Reducing the stigma of homelessness will accelerate solutions centring housing, not handcuffs8/9/2024 by Matt Gannon
Nicole called her apartment ‘a little slice of heaven.’ Nestled into the shoreline of a New Hampshire lake, its waterfront view welcomed her home every evening after completing shifts at her two jobs. Until she was served a no-fault eviction notice, she thought she would never leave. Given just 30 days to move, Nicole packed toys and blankets into cardboard boxes. Facing rental vacancy rates below one percent, she and her two young kids lived out of their rusted red van. With little respite from the summer heat, the family was shunted from parking lot to parking lot while they searched for available and affordable housing. They showered at truck stops, cooled off in the public library, and re-stocked food at local pantries. Despite dozens of calls, no landlord would accept their widely stigmatized federal Housing Choice Voucher. It took three months before the county provided them with temporary accommodation for the coming winter. Housing insecurity and homelessness constitute symptoms of societal inequality in the United States. Researchers have likened the American housing landscape to a game of musical chairs with skewed rules: there simply isn’t enough affordable housing for everyone, and the people who end up without it are those who start with the fewest advantages. Indeed, the confluence of skyrocketing rents and stagnant wages renders housing unaffordable for half of American renters. People of color bear the brunt of this rent burden, and the persistent racial wealth gap disproportionately amplifies Black Americans’ risk of eviction. Moreover, people affected by the criminal legal system, people with significant physical disabilities, and people exiting the foster care system suffer disproportionately high risks of experiencing homelessness. Beyond this, as Nicole’s protracted apartment search demonstrates, homelessness is prolonged and exacerbated by the stigmatization of people experiencing it. Conceptualized as social rejection based on stereotyping, stigma worsens the employment, health, and housing outcomes of unhoused people. Potential employers are reluctant to hire candidates living in emergency shelters. Unhoused patients report limited and delayed access to primary care due to discrimination. Furthermore, many landlords refuse prospective tenants who rely on governmental subsidies, precluding many low-income applicants with experiences of homelessness from obtaining stable housing. In addition to making it more difficult for someone to overcome housing insecurity, the stigmatization of unhoused people discourages support for the systemic changes needed to end homelessness in general. Researchers have long contended that the solution to homelessness is increasing access to affordable housing and providing services in the meantime. However, NIMBY opposition to the construction of affordable housing consistently stalls essential projects, despite a dearth of evidence that such infrastructure deflates property values. Furthermore, residents routinely oppose the construction of emergency shelters in their neighborhoods, citing unfounded fears about people who might use such vital facilities. In short, the stigma of homelessness impedes the implementation of both long-term and stop-gap housing policy solutions. Indeed, “[w]e will struggle to make the structural investments needed to end it,” housing researchers Gregg Colburn and Clay Aldern conclude in their book Homelessness is a Housing Problem, until “public perceptions of homelessness change.” The stakes are life itself. Studies repeatedly conclude that experiencing homelessness deteriorates individuals’ physical and mental health. Indeed, people who have experienced homelessness are three times more likely to die prematurely, with an average lifespan 12 years shorter than the general U.S. population. Despite this urgency, policymakers repeatedly push people experiencing homelessness out of parks and out of mind rather than pursuing evidence-based, inclusive, and effective solutions. Per the National Homelessness Law Center, criminalization is sweeping the nation: nearly three-quarters of American cities bulldoze tent encampments, and half restrict living in vehicles. Researchers warn that cities can’t police their way out of homelessness; indeed, compounding fines render it harder to secure a tenancy, and serving time in jail for unpaid penalties exacerbates housing insecurity. However, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which held that cities can punish people for sleeping on public property with as little as a blanket, advocates worry that proliferating criminalization threatens to codify the stigma of homelessness. In sum, the stigmatization of unhoused people deepens housing inequality, exacerbating the consequences of homelessness and inhibiting the implementation of evidence-based policies to end it. Reducing this stigma will pave the way for sweeping solutions that center housing, not handcuffs. The road forward is clear: in order to enact the systemic changes required to end homelessness for good, we must concomitantly work to end the stigmatization of unhoused people. In the short term, cities can provide shelter via low-barrier, no-judgment Housing First approaches, and –– to help set the stage for more sweeping solutions –– advocates can center the structural causes of homelessness, debunking the false narrative that individual behavior determines housing status. In the long-term, boosting the construction of housing and ensuring that it remains affordable via vouchers, tax credits, and rent caps would go a long way in preventing people from experiencing housing insecurity in the first place. Simultaneously, laws prohibiting source-of-income discrimination, which currently exist in only a handful of states, would prevent landlords from refusing to lease properties to people reliant on such subsidies. Inequitable housing policies made it possible for Nicole’s family to experience homelessness, and stigma made it harder to overcome. To prevent more families from falling into prolonged homelessness, affordable housing must be multiplied and the stigmatization of unhoused people must be supplanted by empathetic action.
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Inequality 101 is a series of short articles written and curated by the Graduate Inequality Review aiming to provide an introduction to the foundations of inequality research and policy.
Many authors have thought, written and taught about inequality of all kinds over time, and this collective effort is the reason inequality research is such a vast field today. However, there are some scholars whose contributions have fundamentally altered our understanding of certain aspects of inequality- be it on the basis of income, gender, race, or international political economy. Read on for an introduction to the ideas of five authors that changed the way we think about inequality. Claudia Goldin. Awarded with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2023, Claudia Goldin (1946) is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Much of her work has focused on gender inequality and the labour market. In 1994, she published an article called The U-Shaped Female Labor Force Function in Economic Development and Economic History, providing evidence that the labour force participation rate of married women first declines and then rises as countries develop due to changing household-level economic incentives. Her 2002 article, co-authored with Lawrence F. Katz, The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women's Career and Marriage Decisions showed that the greater availability of the contraceptive pill in the late 1960s allowed women more autonomy over their own professional and reproductive choices. Branko Milanovic. Born in Serbia but later naturalised as American, Branko Milanovic (1953) is a research professor at the City University of New York. The author of several books on income distribution and inequality, such as Worlds Apart (2005) and The Haves and Have-Nots (2011), he is best known for his “elephant-shaped curve”. The graph, showing the evolution in income for the entire world population, first appeared in his 2013 article Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession, co-written with Christoph Lakner. It shows that those in the 70th-90th percentile, mostly low- and middle-income people in the Global North, were the only ones who saw no increase in their real income over the twenty year period between 1988 and 2008. Kimberlé Crenshaw. The only non-economist in this list, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1959) is an American civil rights advocate and a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School. Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in her 1989 essay Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. With this word, Crenshaw was expressing the idea that the American legal system treats discrimination along a single identity axis, such as gender or race. Therefore, it is badly-equipped to provide justice to Black women, who face specific discrimination that cannot be reduced to being discriminated only as Black or only as women. Since Crenshaw first wrote about intersectionality, it has gained wide popularity within different fields of inequality research. Daron Acemoglu. Daron Acemoglu (1967) is a Turkish-born American economist and Professor at MIT who specialises in political economy. Much of his work has been developed and published with Simon Jonhson and James Robinson: in 2010, they published the article The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development, arguing that the character of the institutions set up in different colonised countries during colonial times explains many of their economic outcomes today. Acemoglu and Robinson synthesised all their research on institutional determinants of economic performance in their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, which explores the drivers of democratic regimes and how democracy promotes economic growth. Thomas Piketty. A professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Thomas Piketty (1971) is a French economist whose work focuses on income and wealth inequality. Together with Emmanuel Saez, they pioneered the use of administrative and fiscal data for in-depth studies on income inequalities, which has the key advantage of not relying on self-reported income figures through surveys. In 2014, he published the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, focusing on wealth and income inequality in Europe and the US since the 18th century. His main argument is that, when the rate of return to capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g), wealth accumulation and inequality is unavoidable unless compensated with state intervention and, particularly, extensive wealth taxation. Elena Rollán Martín University of Oxford The last twenty years have seen a notable increase in the public debate and interest over income and wealth inequality. Since the 2007-2008 financial crisis, many disciplines in the social sciences have taken up the mantle of analysing modern inequality––its causes, manifestations and consequences––to the point that it may seem further research on this area is akin to working away at an exhausted mine. I argue that there are still treasures to be discovered; the main one related to the dimension of geography. Although the advent of new technologies seems to have rendered geography irrelevant, place is still a fundamental aspect of our lives. Where we live, where we work, and where we spend our free time determine many of the resources we can access, the people we can meet, and the opportunities we can enjoy. Space can act as a generator of inequality, as when these resources and opportunities are unequally distributed, but also as a mediator of inequality, because different skills and personal attributes will be rewarded or punished differently across geographic locations (1). Indeed, the geographical aspect of inequality is, deservedly, receiving more attention in the existing social sciences literature. On this, I would point to the work done by Chetty et al (2) on the influence of geography in US intergenerational mobility as one of the influential and pioneering pieces of research on this topic. Nevertheless, the research still presents a range of knowledge gaps, and I believe that some truly groundbreaking work will be published in the years to come. Perhaps the most important one is the incorporation of regional perspectives and localised knowledges in geographic research. It is well known that the development of the post-industrial economy has destroyed much of the manufacturing industry structure of high-income countries. Deindustrialization has hollowed out the middle class, as well-paying and stable jobs for low-skilled workers in factories have been substituted for precarious and low-paying roles across the service sector (3). The geographic dimension of this process is well documented, if not necessarily well understood. There is some work being done here (4), which finds important regional differences in opportunities across Europe. We should expect further research on this area in the next few years, exploiting the potential of administrative and granular data (5). Importantly, income inequality is not the only challenge that needs to be considered from a regional geographic perspective. As welfare states have moved towards new policy paradigms for the new economic reality, they have tended to apply social investment strategies, policies that aim to train and prepare the population for a labour market where flexibility, precarity, and high skills are in demand (6). Nevertheless, these strategies falsely presuppose that citizens are able to take advantage of new opportunities––regardless of the structural barriers that often impact those of lower socioeconomic standing There is literature on how these policies tend to benefit middle class people and leave poorer citizens further behind (7). In many cases, this happens because disadvantaged people lack the knowledge of how to access these programmes. The differing configurations of social and cultural capital that people have are also a big factor in how much they can navigate and enjoy these opportunities (2). The literature on the risks and shortcoming of social investment is still emerging and has not reached a consensus. Taking this into account, I argue that the spatial perspective offers a new promising venue of research. If it is not so much the existence of opportunities but the ability to “hear about” them that influences their impact on the lower classes, then a thorough analysis of the networks of contacts and information that residential locations foster is key to understanding the potential for success of these strategies. Indeed, recent studies find that, in the US, the share of high socioeconomic status Facebook friends among individuals with low socioeconomic status is the strongest predictor of upward social mobility (8). The database that the authors constructed for their paper is publicly available (link), and has ZIP code information that hints at the importance of geographic location. These are two areas where a geographic perspective could deepen our understanding of inequality in all its manifestations. As data sources become more easily comparable across and within countries, we might even see a new shift in the literature, one that takes the given of physical space and leverages it to uncover valuable insights. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elena Rollán is a Senior Editor at the Graduate Inequality Review and is currently studying for a MSc in Comparative Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford. REFERENCES (1) Galster, G. & Sharkey, P. (2017). Spatial Foundations of Inequality: A Conceptual Model and Empirical Overview. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 3(2), 1–33. https://doi.org/10.7758/rsf.2017.3.2.01 (2) Chetty, R. et al. (2014) Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4), pp. 1553–1623, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju022 (3) Castells, M. (1976). The Service Economy and Postindustrial Society: a Sociological Critique. International Journal of Health Services, 6(4), 595–607. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45120089 (3) Castells, M. (1976). The Service Economy and Postindustrial Society: a Sociological Critique. International Journal of Health Services, 6(4), 595–607. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45120089 (4) Granström, O., & Engzell, P. (2023). The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in Europe. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/gzwha (5) Chapelle, G., Domenech Arumi, G. and Gobbi P. (2023). Housing, neighbourhoods and inequality. In: Zimmermann, K.F. (eds) Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_424-1 (6) Bonoli, G. (2007). Time Matters: Postindustrialization, New Social Risks, and Welfare State Adaptation in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Comparative Political Studies, 40(5), 495-520. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414005285755 (7) Cantillon, B., & Van Lancker, W. (2013). Three Shortcomings of the Social Investment Perspective. Social Policy and Society, 12(4), pp. 553-564. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746413000080 (8) Chetty, R. et al (2022). Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility. Nature 608, 108–121 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04996-4 |
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