Elsevier

Cities

Volume 26, Issue 6, December 2009, Pages 307-317
Cities

Towards a contextual approach to the place–homeless survival nexus: An exploratory case study of Los Angeles County

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2009.07.008Get rights and content

Abstract

The characteristics of the immediate locale greatly affect the ability of homeless people to adapt to life on the street and in shelters, with different types of places nurturing different circumstances for survival. Current conceptualizations of the place–survival nexus are too narrow, relying on small-scale, intensive studies of particular places that are known to sustain homeless survival while ignoring more suburban and exurban locales, as well as failing to set these places of survival within the larger socio-economic spaces of the metropolitan area. Further, the literature is heavily qualitative, lacking any kind of “big picture” quantitative assessment of the nexus. In response, we contribute to the place–survival nexus literature by developing a typology of space for homeless survival and then use interview data to examine the variation in survival strategies across three types of urban space in Los Angeles County. Our results speak to how our innovative and exploratory approach enabled a broader, more extensive and variegated understanding of place–survival among homeless people than previous studies.

Introduction

Survival among people experiencing homelessness is understood to be far more precarious than for the housed population (Wolch and Dear, 1993). Recently, and spurred by worries about their image, public safety and livability, local governments and businesses have systematically implemented anti-homeless ordinances to outlaw certain behaviors and survival techniques in public spaces, including panhandling, camping, sleeping, sitting, loitering, urinating and, in some cases, even providing free meals to the hungry (Mitchell, 1997, Merrifield, 2000, National Coalition for the Homeless, 2007). Residential communities have also resisted development of shelters and other housing programs, causing them to be concentrated in some neighborhoods and excluded from others (Takahashi, 1999). While we should not overestimate the impacts of these trends upon a group that is often very resilient (DeVerteuil, 2006), they nonetheless have presented additional challenges to persons living in public space and shelters.

This context makes understanding the nexus between place and homeless survival all the more important. Since homeless people are resource-poor by definition, the characteristics of the immediate locale greatly affect their ability to adapt to life on the street and in shelters (Wolch and Dear, 1993). Moreover, different types of places nurture different circumstances for survival. But we also contend that current conceptualizations of the place–survival nexus are too narrow, relying heavily on small-scale, intensive studies of particular places that are known to sustain homeless survival. The current literature also does not set these places of survival within the larger socio-economic spaces of the metropolitan area. Last, the literature is heavily qualitative, lacking any kind of “big picture” quantitative assessment of the nexus.

In this paper, we contribute to the place–survival nexus literature by addressing these gaps through an innovative approach that develops a typology of space for homeless survival and then uses interview data (n = 25) to examine the variation in survival strategies among our respondents across three types of urban space in Los Angeles County. Our exploratory research focuses on whether our innovative approach enables a broader, more extensive and variegated understanding of place–survival among homeless people than previous studies. To this end, we first outline the homeless survival literature, emphasizing that not all places ensure survival equally. We then re-conceptualize the place–survival nexus by proposing a broader, more mixed-methods approach. As a backdrop to our study, we sketch the larger context of homelessness within Los Angeles County. Next, we outline our research procedures and analytic techniques, specifically (1) the development of a cluster analysis that categorizes Los Angeles County into prime, transitional, and marginal spaces, and (2) the survival patterns within the three spaces derived from our in-depth interviews of twenty-five homeless informants. We then present and elaborate the results of the cluster analysis and its interplay with relevant interview materials, focusing on the multifaceted survival patterns of homeless people within the three cluster spaces. Finally, we discuss the utility of our innovative approach in terms of expanding our understanding the place–survival nexus.

Section snippets

The place–homeless survival nexus

There is an extensive literature on how homeless people materially survive and adapt to their circumstances (Baldwin, 1998, Cohen and Sokolovsky, 1989, Dordick, 1997, Duneier, 1999, Gounis, 1992, Hopper, 2003, Hopper et al., 1985, Koegel et al., 1999, Passaro, 1996, Rollinson, 1990, Rowe and Wolch, 1990, Ruddick, 1996, Snow and Anderson, 1993, Wolch and Dear, 1993, Wright, 1997). We wish to highlight two points that connect homeless survival with the crucial role of place. First, place matters

Reconceptualizing the nexus

We begin addressing these gaps through an innovative approach to understanding the broader context of the place–homeless survival nexus. This approach combines (1) a typology of urban space that moves well beyond the typically resource-rich neighborhood study that currently characterizes the literature; (2) the application of a quantitative technique to map such a typology over a much larger geographic space, thus analyzing macro-social spatial relations; and (3) analysis of qualitative

The context of homelessness in los angeles county

Our goal here is to briefly provide the context of homelessness in our case study – Los Angeles County – and explore some of the associations with the three kinds of spaces. Los Angeles County is the most populous in the United States, with an estimated 9.8 million inhabitants in July 2007 (US Census Bureau, 2008) and 88 municipalities and numerous unincorporated areas. The point-in-time homeless population is also seen to be the largest in absolute numbers in the nation, including at least

Cluster analysis

We used a non-hierarchical k-means cluster algorithm to identify Snow and Mulcahy’s (2001) prime, marginal, and transitional spaces in Los Angeles County, based on socio-economic variables from the 2000 Census at the census tract level. Ten variables from the 2000 Census were chosen for their ability to distinguish prime spaces occupied by largely white, high-income, well-educated and native-born inhabitants, and marginal spaces occupied by largely non-white, high-immigrant, low-education and

Cluster analysis

Table 1 outlines the three general spatial categories in Los Angeles County, clustered in terms of selected socio-demographic and economic characteristics. We found that all of the variables had high and significant F-values (between 444 and 2198), roughly indicating the success of the technique in differentiating the three clusters, as well as the success of each variable in contributing to the overall differentiation. The cluster spaces can be understood as a rough socio-economic gradient,

Discussion and conclusion

Our research focused on whether our innovative approach enabled a potentially broader, more extensive and more variegated understanding of place–survival among homeless people. We found it did in at least two ways. First, the tripartite typology proved useful for both the cluster analysis and the interviews. The results of the quantitative analysis were statistically significant and quite efficient at breaking down a very complex global city-region into three distinct cluster spaces. The

Acknowledgements

The research on which the paper is based was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-0213372, David Snow, Principal Investigator). We would like to thank the National Science Foundation and all of the individuals who responded to interviews used in this paper.

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