, reject it. Related to his notion of a problematic that was discussed in chapter 2,Althusser also has the notion of an ideological “subject,” which aptly addresses this identity-construction

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The geogaphic location of deaths was similar to that sccn in previousyears. Two neighborhoods with the highest concentration of homeless dcaths arc the Tenderloin district and the Mission district.

Homeless Death in San Francisco 1996

Figure 5.2. mission.)

Difference Reinforced in Data Production (Reprinted with per-

phenomenon. Essentially, at certain moments we can step into particular roles that make the problematic work for ourselves and for others:

I shall then suggest that ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very

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precise operation which I have called inte$ellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!”3

Thus, the person without a place to live is interpellated into the subject “homeless person” by recognizing him- or herself as part of that category even though he or she may be aware of the inaccuracy of the label. Michel Foucault, who views discourse as capable of creating the object about which it speaks, has also recognized this c~ntradiction.~ In essence, then, we are all in a constant struggle to fit in, modify, or reject the categories and subsequent definitions that are created to constrain or enable the social processes surrounding us. The great power and complexity of categorization signifies the importance of ideology in our lives. On an intuitive level, a category such as “homeless person” does accurately describe someone without a permanent place to live and, in turn, helps us begin to meaningfully name the large numbers of people in this circumstance. Also, while individuals sometimes do make poor choices resulting in terrible consequences, they can use personal assistance to make changes that will turn their lives around. Thus, it is not so easy to dismiss attention paid to the histories and choices that reside behind an individual’s present circumstances. We must beware of such straightforward explanations, for as Althusser says: It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are “obviousnesses”) obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannotfail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the “still, small voice of conscience”): “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!”5

As we look to each individual to explain the appearance of so many unhoused people, the phrase homeless pe@le allows us to bundle up all of these individual stories into a larger explanation of why there is homelessness under the heading of “individual mistakes.” This explanation, in turn, lessens the discomfort and incongruity of so many such people in a society that tacitly assumes, though in no way guarantees, that everyone will be housed. The visible existence of people without homes challenges that belief. Thus, the role of “homeless” derives usefulness: It names some94

MECHANISMS

Figure 5.3.

Evaluating Clients (Reprinted with permission.)

thing we can see and personally encounter all around us, while minimizing challenges to fundamental assumptions held by and about our society. The conceptions of homeless people as substance abusers or as being mentally ill can be found in the practices of intakes, follow-ups, and data analysis. In this instance, the identity construction comes into play. We can see in figure 5.3 that the identity-construction mechanism allows data production and ideology to work on each other simultaneously. In this followup survey, case managers must rate former clients on points that are presumably key markers of success or failure. Note that the categories of evaluation are permanent and thus contribute to the reification of the substance abuser/mentally ill conception and identity. At the same time, case managers can eliminate those factors as nonissues for any given individual, thus weakening the strength of the substance abuser/ mentally ill identity. However, because the fixed categories are invested with authority-capital (i.e., they are a permanent part of the form), the substance abuser/mentally ill identity must be disproved rather than proven, a much more difficult task.

INDIVIDUATION Individuation refers to the hyper-focus on an individual’s personal flaws as the cause of their homelessness. Individuation can be seen most clearly in the data-production practices of intakes and surveys, particularly as they connect with the conceptions of difference,paternalism, and rehabilitation. 95

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Difference as it relates to data production can be found even in the early efforts at setting up shelters and is very visible in Mary Roberts Smith’s historical study of San Francisco Almshouse women in the late 1800s. Her study focused on the causes of “pauperism” among these women and used interviews similar to contemporary intake interviews. From these individual histories, she developed a table of sixteen different causes, including (as ordered by her) intemperance, drug habit, immorality, shiftlessness and inefficiency, crime, temper, stinginess, speculation, neglect by relatives, no support, accident, sickness, physical defect, mental deficiency, insanity,and old age.6 Each “inmate”was presumed to have a “principal cause” and could also have a combination of “contributory causes.” Each cause was assigned a numeric value, and the sum total of causes was designed to always equal ten. This approach clearly assigns the source of homelessnessto the individual’s behavior and decision making. Further, the notion that there is a constant level of pathology (“ten”) that can be analyzed neatly distinguishes people who are homeless from those who are not. Paternalism is supported through data production through information practices that insist that service providers continually check on clients’ life skills. Figure 5.4, part of a follow-up program for clients who have exited shelters, is one such example. This survey form focuses on whether or not the individual has been able to change specific behaviors that have been identified as causes of homelessness and thus avoid homelessness itself. Paternalism can also be challenged by requests for client opinions or evaluations. For instance, a case-management form that ultimately requires the case manager’s evaluation of the client might include a component for the client’s feelings as to why he or she became homeless. Thus, the individuation mechanism both acts as a conduit for specific exceptions and serves as a challenge to paternalism.

10. This month, have you: made a budget for monthly’expenses? A. been able to pay your bib? B. been able to save any money? C. Figure 5.4.

Follow-ups in Forms (Reprinted with permission.)

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Rehabilitation, discussed previously in chapter 4, is pervasive throughout the practice of case management, beginning with the case management intake. By definition, both the conception and the practice are focused at the level of the individual, which individuation then reinforces. Scott, a case manager, describes the case-managementprocess he uses. This process illustrates how the need for personal transformation is revealed through case-managementintake by focusing on the individual’s weaknesses: Once they schedule the case management intake-that’s a more in-depth intake, where we get information about their history, their root cause, trying to get to the root cause of the homelessness-we go into all kinds of areas, substance-abuse history, family history, if there’s domestic violence, any other physical or mental issues. And that’s where the case manager starts establishing bbOK,these are the things that they’re going to need my support with,” where we determine what things we really want to focus on. So the idea is for the client and case manager to work cooperatively to develop a service plan. And they develop goals that are very specific, that are created by both the case manager and the client. Obviously housing is a priority, so we try to include that in each client’s goal and . . .money management is also offered on site. Clients can deposit money with us, we put it away; it doesn’t get interest or anything because there’s no charge. It’s just pretty much putting it away for them until they leave, with the idea when you leave to go to housing, you’re going to need some kind of money to get started. So that assists them in kind of establishing their nest egg to get into some some housing.

In some instances, individuation allows for challenges to rehabilitation. For example, intake forms may attempt to get at the “internal” and “external” causes of the person’s homelessness. The form in figure 5.5 is unusual in that it acknowledges the potential for external circumstances, in addition to personal behaviors, that contribute to an individual’s becoming homeless. A specific individual may be the victim of external circumstances that cannot be remedied by personal transformation, such as a fire. Individuation can also reinforce a style of work and subsequent data production during intakes. Despite her apparent conflict with the notion of individual responsibility as an all-encompassing explanation,

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CHAPTER 5 F. PRESENllNGCAUSES OF HOMELESSNESS ntae corwwr

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Internal and External Causes of Homelessness (Reprinted with per-

Susan, a housing coordinator and advocate, is nonetheless influenced

by individuation:

Two things come to my mind. One is that, when people say, “Well, why did, why did these people end up homeless?” I always say, “You know we have a thousand people in our program and a thousand different reasons why they became homeless.” The most important thing is to sit down with each person who’s homeless and find out what happened and, and work with them to figure out how to solve it. What people tell us the most is that they need treatment, jobs, education, and decent housing, and there’s a lot of criticism of homeless programs, saying there’s no solution and people don’t know where it all came from or what to do about it, but I think the commitment has never really been there to provide those basic things. If everyone who is homeless is given an opportunity to be in decent housing, I think that you’ll find that there’s really a very small percentage who are the hard-core homeless that people talk about that don’t want services. Individuation ultimately relies on practical work done in the field: helping individual people with their problems. This dependency is illustrated by service provider “Nancy’s” explanation of why having a larger sense of the state of homelessness is immaterial to her work: In order to do that, you’d have to do a lot of outreach, in terms of one to one, and interviewingthe homeless people, by going to shelters, going out

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in the streets, going to DSS [Department of Social Services, now the Department of Health Services], and that’s beyond our scope. Our true interest is helping people get services. We don’t really care in the sense of the totality of it. What we’re concerned is on the individual basis of trying to get each person into programs.

DEFINITION

As discussed in early chapters, the ability to define who is homeless or what constitutes homelessness exerts a tremendous power. The definition mechanism tends to reinforce the ideology of difference by linking it to practices that involve counting, surveying, or categorizing. The simplest case scenario is the medical examiner who defines homeless people as those who are outside when they die and have no permanent residence, this explanation enforcing the related conception of homeless people as “street people” (i.e .,those people actually living on the street) and excluding all other categories that are recognized by other defining bodies. The result is a tremendous undercounting of deaths of homeless people. Another instance of a less narrow definition again supports the notion that people who are homeless can only be found in specific living situations. In this case, the mechanism works to restrict the agent’s ability to categorize people as homeless. According to Christen, a housing coordinator, this restriction interferes with her ability to provide assistance to clients whom they believe have no permanent housing. When asked if she used a standard definition for filling out required paperwork, Christen described how the definitions constrain her ability to provide assistance: The facilities that get Section 8 money, or any money from like Shelter Plus Care money, HUD tells you what the definition is. If it’s women with children, they’ll allow them to have been in a transitional-housing program. Otherwise, you have to be on the streets or in the shelter. And, and that’s hard because if you’re sitting on a list for a year, you might have been able to get out of that and pay for a few nights in a hotel, [but then] we can’t refer them.

99

CHAPTER 5

Christen has identified a conflict between the formal definitions she must use to obtain funding and use funded resources and the actual circumstances her clients actually experience. Finally, definition comes into play in support of the need-discipline ideology, especially its criminal portion. We have seen this in figure 2.1, the homeless-certification form, which the act of defining serves as both an information practice and a mechanism. The definition mechanism, then, provides a direct channel for the dominating conceptions regarding homelessness to act. Because it is also tied to the informationpractice of defining, definitions become a great site of struggle and power exertion. Those with the most power and capital are most able to create definitions that others in the field must follow, such as with the case of Christen above. Her actions are constrained by the McKinney definition. Furthermore, the definition’s power becomes translated into a vehicle for dominating conceptions. The definitions determine who is able to get what.

CODIFICATION Codification is the permanent placement in intake forms and other information-production activities of categories that reflect the dominating conceptions. Some examples of codification were seen when we looked at paternalism and rehabilitation as expressed in follow-up and intake forms. Codification draws on two sources of power that were discussed in chapter 4: the ability to set reporting requirement categories and the ability to set definitions that others must follow. In both situations, power is marked by their control over funding. Filling out intake forms in order to receive services such as shelter spaces is one of the routine and primary information-gatheringactivities concerning homeless people. Included in these forms are questions that attempt to elicit specific problems an individual may have had with drugs in an effort to identify the cause of the person’s homeless status. Because such questions are a formal part of the intake form, they establish and legitimize through routine use and institutional legitimation at least two ideological by-products. First is the identity of “drug user” for people who are homeless. Second is the implication that the reason someone is 100

MECHANISMS

homeless is because of some mistake or fault on that individual’s part, as opposed to (or even in addition to) taking into account social factors such as lack of housing or employment. Thus, a seemingly innocuous form that at one level is intended only to help someone out of a bad situation can actually serve to load that person down with more difficulties while at the same time furthering a dominating understanding of homelessness that avoids looking at its social roots. For instance, in the homeless-certification form illustrated in figure 2.1, the categories offered as legitimate causes of homelessness reinforce the narrower definition of someone who is on the street or, at best, in a shelter. Additionally, the reporting categories required by the larger funding agencies are embedded in the intake forms of participating agencies. Thus, categories become widespread across the field. A clear example of codification concerns the substance abuser/mentaUy ill conception as shown in figure 5.6. In this document, a mental-health and substance-abuse assessment is automatically included on the intake form, supporting the drug abuser/mentaUy ill ideology. Similarly, figure 5.7 devotes more time to the specific nature of a person’s substance-abuse history than any other category (such as physical health) that might prevent that person from working. Codification also links intake and case-management forms with paternalism. For example, as in figure 5.8, case-managementforms often include a standardized checklist that reminds the case manager to confirm that money-management skills have been taught. The assumption, tied to the paternalism ideology, is that homeless people intrinsically do not have the skills to responsibly handle personal finances, as demonstrated by the fact that evaluating basic budgeting skills is a routine part of the intake process. ~

Client ID:

Dwment 0 Releaseform

F i s t Name:

Las Name:

Date

0 Letter of Diagnosis 0 Residencyform 0 TB Aseament 0 MH I SA Assesaent 0Statementof Income Figure 5.6. Codification in a Form (Reprinted with permission.)

101

SOCIAL SERVICES INTAKE Bed # __ Date:

CUENT'SNAME

Social Worker

SS#

DOE

Income

PaIt-tiid 1

1. CURRENT WORK STATUS Full-time[ ] Unknown[ ] Not in job market[ ]

1

UMm!J!OYed[

2. LENGTH OF TIME SINCE LAST FULL-TIME EMPLOYMENT. None(presentlyemployed)[ ] Less than 1 month[ ] 1-3 months[ 1 4-11 months[ ] 1-2 years[ 1 2-5 years[ 1 Over 5 years[ ] Unknown[ I Unskilled labor[ 1 Construction Labxi I ClericaVOffice Workefl ] Manufacturing[ ] Sales/Business[ ] Teaching'Educationl 1 Medical[ ] Technical[ ] HoteVRestauranq] O!herf 1 Unknown[ 1 3. TYPE OF WORK SKILLS: None[ 1

4. HIGHEST LEVEL OF EDUCATION None(] Grades 1-8[ ] Grades 9-12(but not completed)[ ] High School Graduate[ ] GED[ ] Some Cdlege[ ] College Degree[ ] Graduate Study/Degree[ 1 Trade/BusinesslTechnical School[ ] Unknown[ 1

StatelCounty'HospitaI[ 5. HOSPITALIZATION IN THE LAST YEAR, AND TYPE: None[ ] Other non-private Hospital[ ] Private Hospital[ ] Unknown[ ] Reason County Facility[ 1

6. INCARCERATION IN THE LAST YEAR AND TYPE None( ] Federal Facility[ 1 Unknown[ ] Reason

7. DO YOU HAVE A HISTORY OF DRUG ABUSE? Yes[ ]

1

State Facility[ I

No[ ] How long abstinent?

8. DRUG(S) OF CHOICE:

Occasional[ 1 (frequency9. DRUG USE IN THE LAST YEAR None[ ] Severe(addicted/stilIwing)[ I Moderate (not interfering with daily functioning)[ ] Unknown[ 1 Addicted (dean c 1 year)[ ] Addicted (dean > 1 year)[ ] 10. DRUG TREATMENT PRIOR TO ENTERING :None[ ] Counseling[ ](whereDetox[ ](# of t i m e s 1 Doctots Care[ ] Hospitalization[ ](# of t i m e s 2 Half-way House[ ](where ) ANNA[ ](current? YesNOOther[]( ) Unknown[] 11. DRUG TREAlMENT NEEDED: NO[1

Yes[

1

Type

Occasional[ ] (frequency____) 12. ALCOHOL USE IN THE LAST YEAR None( 1 Severe(addicted/stil~using)[ 1 Moderate (not interfering with daily functiiing)[] Unknown[ 1 Addicted (clean < 1 yea )[ ] Addicted (dean > 1 ye@[ ]

: None[ ] Counseling[ I ( w h e Detoxl I(# of t i m e s 2 Doctor's Care[ ] ANNA[ ](current? YesNo-

13. ALCOHOL TREATMENT PRIOR TO ENTERING

-.IHospitalization[ I(# of t i m e s 2 Half-way House[ ](where ) OtherI](

) Unknown[]

14. ALCOHOL TREATMENT NEEDED:

No[ 1

Yes[

1 Type Temp[ 1

15. PHYSICAL DlSABlLrPl WHICH PREVENTS EMPLOYMENT: None[ 1

16. TREATMENT FOR PHYSICAL DISABIUTY: None(] Physical Therapy[ 1 Doctoh Cam[1 Hospaalization[ ] Other[ ] Unknown[ I 16. MENTAL DISABILWY WHICH PREVENTS EMPLOYMENT: None[ I

17. TREATMENT FOR MENTAL DISABILWY: None[ ] Dcctots Care[ 1 Hospitalization[ ] othefl]

Medication[ ]

Temp[ 1

Physical Therapy[ ] Unknown[ I

Pen[]

Pem[ I

Medication[ I

16. OBSTACLES CLIENT FEELS PREVENT ENDING HOMELESSNESS: (Top B!!Ua&y)

Can'tFind Employment[ 1 Mental Health[ ]

Lack of Money for Move In Costs[ 1 Substance Abuse[ ] physical Health[ 1 O

t

Lack of Affordible Housing[ 1 h e d A t1

Figure 5.7. Substance Abuse Codified in a Form (Reprinted with permission.)

MECHANISMS

-3.

Budget and Banking introduction(2nd-3rd day) Bank book given and system taught.

,-

-Budget done. -Any available 'savings- are transferred to that account. -4. Budget and Banking Review (by 8th day) -Resident's knowledge I compliance tested. -Skills -Budget

reinforced. done.

-Client assessed for math skills. -Client Figure 5.8.

referred to Education for remedial math skills where applicable.

Paternalism in a Form (Reprinted with permission.)

HIERARCHY OF KNOWLEDGE The hierarchy of knowledge mechanism serves to weight different sources of information and knowledge. In general, advocates tend to value and advance the experience and voice of homeless people, either by speaking for them or creating opportunities for their voices to be heard, typically through surveys and focus groups. Conversely, other agents tend to privilege the experience of trained helpers, such as case managers, social workers, and other professionals. Both of these attitudes reflect different efforts in a struggle to prioritize between potentially conflicting capitals, firsthand experience versus authority. Likewise, these attitudes reflect different vantage points in either countering or advancing (even if inadvertently) the conceptions that homeless people are unreliable (paternalism) and/or that they are incompetent (discipline). The hierarchy of knowledge first appeared as long ago as the late nineteenth century. In her 1892-94 study of pauperism among the women of the San Francisco Almshouse, Mary Roberts Smith described her interview process in this way: The rest of the information was obtained by repeated personal conversations with the women themselves. Finally, the whole was submitted in 103

CHAPTER 5

detail to the matron, without whose active and intelligent minute personal knowledge of every inmate often filled out, modified, corrected, and sometimes utterly disproved, the inmate’s story of herself.’ Note how her research process reflects a profound mistrust of her subjects’ capacity for normal memory functions and truthfdness, causing her to consider information from her subjects as second-rate and in need of “correction.” A century later in 1997, Rachel, a case manager at a shelter, described a similar strategy that she used for confirming the details of an initial intake process. When asked whether she used the notes from an initial phone screening in preparation for the next intake phase or put them into a database or file, she responded: No. This is what I would jot down for my own sort of snapshot of the family, or maybe, make some mental notes for what I want to follow up on for something sort of didn’t ring, ring true, or there’s big lapses in time with their story, missing unaccounted for money, and those would be things that would be sort of red flags that I would follow up on.

Of course, this level of mistrust is not always the case. For instance, the intake form for a child-care center for homeless children relies solely upon the parents’ information regarding their homelessness. The difference between the approaches at these two organizations-the shelter versus the child-care center-is the degree to which they focus on homelessness. The shelter is predominantly focused on the problem of homelessness,meaning it provides temporary respite to homeless people and tries to assist people out of homelessness. By contrast, the child-care center is focused on the care and education of children, whose housing status is a secondary consideration, at least programmatically. This difference in the legitimacy afforded information provided by homeless people demonstrates that the mechanism can allow successful challenges to ideology through the routine data-production process. DESUBLIMATION Desublimations is the effect of making difficult issues invisible by overexposing them. This mechanism is closely related to hierarchy of knowledge 104

MECHANISMS

because it reduces the effectivenessof homeless people’s voices. Desublimation primarily occurs through the countless surveys of homeless people discussed throughout this book, which generally go unused or are dismissed by the agents involved, though not always for the same reasons. However, the perpetuation of surveys creates an appearance of both action (satisfymg advocates and their constituencies) and listening (satisfying policymakers and service providers), despite the fact that not one agent mentioned how any of the major surveys was actually used. In essence, homeless people are silenced by the very practice that is supposed to give them a voice, encouragingboth the ideology of discipline and paternalism through ineffective means of expression that “force” policymakers and service providers to rely on their own sources of information.

DISTRACTION Ultimately, because of the nature of the practices in the field-helping individuals find somewhere to live immediately-the larger picture of housing availability and income go unmentioned in the day-to-day actions of agents in the field, despite their tacit acknowledgment of the problem. Focusing on the specific problems of individuals who are homeless, legitimate or not, can only help to avoid the looming background issues that ultimately create the problem. For instance, the time limits of most shelters are short (several months) and reflect their goal of providing emergency housing, not transitional or intermediate housing. However, this solution is disconnected from the stark lack of housing and the inability of low-income and poor people to find housing within a short time frame. Case managers are thus put in the position of bouncing clients back and forth between emergency points until permanent housing becomes available. “Scott,” a case manager at a shelter, expressed most starkly how this conflict arises for him. I think the main frustration for us is [unlavailability of affordable housing. It’s tough when you’re saying, “OK. We’re an emergency shelter. We’re funded for this, and you know, thirty-day bed, and beyond that, blah blah blah.” But there is really no goal to work towards, you know. The client is working on housing resources. They’re on five different housing waiting lists. What do you do? Do you keep them for a year until their waiting list 105

CHAPTER 5

comes up, or do you say, “I’m sorry, but, you, we got you connected, you’re on waiting lists, you just need to go to another shelter, and if you want to come back, you can, you know, play the thirty-days-in, thirty-days-out game until your housing comes up.” Housing is a biggie. And, employment. I would say those are the two biggest needs.

SUMMARY

A variety of mechanisms operate in the field, linking the dominating conceptions and the routine data-production practices in the field: identity construction, individuation, definitions, codification, hierarchy of knowledge, desublimation, and distraction. These mechanisms, and the dominating conceptions and information-production practices that they link, are listed in table 5.2. The information-production practices that are most closely linked by the mechanisms to the dominating conceptions are intake processes and Table 5.2.

Mechanisms, Conceptions, and Information Production Practices

Mechanism

Conceptions

Information Production Practices

Identity Construction

Difference Substance Abuser/ Mentally I l l

Counting/Surveys Intakes/Follow-up and Data Analysis

Individuation

Difference Paternalism Rehabilitation

Intakes Follow-UPS Intakes

Definition

Difference Discipline

Counting Data production

Codification

Substance Abuser/ Mentally I l l Street People and Difference

Reporting Requirements Definitions

Hierarchy of Knowledge

Discipline and Paternalism

Surveys and Focus Groups

Desublimation

Discipline and Paternalism

Surveys

Distraction

Rehabilitation

I ntakes/Case Management

106

MECHANISMS

those procedures involving categorization, such as counting efforts and surveys. In general, the identified mechanisms reinforce the dominating conceptions. However, they do serve a bi-directional function, meaning that it is possible for mechanisms to support challenges to dominating conceptions as well.

NOTES 1. Sekctionsfrom the Prison Notebooks ofAntonio Gramsci,ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 246. 2. Sehctionsfiom the Prison Notebooks, 247. 3. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards and Investigation),” in Lenin and PhilosOphy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174. 4. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hemnaneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 61. 5. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 172. 6. Mary Roberts Smith, Almshouse Women: A Study of Two Hundred and Twenty-Eight Women in the City and County Almshouse of Sun Francisco (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, 1896), 29. 7. Smith, Almshouse Women, 2. 8. The term &sublimation is borrowed from Herbert Marcuse, OneDimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).

107

CONCLUSION

0

ur investigation is now complete. We have critically examined the field of homelessness, paying particular attention to the information production practices, dominating conceptions, and the mechanisms that connect them.

PRIMARY FINDINGS

A dominatingideology was found to operate within the field of homelessness, identified as the individual-responsibility ideology. The individualresponsibilityideology explains homelessness as the result of an individual’s personal circumstances. The multiple variations of this ideology, as discussed in the previous chapter,move along a continuum of blaming the individual for poor choices to seeing the individual as a victim of circumstances. Those conceptions include difference, paternalism, rehabilitation, substance abuser/mentally ill, street people, and discipline. Among the many information-production practices that agents regularly engage in, there are several that seem to have especially vigorous connections with dominating ideologies. They include intakes and casemanagement processes, counting efforts, and surveys. These practices are in a central position with regard to ideology because of the importance they have in the field and because of their dependence upon categorizations. In terms of the former, these practices are linchpin practices. With108

CONCLUSION

out intakes and case management, the field as it stands could not exist; it requires that level of documentation and the particular professional/ client relationship in order to keep the focus on individual problems and not social issues. Additionally, data serve as a currency in the field. To keep relations between agents in motion, desired data must be produced and exchanged, ensuring the importance of intakes. To this same end, counting and surveys reconfirm the assessments of the state of the field by other agents, such as advocates and people without homes themselves, but are not effective vehicles for promoting those assessments. This tension keeps a certain balance among all agents. In terms of counting efforts and surveys, the categories that are embedded in the practices reflect the dominating ideologies and are reinforced through their continual reuse. Agents regularly and seamlessly use these categories to accomplish tasks, which renders the authority of those categories invisible. A suite of mechanisms were discovered that act as channels for the interplay between the various competing and complementary ideologies and information-production practices. They include identity construction, individuation, definitions, hierarchy of knowledge, desublimation, codification, and distraction. Perhaps the most powerid of these are identity construction and individuation, because together they adeptly serve to keep attention focused at the level of the individual. Although this research did not encompass a measure of the directionality of the influence of information production and ideology, results indicate that the more powerhl direction is from the dominating ideology to information production, rather than the reverse. As discussed in appendix C, conceptions regarding people without homes began to take shape as the population appeared, and data-production practices developed along with responses to that population. For instance, the charitable societies that formed in San Francisco in the 1800s were created in response to the gowing numbers of abandoned women and children. Their reporting practices came after receiving funding from the California State Legislature. Questions that were asked in intake forms assumed the validity of many of the dominating conceptions. For instance, the issue of being a substance abuser is implied by the repeated series of questions regarding this practice on almost all intake forms. Questions by case managers about 109

CHAPTER 6

how an individual became homeless do allow for challenges to the dominating conceptions, but those questions are often set in the larger context of finding the personal weaknesses that need to be addressed, which then places the individual squarely within the rehabilitation conception. From these cases, it seems that the dominating ideology possesses a greater ability to influence the data production process. The individualresponsibility ideology influences the types of questions that are routinely asked and shapes the relationships between agents engaged in the data production itself. This is not to say that data production has no influence on ideology. In fact, it tends to reinforce it because it is so highly shaped by it. A dialectical pattern is established whereby the ideology informs the data-production process, and the results of that process then confirm the ideology. Even those agents who attempt to challenge this ideology are often in fact stuck responding to it as opposed to offering alternatives.

BROADER IMPLICATIONS The findings described above have implications for the foundational areas of homelessness, ideology, and information that were drawn on in this work. These implications are important at both practical and theoretical levels. Homelessness

Three essential points have been revealed. First, dominating ideologies are without doubt interwoven into the information-production tools used within the field ofhomelessness. It is not possible to view these forms and procedures as objective or impartial because no such state of neutrality can actually exist. This quality is likely not particular to the field of homelessness but is in fact probably true of all fields. Second, there is a dependency in the field of homelessness whereby the circumstance of being homeless helps to maintain the dominating individual-responsibility ideology. A driving force for this dependency is that agents are consumed with assisting individual people cope with being homeless. Thus, the focus of the field is almost exclusively trained at the level of the individual except during planning exercises for federal funding. 110

CONCLUSION

This level of attention is only understandable given that every individual’s situation could be considered an emergency; however, it can also reveal contradictions with the individual-responsibility ideology. This conflict is most apparent as agents attempt to help homeless individuals find permanent housing, which is too scarce. But the lack of affordable permanent housing, and the resulting contradiction in the field, has no prominent place within the information-production process, and as there is no formal way to address this reality within the field, it gets reduced to the realm of personal opinions and frustrations. Third, this research suggests a way to begin to step out of the problematic of the individual-responsibility ideology. An alternative is to shift the primary focus away fi-om looking for individual pathologies, weaknesses, and crises and turn instead to the social level, specificallylooking at the industry ofhomelessness and how, despite tremendous good will and intentions, that industry contributes to the perpetuation of homelessness.

Ideology Scholars of ideology are interested in matters of social reproduction, domination, and consciousness. This research has shed some light on all three of these processes. In terms of social reproduction, the dominating conceptions as they are found in the day-to-day data-production practices of the primary agents contribute to the perpetuation of homelessness by diverting attention from long-term solutions. Keeping attention focused on individual failings provides a superficially reasonable explanation for any given individual’s homelessness. That level of attention also supplies engaging problems for hosts of professionals to attempt to solve, keeping them distracted from solving the problem of homelessness at the social level. Hegemony is thus established and is further maintained as individuals strive to obtain and provide minimal levels of assistance. Domination is revealed primarily in struggles over capital, especially authority, power-over, and firsthand-experience. Agents work to acquire these capitals and use them to influence activities within the field. Those within institutions that already have authority- and power-over-capitalcan more easily continue to acquire them. Those without much capital, primarily people without homes, have little ability to resist domination. Advocates attempt to amass firsthand-experience-capital in great quantities 111

CHAPTER 6

through surveys and other practices with homeless people in order to challenge other agents who hold authority-capital. To date, this challenge has only occasionallybeen effective, and there have been minimal changes in this relationship. The question of consciousness is a more complicated one. Traditional theories of false consciousness would argue that people without homes, as those most oppressed by current conditions, would be those most likely not to be aware of the contradiction between dominating conceptions and their lived lives. The dominating ideology would be strong enough to convince people that they are indeed primarily responsible for their impoverishment. However, this research has shown just the opposite. Those who have experienced homelessness are very aware of these conceptions, perhaps the most aware of all agents (though this would have to be confirmed through more research). This awareness does not mean they were immune to the dominating ideologies,just more attuned to the contradictions. All agents exhibited a degree of conflict between their experiences and the conceptions they articulated. In other words, all were engaged in ideological struggle each day, which by definition means they were aware (to differing degrees) of the dominating ideologies. Thus, consciousness of ideology is not something that is turned on like a switch, though it may appear that way after one’s problematic (how the world appears to a given person) is altered through recognition of a dominating ideology. Instead, individuals experience fluid mixtures of unaware acceptance and rejection as they compare conceptions and experience. Finally, this research has reinforced the concept that ideologyis not simply a theoretical construct but a very real factor in everyday life. The notions of subjecthood and normalization, which are central to thought in ideology, have been shown to exist quite clearly within the field of homelessness. A specifichomeless identity was indeed found. That identity was both the result ofthe mechanismsand dominating conceptionsat work and a tool for perpetuating them. Ideology is intertwined quite closely with predominant information-productionpractices. That connection is made possible by specific mechanisms that smooth the path between conceptions and actions, allowing those conceptions to blend in and not stand out. Thus, it is possible and fiuitful to examine ideology in the day-to-day material world. Unlike mass media and communication, these arenas do 112

CONCLUSION

not have a primary intent to project messages to audiences, making an analysis of these more pedestrian activities perhaps more important and more complicated. Looking at ideology in real-world settings lets us see specificallyhow ideology can work. Focusing on such everyday life experiences instead of being restricted to the theoretical and cultural spheres can only broaden and deepen our understanding of how ideology operates. Information The primary implication of this research for those interested in information is that the malleabilityof informationextends far beyond questions of individual bias or perspective. While vigilance for these factors will always be called for, that vigdance in no way addresses the tight connection between dominating ideologies and data that are produced within the context of those ideologies. For example, the conception of rehabilitation that pervades the data-productionprocess in the field of homelessness cannot be attributed to an individual person’s bias about homeless people in general. The conception is embedded in practices that are created at institutional and social levels, not by single individuals. Furthermore, unlike with the issues of bias and perspective, there is no simple way out of this relationship. Ideology is socially produced and confirmed,as are its products. The answer then, is not so much to attempt to get “outside” of ideology but to be conscious of contradictions that belie dominating ideologies. These contradictions are the clues that can allow us to see beyond our existing problematic and understand how dominating ideologies influence our lives, including such seemingly banal actions as creating and using forms for data production. Another implication is that researchers interested in social aspects of information must expand their gaze beyond the boundaries of single institutions, such as hospitals or businesses. While research at the level of a specific institution is valid and important, more work needs to be done that takes into account connections between various institutions and individuals as they interact with information they share in common. There is a great need within the field to understand how information fits into the relations between people and the institutions they are associated with. Examining data production about homeless people only in a given shelter, or even in a primary agency such as the San Francisco Department of Human 113

CHAPTER 6

Services, would only have supplied a fiagment of the picture. In order to understand the nature of information in this arena at a deeper level, it was necessary to take a step back and look at the entire network that was engaged in the practice of data production about homeless people. Finally, and related to the previous point, there is a need to draw on research methods and theories from outside of library and information studies, such as economics, public policy, history, and sociology. This study has drawn on the field of sociology, through the work of Bourdieu, to provide tools for both the research process and parts of the actual analysis. In order to examine information actions in a more complete manner, we must continue to draw on understandings fiom other disciplines that have examined related social settings. There we can find the analytical tools to help us look at these issues and, hopefully,contribute to those tools as well.

BEYOND THE HORIZON We have now reached the end of one path, identifylng information-production practices and the dominating conceptions interwoven among them in the realm of homelessness. We have discovered the mechanisms that allow these two social forces to act upon one another, and we have seen the results of that action. Dominating conceptions were shown to shape the tools and methods used for generating data about homeless people. Through very specific mechanisms, particular understandings about people who have no permanent housing were inserted into these methods and processes, almost (but not entirely) predetermining the outcomes. This integration results in the perpetuation of these understandings and contributes to the maintenance of homelessness as it exists today. In addition, it is not implausible to anticipate finding similar results in other realms of life where information production occurs constantly, though perhaps in the background. For instance, regular, ongoing information production occurs in various ways in areas such as unemployment, teen pregnancy, transportation, or pollution. The information-production practices here are likely to include some that we have seen in this current study, such as surveys and some sort of personal interviews (known in the field of homelessness as “intake”), and others we have not, such as mea114

CONCLUSION

surements and counts of events. All of these practices present opportunities for the operation of dominating ideologies. The task would be to determine what those dominating ideologies are and the mechanisms that enable their interaction with the information production practices. While these results may appear to be discouraging and seem, at first glance, merely one more critique among many of efforts to address issues of social consequence and concern, they are in fact, quite the opposite. The important thing to understand from all of the findings presented in this book is that it is indeed possible to examine information-production practices and understand how they contribute, or perhaps challenge, existing dominating conceptions about a given area in such a way as to impede progress in addressing social concerns. It is feasible to identify how ideology works in practice, where specifically it appears, and how it can shape information-production efforts. We do not have to shrug our shoulders and give up in the face of such a seemingly daunting force as ideology. We can become aware of the conceptions we operate under, we can see how they work, and we can modify our tools and practices.

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This Page Intentionally Left Blank

APPENDIX A Interview Subjects

I

nterview subjects have been given aliases to provide confidentiality. Table A. 1 lists the interview subjects quoted in this research and provides a brief description of their respective involvement in the field of homelessness.

117

Table A.l.

Interview Subjects

Alias

Background

"Alex" "Adam" "B iII'' "Brian" "Colleen" "Dan" "Dana" "David" "Diane" "Ellen" "Francine" "James" "Janine" "Joan" "Kathy" "Christen" "Liz" "Michael" "Nancy" "Rachel" "Richard" "Rick "Scott" "Susan" "Ted "Theresa"

an advocate who was formerly a caseworker a shelter employee a businessman who employs homeless people a database consultant an advocate for homeless people who have been arrested a law-enforcement officer an advocate who was formerly homeless a researcher on a city-funded homelessness research project a health-service provider an advocate for homeless people an educator and advocate in an educational setting a professional in a city agency who was formerly homeless a service-delivery coordinator an advocate for homeless people a housing coordinator a housing coordinator a service-agency employee a researcher on a city-funded homelessness research project a staff person at a service provider a case manager in a shelter a legal advocate a law-enforcement officer a staff person at a service provider an advocate for homeless people an employee of a health-clinic setting an advocate who was formerly homeless

APPENDIX B Key Elements of the Field of Homelessness

T

he key elements of the field of homelessness are captured in table 2.1 and were explained as they became relevant to a given phase of the analysis. However, it is u s e l l to have a compact listing of those elements in toto. Each of the signification types of fields, agents, information practices, and capitals is described below.

FIELDS

Aid and Service This field encompasses the provision of either direct service (e.g., shelter, food, and health care) or referral service to homeless people seeking assistance.

Government Included here are all levels of government entities (local to federal) and federal funding efforts, such as HUD monies via the McKinney Act.

Advocacy This field includes all agents who engage in efforts to speak for or promote the voice of homeless people. Such efforts often result in challenging 119

APPENDIX B

institutions such as the city or a service provider either at the level of individual complaints or at larger levels trying to change policies for the general homeless community. The field also includes public education activities concerning the condition of homeless people.

Health This field includes the issues of health that are specific to homelessness, including the role of health in precipitating or prolonging homelessness, issues of access to health care, and health-care programs that are designed particularly for homeless people.

Housing Encompassed in this field are issues of acquiring housing, maintaining housing, building housing, and administering housing programs. Also included are general planning issues regarding the mix of low-income hotels; low-, middle-, and upper-income housing; and debates over new types of housing, such as transitional and supported housing. Both publicly and privately hnded and constructed housing are included here.

Shelters The field of shelters includes the actual provision of shelter spaces, the problem of getting into a shelter, the funding of shelters, and the quality of shelters. Shelters are seen as distinct from housing in that they are not permanent residences.

Money The field of money crosses over many other fields. It includes issues concerning the control of money on the part of hnders and disbursing agents such as City departments,the lack of money as it contributes to and maintains homelessness, and access to money on the part of service providers and homeless people. Other aspects include policies of money management that are implemented in shelters, and payee services that while elim-

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inating immediate control over resources, allow homeless people slightly better housing options in hotels. Crime/Police This field encompasses all issues having to do with crime perpetrated by or against homeless people and the various relationships the police and sheriffs departments have with homeless people, advocates, elected officials, and the general public. Families Families are viewed as a distinct category by agents within the field of homelessness, and special services are set up to address their needs apart from individuals who are homeless. Because of these reasons, “families” has been identified as a field that in the case of homeless families, overlaps with the field of homelessness. All issues that concern families as a whole, such as finding shelters that will take whole families, and issues of children, such as child care, are included here. Substance Abuse This field includes the issues of current and past addicts, organizations working with substance abusers, and laws concerning drugs. One field is surprisinglynot included here-the field ofpoverty. It is the eleventh most frequently applied code. Poverty may be too general of a concept. Other fields such as health, housing, money and shelter could be considered subsets of the field of poverty or, at least, closely allied fields.

AGENTS Homeless People This category includes indivimals ant families who currently lack their own permanent residence. The field of homelessness and the agents that

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populate it are centered on this primary category, for without it, there would be no field at all. Debate goes on throughout the field about how to define a homeless person. Advocates/Coordinators

Advocates engage in a wide range of practices, most of which entail either speaking on behalf of homeless people (both individuals and the larger population of homeless people) or creating opportunities for homeless people to speak for themselves. The latter occurs primarily through surveys and focus groups. Additionally, advocates often attempt to help homeless people connect with potential service providers for whatever they may need. In this regard, advocates sometimes overlap with traditional information and referral services, whose sole purpose is to link those in need with providers. Finally, advocates often play the role of coordinator, bringing together a variety of agents to discuss homeless issues, or facilitate such activities. These activities range from smaller meetings, such as shelter-director meetings, to citywide task-force committees. Advocates vary in the degree to which they work within the existing city structures, the amount of direct experience they have had with homelessness, the degree and manner in which they include homeless people in their work, the sources of their funding, and the types of changes they hope to see. Service Providers

Service providers are simply those organizations offering direct services to homeless people, including shelter, food, and prenatal care. They differ as well in their dependence on private and public monies, which in turn affects their ability to pick and choose clients and types of reporting required about their work. Service providers are found mostly in the nonprofit and governmental fields. Clients

Clients are homeless people who are currently receiving some service, frequently, case management. The client identity implies a relationship 122

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with some sort of professional who is trained to or has authority to fix some sort of problem. The relationship between clients and case workers is a central one in the field of information production concerning homeless people.

Police This agent category includes police officers and captains, as well as the sheriff and sheriff’s deputies. These agents have contact with homeless people on both a day-to-day level, in jails, and on special projects.

Shelters This category includes privately and publicly hnded shelters. Shelters can be considered a stabilizing force within the field of homelessness because their resource, shelter spots, is so scarce that much time, money, and energy is spent maintaining them and trying to obtain them. They provide justification for the continued use of resources, in part because there are not adequate numbers of shelter spots to hlly meet the need for emergency housing, as each winter proves so clearly.

Families Homeless families are often treated distinctly from homeless individuals, especially in the shelter system. Though there is some overlapping between the two agent categories “homeless person” and “families,” there are enough occasions where families are considered as a unit that the distinction is warranted. For instance, there are special shelters just for families, and San Francisco has developed a special system for coordinating the provision of emergency shelter to families, including obtaining emergency hotel rooms for them until an opening develops at a shelter. In addition, data collection regarding families in the familyshelter system is undertaken in a much more sophisticated and coordinated fashion. Families thus appear to be higher up on the triage scale based on this type of treatment. This ranking corresponds to Joanne Passaro’sl discussion of how traditional gender roles get reproduced and rewarded in the homeless system; women who have children are 123

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“rewarded” with services, whereas single people, especially men, are considered better able to take care of themselves.

Department of Human Services San Francisco’s Department of Human Services (DHS) is a key power holding agent within the field, for it has tremendous control over financial resources combined with policymaking ability within the larger plans of the city. DHS contracts out all of its homeless services, thus positioning itself as a major broker because it is still the agency that directly applies for federal funding.

City Departments In addition to its DHS, the city of San Francisco as a whole and its various departments, such as the Health Department, the Housing Department, and others, are central figures. They are less prominent than DHS, however, because they hold fewer purse strings. In fact, the homeless program within the Department of Public Health actually has a reverse relationship in that it is a contractee of a nonprofit that disburses “Health Care for the Homeless” monies. Public-health employees work in special permanent clinics for the homeless, street-health projects at shelters, and known public gathering places where homeless people are.

Agents by Formal and Informal Work Relations Relations between agents must be understood both as they are formally presented, through structured relationships (e.g., contracts, employment, legal statute, task forces), and as they are more informally practiced (e.g., personal relationships, lobbying, advocating). One view or the other alone does not account for the presence and actions of all types of agents. Figure B.l sketches out the connections between agents but does not reflect their relative strength. This diagram demonstrates the centrality of city and county agencies and the providers they contract with. While advocates also have many connections to other agents within the field, those connections are primarily informal ones established by the efforts of the advocates them124

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..........................................................................................................................................

i

- formal, contractual relations .-..... informal. non-contractualrelations

;

= =

Figure B.1.

Agents by Structural Relations

selves. They lack the stability and strength of the contractual and programmatic relations agencies have.

INFORMATION PRACTICES Data Sharing Data sharing is the practice of allowing other agencies or organizations to use the originating organization’s data. This practice occurs primarily among family shelters due to the structure of family-shelter service in the city. Shelters operate through a consortium and are required to submit certain types of data to DHS. These data are then amalgamated in order to create a general picture of the situation of families seeking shelter through the city’s family-shelter system. Part of this data sharing includes generating data in a format that maintains privacy and anonymity for shelter residents. However, shelter heads also participate in regular meetings to decide which clients should go to which participating shelter. In this 125

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instance, specific data regarding clients, from the coordinating agency’s intake form, are used. Even in this instance, though, some privacy is possible for clients, for they must sign a release form before data from the intake form can be discussed. Other instances of data sharing are similar to this one, involving agencies that are providing a direct service as a contractee for the city and therefore share data before or after a client has come to them in order to either coordinate service provision or to report back in order to fulfill their contract.

Intakes and Case Management An intake is essentially an interview with a client or prospective client about his or her background. Intakes vary in their degree of detail depending upon the organization, the resources they have available to devote to the intake process, and the purpose of the intake itself. Some organizations have several intake processes, beginning with a very general set of questions in order to gather basic demographic data. A second intake process is more detailed and can take one to several hours. This step is usually tied to case management and the production of a casemanagement plan. These intakes go into great detail concerning the client’s history, especially focusing on aspects that are seen as potentially contributing to the person’s homelessness, for instance, substance abuse. Lengthy intakes most frequently occur within the shelter system, both for families and individuals.

Counts of Homeless People Counting homeless people is undertaken by a variety of agents. The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department provides weekly totals of daily counts of “illegal campers” in the city parks. In addition, the coordinated family-shelter system allows for a certain amount of counting, at least of those who seek shelter in that system, by eliminating duplicated turn-away counts. Some agents serve both homeless and other clients who are in a general pool for similar services. In that case, homeless people are often separately identified and counted, as they can receive special restricted services set aside only for homeless people. Several years ago, the Census Bureau undertook an infamous count of homeless people that 126

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is almost universally dismissed as highly flawed. Most agents seem skeptical of any counts, coming up with their own methods against which to criticize other agents’ counts. Additionally, some agents feel that the entire notion of counting people is useless and a waste of resources. However, one agent mentioned that a lack of a number in the context of her situation, as an advocate in a college environment, contributed to the invisibility of homeless students and a continued lack of recognition of the need to secure more resources to help those students.

Reports to Funders/Requiring Reporting Almost all organizations that receive either public monies (through the federal government, directly or indirectly, or local money) or foundation money are required to provide data to their funders. For some, the types of data are already stipulated, especially with federal hnds. For others, the data allows them to write more compelling and fleshed-out narratives to foundations.

Survey Writing and Administration Survey administration is the process of actually taking surveys to homeless people, and sometimes service providers, and getting them to fill them out. Surveys usually occur in two ways. First, they have been used to complement citywide planning efforts, such as the development of the HUD-mandated “Continuum of Care Plan” or, most recently, as a contested part of preparations for the yet-to-be-held Mayor’s Summit on Homelessness. In these cases, the survey is designed by a committee of people, including homeless advocates, and is almost always administered by homeless or formerly homeless people. Second, advocacy groups themselves conduct surveys, either for their own work or as a contractual service offered to other organizations, such as groups trymg to develop local solutions to issues of homelessness in their neighborhoods.

Database/Report Design Database and report design consumes much time for those who must report to hnders. It is directly linked to the intake process, for that is where 127

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the raw data comes &om.Within the family-sheltersystem, the city has actually hired a consultant to develop the database, collect all of the information on a regular basis, and prepare reports. Interestingly, within this particular system, advocates have been able to have a voice in requesting collection of data in certain areas in order to help them in their work. Their participation is a regular part of the development of the databases, reports, and intake forms and the subsequent discussions of these data. Many agents reported great difficulties keeping up with inputting their data fi-om paper intake forms into computer databases. Some were quite distressed at not having the time or skill to develop databases that captured more than the minimum required to satisfy funder reports or that would allow them to do more analysis of the data they were collecting in order to obtain more sophisticated senses of their work.

Raw Data Analysis Agents engaged in this practice are analyzing data generated by themselves and others. Some profess a desire to do more analysis, though they seem unclear as to how it would be used. A handfd of agents do indeed use their data in reviewing their work; for instance, in the family-shelter system, coordinated data collection, data sharing, and analysis has been structured into the process of providing shelter to families. One agent commented that it would be quite desirable to do the same thing for shelters that deal with individuals in order to gain a better understanding of what was happening with those people who seek help at publicly funded shelters. By contrast, some appear quite disinterested in looking at their data, seeing them only as a necessary part of the funding process.

Follow-up involves the use of either telephone calls or surveys with clients who are no longer with the service provider. The purpose is to determine their post-service status (i.e., if they have they obtained, maintained, or lost housing or jobs). Follow-up programs tend to be separately funded programs and thus are not frequently an integrated part of service delivery.

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Definitions of Homelessness

This activity is the practice of determining who is considered homeless. It can occur explicitly, through actual definitions that are stated on forms and in documents. It can also occur implicitly, through the building up of “profiles” indicated by characteristics and behaviors to be identified in someone seeking assistance. The ability to shape and enforce definitions is tied to the type and amount of capitals a particular agent has, particularly authority-capital and money. This ability is seen most clearly with the McKinney Act.

CAPITALS Raw Data

Raw data are the data produced during intakes and surveys. Raw data were the most frequently mentioned capital. This prominence is due in part to the focus of the research at hand, data production. However, the research focus only explains part of data’s prevalence as a capital. In examining the actual day-to-day work of many agents (especiallyservice providers), generation of data was an important part of their work, as the intake process is the first step in service provision. (See the earlier discussion of practices.) Money

Money is a driving capital in the field. Agents seek to convert data into money (as in the case of shelters), legitimacy into money (as in the case of advocates surviving solely on individual donations), as well as other capitals. In addition, those with money can set the terms of practice, by mandating the collection of specific types of data that in turn can influence the actual work of the agency receiving the money. Money is also an essential capital for homeless agents in rather obvious ways. In an immediate sense, their material misfortune is due entirely to a lack of money and a lack of means to obtain it. Because housing is such a scarce capital, notjust in the field of homelessness but in the entire field of housing, increasing amounts of money are required to obtain it.

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Authority Authority is the institutionally grounded ability to make decisions that others must follow. This authority often appears in the abiity to set definitions that others must follow or that have widespread effect, such as the McKinney Act definition of homelessness. Authority is different from legitimacy, which has less to do with the ability to make decisions than with the recognition that is derived from other capitals. For instance, among certain agents, if one has firsthand-experience-capital,one also has a certain amount of legitimacy. Or, if one has a positive reputation, one also has legitimacy. The converse can also be true. Both authority and legitimacy seem to be dependent on associated capitals. One agent had authority due to his position within the city government structure, yet his control over other resources/capitals was both limited and inefficient because of his lack of knowledge. In addition, he lacked legitimacy in the eyes of almost all categories of other agents due to his lack of knowledge of homelessness, either firsthand or secondhand. His authority was so endangered by this lack of legitimacy that an assistant who had both firsthand knowledge and legitimacy, recognized across the field by all agents, was hired in order to boost his authority.

Housing Housing-capital is defined here as permanent housing, distinct from temporary shelter beds and transitional housing, each of which was theoretically designed to be a waiting point until permanent housing was achieved.* One would think housing would be the main driving capital within the field of homelessness, yet it is not. Though people are homeless because they have no permanent housing, the scarcity of housingcapital, while making it much sought after, is not realistically in the immediate range of problems to be dealt with, though it is a key part of the longer-term solution. It is, however, much sought after and was cited by interview subjects as one of the most direct causes of homelessness (as in a lack of low-cost housing) and is present in everyone’s minds.

Social Network Social-network-capital is essentially the breadth and depth of contacts one has across the field. It operates in two ways. The first is the degree of 130

KEY ELEMENTS OF T H E FIELD OF HOMELESSNESS

connections one has within one’s own agent category as well as across agent categories. The stronger one’s social network, the more ability one has to garner a wide variety of resources, to influence proposed projects, to develop projects, and to shape the larger field. The second is the depth of connections one has at a personal level. Many people cited the lack of a social network (support network) or the fiscal impoverishment of that network as a cause of homelessness. Time

Almost all interview subjects conveyed a sense of not having enough time to do everything they wanted, from data production to educational efforts for the public. Lack of time-capital is directly connected to the amount of money-capital available to be transformed into additional staff. Power-over

Power-over-capital is similar to authority-capital in that it is institutional in origin (i.e., it is derived from one’s position in an institution), yet it operates more at the individual level. Power-over-capital comes most directly into play between service providers and homeless people-clients. In this relationship, the service-provider staff member has great control and can mandate the client’s use of time and ability to interact with others, challenge his or her parenting style with the threat of calling in Child Protective Services, lengthen or shorten shelters stays, and more. There is some effort to remedy the imbalance of power in this relationship through the establishment of a grievance procedure that all city-funded shelters must follow. The grievance process includes a requirement that shelters notify clients of the shelter rules (which was not done regularly until the grievance procedure was put into place in January 1993)and has also resulted in the appointment of a city-funded advocate who represents clients throughout the grievance procedure. The flip side of power-over-capital is control-over-self-capital.Powerover is the ability to limit someone’s control over himself or herself. Michel Foucault has discussed something similar in his analysis of how the social contract was established in France, specifically in regards to unemployment. Society was obliged to feed the unemployed person, but only if they 131

APPENDIX B

accepted internment. This “contract” leads to the “moral” connection: work-freedom, unemployed-c~ntrolled.~ This sort of physical control and containment in exchange for assistance exists for homeless people today. Support in shelters and the ability to stay in them is often dependent upon agreeing to follow certain sets of rules, from loose to very strict, that limit an individual’s ability to determine his or her own day-to-day actions.

Knowledge of Resources Knowledge of resources is the degree of familiarity of what exists within the field to help people. Resources include various direct-service programs, housing programs, educational opportunities, job training and employment opportunities, and more. Knowledge of resources is prized not only by those in advocacy and coordinating positions but also by those in case-management positions as they attempt to help clients create and fulfill case-management plans. Someone who lacks this capital will be less able to successfully serve others and will thus lose status in the field. Knowledge of resources, then, can be transferred into real material goods and services for homeless people and into legitimacy and reputation for the individual holding the capital. Some agencies specialize in amassing such knowledge and either distributing it within the field (*in resource manuals) or making it directly available to homeless persons (through information and referral services).

Firsthand Experience Firsthand experience has been frequently mentioned in discussion of other capitals. Firsthand experience with homelessness is a particular form of legitimacy that is recognized in different ways across the field depending upon an agent’s perspective about the cause of homelessness. In general, homeless and formerly homeless people are not seen as particularly knowledgeable about homelessness except among advocates, and not consistently there. For instance, the practice of surveying homeless people before the development of citywide plans appears to be more of an appeasement measure, as often the plans are well under way to being written while these surveys are being conducted. In some service agencies, homeless people’s opinions concerning qualities of shelters and hotels are 132

KEY ELEMENTS O F T H E FIELD O F HOMELESSNESS

highly sought after as a way of both attempting to shine the light on seedy hotels and collecting more accurate information about where to refer people looking for shelter. In others, opinions about shelters and hotels are, if not dismissed, seen as beside the point, as there is little that can be done with this information since the need for places to stay overwhelms all but the most extreme concerns. On the other hand, there are instances where the fact that someone has this experience has brought that person more recognition throughout the field; however, this case is more rare.

Jobs In many ways, housing and jobs are tied together as capital. As the lack of low-cost housing was repeatedly cited as a cause of homelessness, so was the lack of living-wage jobs. Different agents have different perspectives, though, about the desire and ability of currently homeless people to acquire and maintain jobs. Some feel that, assuming there was adequate job development, a host of other issues would have to be dealt with, such as lack ofjob readiness and job skills. Others feel that some homeless people just do not want to work. Others swear that they can take a host ofjob notices to a shelter and have them taken up right away.

Homeless People Though not as commonly cited by interview subjects, there are other capitals of interest. One of the most curious is homeless people. Service providers and advocates all need to show numbers of homeless people that they have assisted in order to obtain other capitals-money and contracts for service providers, legitimacy and reputation for advocates. Without homeless people, these agents would lose their reason for existence. A few service providers and advocates seemed very aware of this dependency and mentioned that they were either troubled by a sense of self-perpetuation in the field or that their goal was to eliminate their job. NOTES 1. Joanne Passaro, The Unequal Homeless:Men of the Streets, Womenin Their Place (New York: Routledge, 1996). 133

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2. This is an example of Hopper and Bauhmol’s theory of liminality and abeyance, discussed earlier. Kim Hopper and Jim Bauhmol, “Redefining the Cursed Work: A Historical Interpretation of Homelessness,”in Homekssness in America, ed. Jim Baumohl (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1996). 3. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermaneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 6.

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APPENDIX C History of Homelessness in San Francisco

W

hile homelessness is often discussed as a modem phenomenon, it has been a part of San Francisco life from its earliest days as part of the United States. Evidence for this assertion comes from newspaper articles and documentation of police activities, private charities, and governmentsponsored projects. What is most fascinating about the materials and the knowledge they provide is the striking similarity to conditions today, especially in terms of attitudes and responses to homelessness and people who are homeless. They include such things as record keeping and data collection as required by funders or legislation; efforts to individualize the problem of homelessness through pathologizing people and confronting them as individuals who need to be reformed; and tension between acknowledging and ignoring the relationship between poverty and homelessness. Despite this background, today’s local advocates and policymakers tend to consider homelessness as a phenomenon of contemporary times, with its history beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, as expressed in their documents and public debates. This gap is unfortunate, for an understanding of the longer history of homelessness, especially social responses to it, provides a more complete framework in which to assess our current situation, in both an analytical sense and in terms of potentially creating policy that is more effective at addressing the problem of homelessness. Below is a discussion of each of the main sectors of society in which there was substantial interaction with homeless people or documentation of homelessness in San Francisco. 135

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NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS Poor and homeless people were described in newspaper accounts as troublesome victims who should be attended to by those who could afford to be charitable. A brief column entitled “Hard Times” in the Duib Drumutic Chronicle (San Francisco) in early 1865 laments: Every night, for a week past, we have been stopped on our way home by some poor devil who wanted “to borrow two bits to get a night’s lodging.” The consequence was that we had twice to go without a dinner. Won’t some philanthropist start a free lodging house for the unfortunate who have nowhere to sleep?’

Charity work often appeared to be the actual focus of newspaper articles that addressed homelessness, thus switching the main point of attention from those who were in need of assistance to those who provided it. Such work, and the subsequentpositive publicity gained from it, appeared to provide a certain amount of social capital to those engaged in it. One item in particular expressesthe desirabilityof this capital well. A Duib Examiner (San Francisco) piece offers profiles with sketched portraits of nine women notable for their charity work, describing in brief the organization they were affiliated with and the type of services they rendered.*

POLICE ACTIVITIES Record keeping on residents began before the city was part of the United States. A document from 1844 for the Alcaldo of San Francisco lists the people in San Francisco, where they live, their reading and writing abilities, and the number of voting tickets they were allotted? While this document is not a police document, it is an official effort at keeping track of the status of residents, including their location and housing status. After San Francisco’s change in control from Mexico to the United States, police record keeping began in earnest. As early as 1868, we can find annual reports of the number of arrests made by type of crime. These records were published by local printers and appear to be publicly available. For the year spanning 1867 to 1868, arrests were made in several crime categories that have changed little over time. They include drunk156

HISTORY OF HOMELESSNESS I N S A N FRANCISCO

enness, being out of the almshouse, begging, being a nuisance in a public This collection of street, disturbing the peace at night, and ~agrancy.~ laws can be described as quality-of-life crimes in the sense that those who commit them are infringing upon the comfort of others. It is easy to make a connection between these crimes, such as begging, and the newspaper column referenced earlier, which sympathetically complained of being disturbed by a vagrant begging on one’s well-worn path home. For nearly one hundred years, the police reports were simply counts of the number of arrests made for each crime category. In the 1950s, those counts became a bit more sophisticated. Distinctions were made among the general pool of offenders according to their age (juvenile or adult), race, nativity (native or foreign born), and gender.5

PRIVATE CHARITIES The activities of private charities can be pieced together from newspaper accounts, as discussed earlier, and their own annual reports. One of the earliest charities was the San Francisco Ladies Protection and Relief Society, established in 1853, which was set up to help strangers and sick and dependent women and children. Toward the end of the 1850s, that objective was streamlined to focus on providing shelter for women and children.6 As the organization grew, it approached the state of California for financial support. In 1860, the society asked for and received three thousand dollars from the legislature in order to aid homeless women and children.’ This support signals an advancement in work concerning homelessness on several counts: first, the increased formalization of the work itself, as reflected by the society’s very request for funding, second, the state’s willingness to support relief of homeless persons, and third, the nascent contractual relationship between the state and “service providers” that is common today. In the 1880s, the society sharpened its focus again and became primarily concerned with children and orphans. The society kept records on service provision from its earliest days. Those records took the form of annual reports that tallied the number of people admitted (distinguishing between children and young girls), the number in residence at the beginning and end of the year, the total number 137

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of people helped, and number of illnesses. Orphans were differentiated by their degree of “0rphaness”-whole, half, or abandoned. Narrative portions of the reports described the benefits, especially for children, of life at the Society (in contrast to conditions at their homes), and praised the qualities of the staff.8 Eventually, the reports also included advertisements (the Thirty-fourth Annual Report is well over half its length in ads) geared toward the women of the society, advertising buggies, pharmacies, household merchandise, life insurance, and candy. The annual reports of the society remained much the same over the years except for subtle changes in references to clients. Previously, clients were referred to as people and children and stressed the importance of a homelike atmosphere. By 1890, the annual report refers to clients as inmates, reflecting a marked change in perspective from worthy victim to unworthy perpetrator.

SAN FRANCISCO ALMSHOUSE On March 21,1862, the California State Senate and General Assembly, in their thirteenth session, gave permission to the board of supervisors of the city and county of San Francisco to appropriate twelve thousand dollars from the general fund “for the general relief of the indigent sick of said city and county . . . for the purpose of maintaining the Hospital and Pest House. . . A few months later, the senate and assembly appropriated five thousand dollars for a similar institution to care for “inebriates.”” This act was repealed approximately thirty years later. Finally, in 1866, the senate and assembly authorized the board of supervisors to build an almshouse and granted power to appropriate land and erect buildings. In addition, maximum budget-appropriation levels were set by state legislators, along with staff composition and managerial levels, all with associated salary caps.’‘ Such support, in the form of both permission and monies, coming soon after the support given to the San Francisco Ladies Relief and Protection Society marked official recognition of the existence of homelessness and poverty, or at least its troublesomeness to those encountering people in that state. The change in nature of the statutes from 1862 to 1866, from simple authorization to explicit instructions, represents an increased for-

.”’

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HISTORY OF HOMELESSNESS I N SAN FRANCISCO

mality of interest, as well as a change in perception toward those served. In this last bit of legislation, those served by the almshouse were referred to as “inmates,” the same change in language that the society itself underwent; in previous legislation, they were simply left unmentioned. The almshouse persisted at least until the early twentieth century. After the 1906 earthquake, additional structures were built on the property to serve as a “relief home” for the “chronically ill homeless,” and the institution became more of a hospital and old-age home.’* By the turn of the century, the almshouse was known as both a relief house and poor home. Most of the residents were more than seventy years of age. A portrait of the transformed institution published by that in~titution’~ goes to great lengths to distinguish between the two, attempting to emphasize the charitable relief efforts as opposed to the impoverishment of the residents. At this stage, too, the institution is described as a “cooperative community.” Despite this appearance though, the community itself appears to have had little control over the rules and procedures of the home. Instead, they were regarded as “good old children”14 and had relatively structured lives, providing valuable services for the city and county at comparatively little cost. Since residents provided the laundry service for all of San Francisco’s hospitals as part of the regular workday at the relief home and supported themselves through the manufacture of their own clothing and food, as well as building and maintaining their own structures, their public burden was minimal. Record Keeping at the Almshouse

The superintendent of the almshouse submitted an annual reportI5 each fiscal year to the board of supervisors. This document started out as a simple accounting of statistics on the “inmates” but came to include more elaborate narratives describing life at the almshouse as a new superintendent attempted, successfully, to expand the institution. Throughout changes in presentation, however, the basic set of descriptors of the residents remained stable. They included number of admits by gender; number of discharged inmates and reason for discharge; number of deaths and runaways; year-end total remaining at the house; nativity of inmates (U.S. and foreign born); “color”; occupation; age; money and valuables confiscated upon admission; number of re-admits and frequency of readmissions; and, finally, data on the farm that the residents worked, 139

APPENDIX C

including acreage, crop yield, and livestock. As work life at the almshouse diversified into clothing and shoes, reports on those areas were added as well as accounts of the dietary allotments and costs per resident. All of this data, combined with the narrative accounts, seems to go toward proving the self-sufficiency of the almshouse. In the late 18909, a Stanford University assistant professor conducted a study of the women of the almshouse“j that appears to be part of a larger body of work throughout the country attempting to understand the phenomenon of pauperism. In this study, the residents were interviewed about their previous occupations and reasons for being in the almshouse. All data were confirmed and “corrected” by the matron, as the researcher felt that the women could not be relied upon to be honest. Much of the focus of the study is on the circumstances that led to the women being there, which frequently was reduced to some personality trait, such as being too quarrelsome. This search for and use of personality qualities as the root cause of poverty and homelessness has not changed much over time, as was apparent in discussions of casemanagement practices in previous chapters.

NOTES 1. “Hard Times,” Daily Dramatic Chronicle (San Francisco), 18 February 1865, p. 30. 2. ‘‘Caring for the Poor,” Daily Examiner (San Francisco), 16 December 1886, p. 11. 3. Early San Francisco Papers, Folder 121. Listing of San Francisco residents. Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley, JosC de Jesus NoC, “Seccion Unica de S. Francisco,” 14 December 1844. 4. P. Crowley, Chiefof Police’sAnnual R+ort for the Fiscal Ear 1867-8,EndingJune 30, 1868 (San Francisco, 1868). 5. Annual Report of the Police Department of the City and County of Sun Francisco Cal$omia, Calendar Ear 1952 (San Francisco, 1953). 6. Rowena Bean, “Inasmuch. . .,’ I;he One Hundred Ear History of the Sun Francisco Ladies Protection and Relief Society 1853-1953 (Berkeley: James J. Grillest, 1953). 7. Carol Green Wilson,A History of the Heritage (San Francisco: Ladies Protection and Relief Society, 1970).

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HISTORY OF HOMELESSNESS IN SAN FRANCISCO

8. Thirty-second and llhirty-third Annual %arts of the Managers of the San Francisco Ladies’ Protection and Reliefsociety for the Two Ears Ending Dec. 31, 1886 (San Francisco, 1887). 9. Statutes of California, chap. 79. 10. Statutes of California, chap. 368. 11. Statutes of California, chap. 214. 12. Facility Assessment R@ort, Laguna Hunda Hosfiital Master Plan (San Francisco: Department of Public Health, Laguna Honda Hospital, 1992). 13. Mabel Craft Doering, A Poor House That Pays: The Stoly of Sun Francisco’s Co-ofJerativeReliefHome (San Francisco: City and County Relief Home,

1912). 14. Doering, A Poor House That Pays, 25. 15. “Almshouse Report,” San Francisco Municifial R+orts (San Francisco: San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 1868-1904). 16. Mary Roberts Smith, Almshouse Women: A Study of Two Hundred and Twenty-Eight Women in the City and County Almshouse of Sun Francisco (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, 1896).

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APPENDIX D Research Method

T

he model of research used in this study is a blend of several qualitative models, most notably grounded theory and ethnography. It attempts to gather data in a way that allows for a nuanced analysis, as was deemed necessary for examining ideology. It is relatively independent from the specific content area of homelessness and could be transferred to any other arena, such as unemployment data and transportation data.

DATA COLLECTION The nature of ideology, the complexity of the process of generating data, and the hzziness and sensitivity surrounding homelessness all pointed to the need for a qualitative approach as opposed to a more quantitative approach. Although the latter would have provided data from a greater number of people and organizations, the type of data generated would have been insufficient to reflect the intertwining of the issues delineated above. The primary means of data collection for this study was through semistructured interviews with representatives of the diverse assortment of organizations that generate data about people who are homeless in San Francisco. The models of ethnography and grounded theory' were influential in formulating a basis on which to conduct these interviews and establishing a style of observation and openness to information and clues presented by subjects. Interviews were similar to the intensive interviews 143

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described by Lofland and Lofland2in their presentation of ethnographic method. While there were key points that needed to be covered, the interview closely paralleled an in-depth, intimate discussion regarding the nature of the organization’s work. Grounded theory was instrumental in the process of continually listening to the interviews for categories of organizations and individuals that should be contacted. Interviews The majority of interviews were conducted during the spring and summer of 1997, totaling thirty-two interviews with thirty-five people (there were two subjects in three of the interviews). Interview subjects came from advocacy groups, direct-service agencies, government offices, and other entities whose primary focus is not homelessness but who are affected by homelessness (e.g., merchants and the police department). People were chosen within the organization who were most directly engaged in the work related to homelessness, although sometimes managers were interviewed as well. These contacts were identified through several sources: reports, newspaper articles, source books and resource guides, the telephone directory, suggestions from interview subjects, and preexisting knowledge. Each interview had several goals. The first was to identift the specific activities organizations regularly engage in that involved generating descriptive data about people who are homeless. The second was to locate the organization within the larger pool of organizations that are dealing with issues of homelessness. The third was to tease out understandings of the situation of homelessness and conceptions of people who are homeless. Overall, these interview points were successful. Some interview subjects seemed to be offended at being asked to discuss causes of and solutions to homelessness, insinuating that the answer to those questions was more than obvious. Others seemed flustered by the question, indicating that it appeared large and overwhelming to them. Documents In addition to interviews, a variety of documents were collected for analysis as well. Documents represent a more formalized, stable reflection of 144

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information-generatingactivitiesand thus can provide additional, and perhaps more central, data for analysis. The primary documents of interest were information-gathering instruments, such as intake forms and surveys. Supplementary documents (such as reports by those same organizations) have been collected either directly from organizations that were interviewed or from libraries and clearinghouses focused on homelessness. Finally, there are several documents that are key to the field of homelessness that have also been analyzed, and while they are not directly about data generation, they serve to define the types of activities that take place around homelessness. Examples of such documents include the McKinney Act and the HUD-required Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy (CHAS) plan for San Francisco.

Archival Data Research was also conducted to discover the earliest examples in San Francisco history of collecting descriptive data concerning people who are homeless. Archives of government documents, newspapers, and literature developed in the private sphere were searched for evidence of such activities taking place and for surrounding public debates concerning those activities.

ANALYSIS Within the gross parameters of the question and related definitions above, there immediately arise questions as to which level of this problem is to be examined. It is helphl to think of the level of analysis as a question of scale3as opposed to the traditional macro/micro split that tends to create a false dichotomy within problems that, first, truly have no organic split into individual or social (where do small groups fit in?), and second, implies a disconnectedness between levels of analysis. Ifwe instead think of gradation and use the notion of scale as it is used in defining the view of a map, we are given more choices and have a greater chance of landing on a rich vantage point. This study uses a medium scale of analysis. In other words, a large-scale focus aimed at the specific psychology of individuals is not of particular 145

APPENDIX D

interest in trying to tease out the shape of ideology here because the question is one of social processes, not personalized living, thinking, and coping strategies. However, stepping back too far into a small-scale focus and employing, for instance, surveys of large numbers of people, would also fail to provide detailed evidence of the intersection of information production and ideology; the scale is too small-the view is too far away. Thus, we are left with a medium-scale view, a street map as opposed to a lot map or a map of the state, which allows for the identification of the specific activities and understandings of organizations,without getting caught in particular personality machinations or overwhelmed by the more dramatic nature of large societal movements. The question of scale discussed above calls into question yet another fundamental question: Which sort of analytical school can be brought to bear on the problem at hand, given the specific scale at which it is being examined? Because the relationship between ideology and information production is being examined here at the street-map level, much f d s away from immediate usefulness and becomes instead part of a larger background of informative tools that may be usefd to draw upon at key moments. The research question of concern here is not one of individual psychology, although there are sociopsychologists who have done empirical analysis of ideology4 as well as linguists and other discourse analysts who have paid close attention to the microscopic details of conversations and utterance^.^ On the other extreme, which is more common, are the analyses that take place at a much broader mass level, primarily in the realm of cultural artifacts such as film, television, or literature.6 What is left then, is a mix of both discourse analysis, traditional sociological and political study, and mass-media critiques focused on a specific convergent point-the organization in its social and material environment. The foibles of individuals must be recognized, as well as the larger social background in which activity takes place. However, the central point is the activity of these key groups and the social world, informed by an understanding of the variability of individual human beings and the sociohistorical context within which we all act. With this footing established, analysis of the data occurred on two levels. The first was at the organizational level, as embodied in the documents and interviews. In what types of activities are organizations engaged? What sorts of conceptions are embedded, supported, and 146

RESEARCH METHOD

challenged by these activities? The second level is the larger social level. What was the historical and social context in which these organizations engaged in these activities? The analytical strategy used in this study approximates the threephase “depth hermeneutics” approach suggested by John Thompson for the examination of ideology in everyday life. Phase one should be a robust sociohistorical analysis, which strives to “reconstruct the social-historical conditions and contexts of the production, circulation and reception of symbolic forms, to examine the rules and conventions, the social relations and institutions, and the distribution of power, resources and opportunities by virtue of which these contexts form differentiated and socially structured field^."^ Phase two, a “discursive analysis? calls for identifying and analyzing those “meaningful objects and expressions which circulate in social fields.”8 Thompson also refers to these objects and expressions as “symbolic constructions which display and articulate str~cture.”~ Phase three, the final phase, is “interpretation/re-interpretation” in which one “proceeds by synthesis, by the creative construction of possible meaning.” Thompson argues that this last phase must take place alongside such efforts as discursive analysis because without it, we are unable to discover and understand what is actually being represented in the constructions we find. Thompson’s three phases have been followed, though in a somewhat different order. Phase two maps to “level one”; phase one, to “level two”; and phase three, to level three. It is important to note that in this study, all levels of analysis occurred simultaneously for both practical and methodological reasons. Practically, it is far easier to pursue this type of research if one alternates between several aspects of the problem at the same time. Methodologically, each of these levels informs the other. They are by their nature intertwined, so to look at one will bring about an examination of the other, though the emphasis of attention may vary.

Level One Analysis For the first level of analysis, a mix of the method of coding employed in traditional ethnographic research“ and in grounded theory has been blended with aspects of discourse analysis, especially followingthe models 147

APPENDIX D

of Norman Fairclough and John Thompson. In this model, transcripts and documents were read with an eye for concepts and themes that presented themselves organically, termed here asfiee codes. Examples of such codes include legitimization, dignity, and privacy, all of which are concepts that appear throughout many of the sources. In addition to free codes, sources were analyzed for the presence of an additional suite of “semi-fixed codes.” These were drawn primarily from the work of Pierre Bourdieu,” and include agents, fields, capitals, and practices. Along with these were added the codes of conceptions and mechanisms, as these were specific aspects of the study not covered by the existinglist drawn from Bourdieu and were too central to leave to the freecoding method. Coding and analysis was done primarily with the qualitative software program AtlasTi.

Level Two Analysis The second level of analysis concerns the social sphere, both the immediate and historical circumstances that shape material conditions. These conditions in turn shape both what is possible and what appears to be possible to people in that environment. The context required to understand the actions and understandings of those producing data about homeless people must go beyond the historical to include a larger contemporary picture of the relations between the people involved and the terms of those relations. The Bourdieu’s work offers a robust set of theoretical tools that allows one to both conduct research and analyze such social settings, which are by definition complex due to the level of conflict, scarcity of resources, and interdependency among participants. A brief description of these tools is offered below. The Field Bourdieu defines the field as a conceptuallybounded terrain on which interested parties (which he refers to as agents) compete for the various resources that happen to have value in that particular field. Bourdieu fiequently uses the analogy of a gameI2in which the players have an intuitive sense of the rules, how to play, and the things of value that they are trying 148

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to attain. This analogy cannot be taken too far, however, for agents within the field occupy many positions and have many interests, so there is not merely a simple “for and against” opposition at work. In addition, agents are constantly battling over the rules of the game, whether in the form of the field boundaries (trying to stretch or constrict what is considered relevant) or in terms of what constitutes a valued resource. Ultimately, the field is the space in which the interactions between a particular set ofpeople make sense. It is derived from their regular actions (practices) and their goals. These actions are what begin to set the boundaries of the field and distinguish it from related fields. Examples of fields would include academia, politics, and musicianship.

Agents Agents are the general categories of people that populate a given field. These are the types of people who regularly engage in specific activities within that field. If we think of the field of academia, the categories of people would probably include faculty, students, and administrative staff. Each of these categories could be broken down, depending upon the scope of the field and the area of research. For instance, within the larger agent category of faculty, fill professors, assistant professors, lecturers, and teaching assistants may all share some practices in common, such as teaching. But, there may be substantial differences in those practices as well, and additional practices that are unique to those finer categories, such as what level of student or class is taught, ability to do research, or administrative responsibilities.

Practices Practices are the actions that agents engage in on a regular basis within a given field. These practices can actually help define the field itself.

For instance, if someone was investigating the research of university faculty members, at first it might be logical that the field would be defined as “university research.” However, in looking at the practices of faculty members, it would be clear that many faculty members engage in research outside of the university. This would lead to a decision in 149

APPENDIX D

defining the field, either by consciously restricting it to only universitybased research or by expanding it to include all types of research by university faculty. Another important element of practices is that they are fundamentally social; that is, a practice is not engaged in isolation. Other agents and aspects of the field are involved, and in many ways, a practice makes no sense if it is viewed outside of that constellation of social relations.

Capital Capital is the last of the conceptual tools described here and refers to the resources, both material and nonmaterial, that are valued within a field. Agents need capital to engage in practices and must engage in practices to acquire more capital. There is competition among agents to obtain capital, to validate or invalidate various types of capitals, and to import new types of capital to which they have access. Bourdieu defines several broad categories of capital, which seem to operate in all types of fields. These include cultural capital, which can be defined as a sense of knowing how things are done; social capital, which is comprised mainly of social contacts and connections; symbolic capital, which can be considered material items that express one’s position and capital holdings within a field; and finally, economic capital, which is money capital. These categories can be more specifically defined for a given field, as well as augmented. Capitals can sometimes be exchanged for one another, though not always successfully.For instance, someone who is attempting to inhabit an unfamiliar social sphere may exchange economic capital (money) for symbolic capital (clothing), but if they do not have the required cultural capital (the sense of what is appropriate to wear in that sphere), the conversion will be unsuccessful. The tools described above were employed in revealing and understanding the complex social situation of data production concerning homeless people in San Francisco. They were instrumental in uncovering the findings discussed in previous chapters. However, they do have constraints that must be taken into account. First, these are analytical tools and thus cannot be mapped exactly to the world. They help create a simplified model of the situation under examination, but in no way can that 150

RESEARCH METHOD

model actually re-create, to a fine degree, that world. In fact, simplification is actually one of the goals, for without it, it would be almost impossible to get at any of the questions concerning the arena in which we are interested. Second, all of these categories are interdependent; they help to define each other. Agents, for instance, can be defined as a group by their practices, thus requiring one to discuss practices in the background while trying to understand agents in the foreground. Third, there is no hierarchy among these categories. The order in which they are discussed was chosen to enhance the discussion of the findings but does not reflect differing levels of importance. Finally, each of the categories covered are discussed at a certain level of generality that seem best suited to the research. However, different levels are possible. For instance, in looking at agents, one type of agent is “advocates.” For the most part, there is little distinction made between advocates within the body of this research. However, within the field of advocacy, there are different types of advocates who are separated by the degree to which they are aligned with, or appear to be aligned with, business interests.

Level Three Analysis One thread within this study concerns the issue of how society reproduces itself and how certain social relations are maintained, modified, or completely altered. Theories of ideology argue that ideology itself is one of the primary means by which this replication occurs, though with great conflict and subtlety. An essential task here is carefully treading the thin line between dynamic understandings of ideology and more mechanistic approaches that are both deterministic and patronizing. With this in mind, an analytical framework was developed, influenced by the work of Marx,13 Gramsci,14 Althusser,15 Bourdieu,I6 and Thompson.” Ideology is understood, in its critical Mamian sense, to be understandings that help to maintain existing social relations of unequal distributions of power and resources. Thus, it is necessary to look for those understandings that seem to be dominating, dominated, or stuck in struggle somewhere between those two poles (as is, in reality, most often the case), the social relations they reflect, the agents involved, and the regularly occurring activities and resources that come to bear within this struggle. 151

APPENDIX D

NOTES 1. Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss, “Grounded Theory Research: Procedure, Canons and Evaluation Criteria,” Qualitative Sociology 13, no. 1 (1990): 3-27. 2. John Lofland and Lyn H. Lofland, Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to

Qualitative Observation and Analysis (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1995). 3. This insight is thanks to Patrick Wilson. 4. Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exfibitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 5. Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (New York: Longman, 1989).

6. See works by Herbert Marcuse and Terri Hall. 7. John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 284. 8. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 284. 9. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 284. 10. Lofland, Analyzing Social Settings. 11. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980). 12. Pierre Bourdieu and LoicJ. D. Wacquant, A n Invitation to Refixive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 13. Karl Marx, Cafiital, Vol. 1 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986). 14. Sekctions from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. (Luintin Hoare and Geofiey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). 15. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards and Investigation),” in Lenin and Philos@hy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 16. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Refiroduction in Education, Society and Culture (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1977). 17. John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990).

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APPENDIX E Interview Questions

I

nterviews were unstructured and conversational in format. However, each interview did cover a common set of questions, which are listed below.

1. The work of the organization and of the specific interview subject. 2. The types of information the organization collects and how it is collected. 3. How the organization uses the information internally. 4. Whether or not the information is used outside the organization, by whom, how, and why. 5. Whether or not the organization uses information generated outside of itself, how and why. 6. The organization’s hnding sources. 7. Based on his or her experiences at the organization, what the interview subject thinks are the primary reasons people are homeless. 8. What the interview subject thinks should be done, and by whom, to address the issue of homelessness. 9. Recommendations of other people and organizations to contact.

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APPENDIX F Transcription Conventions

I

nterviews were transcribed verbatim. For the sake of readability, quotations have been stripped of “pause words,” such as “um” and “uh,” and disconnected sentence fragments. Except for this, grammar and word choices have not been altered. The questions and comments of the interviewer are enclosed in square brackets “[I]”,as are clarifying notes within the body of the quotation itself. There is no formal depiction of pauses or passed time during an interview.

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INDEX

1990 census. See S-Night advocates, 29,39,71,86,109,122; and capitals, 48,86; and causes of homelessness, 98; and dominating conceptions in the field, 61-62, 64,72,76,79,81,84; and mechanisms, 98-99,103; and other agents, 39-40,48; types of, 39,61-62 agents, 30-3 1,56,60; relations between, 124-25; theoretical definition, 13; types of, 121-24 Althusser, Louis, 2 1-22 authority-capital, 30; and agents, 30-3 1,38,86; and dominating conceptions, 80-81,111-12; and the identity construction mechanism, 95; and the McKinney Act, 31,51 Bassuk, Ellen, critiques of counting, 10 bias and perspective, 3,19-20

Bourdieu, Pierre, analytical tools of, 12-16 Braman, Sandra, and definitions of information, 17 Buckland, Michael, and definitions of information, 16 businesses and the paternalism conception, 64 capitals, 26n23,26n24,51-52,81; theoretical definition of, 14; types of, 129-33 case management, 44,49,126; as central to the field of homelessness, 108; and dominating conceptions in the field, 96-97,108; and information production practices, 44-48; and mechanisms, 96-97,lO 1,104-5; and other agents, 47-48; case management plans, 47 case managers, 47,49,63,69,84; and dominating conceptions, 63, 83-84

165

INDEX

case workers. See case managers causes of homelessness, 5 1,65,69, 98; and the codification mechanism, 101;and the individual responsibility conception, 108; and the individuation mechanism, 95,98 Census Bureau, 4 certification of homelessness, 23-24, 56,87,101 children and homelessness, 54, 137 Chomsky, Noam, 2 city departments, defined, 124 clients, defined, 122 codification mechanism, 100-2,109 common understandings. See commonly held understandings commonly held understandings, 2,5, 58-60. See also dominating conceptions; ideology consciousness, 22,111-12 contradictions: as clues regarding ideology, 113; identifying, 5 counting people without homes, 4, 9-1 1,92,108-9,126-27 counts. See counting people without homes data, 17,41,44,109. See also information data analysis, defined, 128 data design, defined, 127-28 data generation. See information production data production. See information production data production practices. See information production practices data production process. See information production practices

data sharing, defined, 125 data-capital, exchanging for other capitals, 43 data-money connection, 40-44 definition mechanism, 99-100,109 definitions, 29-32,99-100,129; implicit and explicit, 11; and information production practices, 4,9,23 Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 4,lO Department of Human Resources (DHS), 35-36,124 depth hermeneutics, and John Thompson, 147-48 desublimation mechanism, 104-5, 109 difference conception, 59-63,96; and agents, 60-62; and the individuation mechanism, 95; and other dominating conceptions, 62, 73,108 discipline conception, 59,83-86, 100,108 distraction mechanism, 105-6,109 dominant ideologies, 21-23. See also dominating conceptions dominating conceptions, 58-59,80, 109-13 domination, and ideology, 111- 12 Fairclough, Norman, 21 false consciousness, 112 families, 54,123-24 family shelters, 63 field of advocacy, 29,119 field of aid and service, 119 field of crime, 56,72,84-85,100, 121,136 field of families, 121 166

INDEX

field of government, 119 field of health, 120 field of homelessness, 29-35,58-59, 110-1 1; and the McKinney Act, 32,50-51 field of housing, 120 field of law, 29 field of money, 120 field of politics, 29 field ofshelters, 120 field of substance abuse, 121 fields, theoretical definition of, 13 fields within the field of homelessness, types of, 119-21 firsthand-experience-capital,36, 80-81,111,132-33 follow-~p~, 96,100,128 forms, 76; and the codification mechanism, 101; and definitions, 11,23-24; and dominating conceptions, 73,76 Foucault, Michel, 94 funders, 43,50-5 1,56 gay men and women, and shelters, 55 gender identity, 54. See also transgender identity, and homelessness government agencies, and the certification of homelessness, 56 Gramsci, Antonio, 2 1-23 Hall, Stuart, 22 hegemony, 21-23,111 hierarchy of knowledge mechanism, 103-4,109 history of homelessness in San Francisco, 136-40 homeless people. See people without homes

homeless-people-capital, 133 homelessness, 7-12,28-35; institutional and legislative responses to, 8,50; perpetuation and maintenance of, 111 housing, 49,5 1,53 housing strategies, and the McKinney Act, 9 housing-capital, 130 identity, and race and ethnicity, 53 identity construction, 49,53-55,72 identity construction mechanism, 90-95,100,109; as the primary mechanism, 89 ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), 21 ideologies, 3, 18-23. See also dominating conceptions ideology, 2-3,5,18-23,58,89,94, 11 1-12 impartiality, 1-2 individual responsibility conception, 59-60,108,110 individual solutions versus social solutions, 1 11 individuation mechanism, 95-99,109; and dominating conceptions in the field, 95-96; and information production practices, 95-97 information, 1-3,113-14; defined, 16-17 information production, 3,5,17,28, 44,46,50,53,89,92,113; influence on dominating conceptions, 109- 10 information production practices, 5, 108,137-40; types of, 125-29 information production tools, and objectivity, 110

167

INDEX

information research, and fields outside of library and information science, 114 information sources, quality of, 2 intake forms, 5,45,53,69-70,100 intakes,41,44-48,104,108-9,126; and dominatingconceptions, 76, 97,108; and mechanisms, 95,97, 104; and power-over-capital, 46,48 Interagency Council on Homelessness, 8 job-capital, 133 knowledge-of-resources-capital, 132 Kuhn, Thomas, 19-20 law enforcement agents, 33-34; and dominating conceptions, 61, 65-66,75,84-85. See also police legislative responses to homelessness, and the San Francisco Almshouse, 138 legitimacy, 30-31,36-37,39 Marcuse, Herbert, and the distraction mechanism, 107n8 McKinney Act, 8-9,11,31-32, 50-51,72,92,99; definition of homelessness, 32-34 mechanisms, 5,88-107 media, 2,40 mental illness, and the difference conception, 62 mentally ill conception, 75-76, 79-81,92,95,101,108 money management, 68-7 1,73 money-capital, 43,129 objectivity, 3,110

paradigms, in contrast to ideology, 19-20 paternalism conception, 59,63-71, 87,96; and agents, 63-68; and dominating conceptions in the field, 71,83,108; and mechanisms, 95-96,100; and money management, 68-71 people without homes, 5,35-39,56, 62,70,85,96,119; and dominating conceptions in the field, 50,60,79,82; and the identity construction mechanism, 91; and information production practices, 4,29,36,38; and the McKinney Act, 9; and other agents, 33,40,67,70 permanent housing, 52-53 police, 123. See also law enforcement agents power, 2,48 power relations, 15,49-56 power-over-capital,48,13 1-32; and agents, 38,45-46,48,63,84; and the certification of homelessness, 56; and dominating conceptions in the field, 63,111; and the McKinney Act, 32-33 practices, 13- 14 the problematic, and Louis Althusser, 21 questionnaires, and commonly held understandings, 5 race and ethnicity, 53-54 race-capital, 53 rehabilitation conception, 59,71-75, 97,100,108 reporting, defined, 127

168

INDEX

research methods, 145-52 resource control, 49-53 S-Night, 9-10 San Francisco Almshouse, 96,103, 138-40 San Francisco Ladies Protection and Relief Society, 137 secondhand-experience-capital,81 self-sovereignty, 49. See also powerover-self-capital service providers, 45,56,69,122; and the data-money connection, 41; and dominating conceptions in the field, 62,67,72,79; and the McKinney Act, 9; and other agents, 33,39,45-46 service provision, 49,137 sexual orientation, 54-55 shelters, 29,37,61,65,69,123; and capitals, 38; and the certification of homelessness, 87; and dominating conceptions in the field, 61,65,72, 76,79,83-84; and mechanisms, 100,104-5; and other agents, 37, 55,70 Shinn, Marybeth, and critiques of counting, 10 Smith, Mary Roberts, 96 social reproduction, 3,5,12,111 social workers, and the professionalization of services, 51

social-network-capital,defined, 130-31 street people, as different from people without homes, 82 street people conception, 82-83,87, 99,108 substance abuse, and the difference conception, 62 substance abuser conception, 59, 75-82; and agents, 75-76,79,81; and capitals, 80-81; and the individual responsibility conception, 108; and mechanisms, 92,95,101 surveys,36,95,99,105,108-9,112, 127 Thompson, John, and depth hermeneutics, 147-48 time-capital, 4 1,13 1 tools and processes, critically examining, 5 transgender identity, and homelessness, 54-55 transgender people, and shelters, 55 transitional housing, 53 Urban Institute, and counting people without homes, 4 Weitzman, Beth C., and critiques of counting, 10 women, 54,137

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa Schiff has studied social aspects of information in many disparate areas, from information access to information-system evaluation and design. She has also been involved in projects promoting the creation, sharing, and use of information, especially in the realm of community education. Schiff received her MLIS and Ph.D. in library and information studies from the University of California-Berkeley. She resides in San Francisco, California, and is currently an information engineer at Interwoven, Inc.

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