Assistant Professor in Urban Studies
Urban Studies, Eugene Lang College & City Area of Studies, Bachelor’s Program, NSGS

Considered one of the most comprehensive and clearly written analyses of urban homelessness of its time, Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City continues to be as relevant and persuasive today as it was back in the early nineties. Wonderfully written, this interdisciplinary book is a must read for anyone interested in poverty and homelessness.

I spent 1993 as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Southern California, where the authors, professors Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear, taught in the Geography department. They had just concluded a multi-year research project on urban homelessness that became the basis for the book. Michael Dear eventually became my academic advisor, supervised my M.A. thesis research, and taught me much of what I know about homelessness.

The book was an eye-opening experience. I rarely encountered an academic text that explained a complex social problem in such a coherent and understandable fashion. The book provides a concise narrative of urban homelessness in Los Angeles by approaching the problem from multiple angles. From a top-down perspective, the authors first deconstruct the broader structural processes that determine homelessness and subsequently explain these processes with substantial empirical evidence.  Part two focuses on local political and community responses. The third section examines lives without a home, the spatiality of homeless people’s lives, their survival strategies, and their social networks from the perspective of homeless people with particular focus on homeless women. In “The Truths about Homelessness,” the authors reveal the complexity of the problem and the institutional and policy failures, while reminding the reader of the tremendous strength, resilience, and courage homeless people have.

What makes Malign Neglect such a remarkable and important text is its ongoing relevance. The root causes of urban homelessness that Wolch and Dear proposed in 1993 continue to affect the living conditions of many impoverished Americans and adversely affect homeless people’s lives and life chances:
•    Postfordist economic restructuring still facilitates income polarization and occupational segregation along race and gender lines. Income disparities increased across U.S. cities leaving homeless people few job opportunities that provide living wages. Homeless people, even those who exit, remain entrapped in chronic poverty.
•    Demographic changes including rise of single households and single parent households continued to proliferate increasing the demand for affordable housing units for such groups.
•    Local housing markets, especially affordable units, have become sparse and inaccessible as rental prices have soared and supply diminished in any U.S. city. To this day, we lack approximately 1 million affordable housing units nationwide.
•    Welfare state restructuring – the dismantling, devolution, and privatization of the welfare state – continued with Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform. By eliminating entitlements and by imposing time limits and strict work requirements, the government contributed to increased homelessness among single parent households. Such households inevitably depend on the privatized homeless service sector in service dependent ghettos with increasingly less public support.

While providing a sound structural analysis, the study’s emphasis on scale and agency also make homelessness approachable and personal. The authors depict homeless people as rational actors who live under extremely trying circumstances. Their ethnographic insights reveal the complexity of homelessness and the individually different experiences that make it so difficult to solve the problems. It is the sum of its parts that allows the reader to solve the “puzzle” of urban homelessness and its structural, individual, and institutional components.

Malign Neglect contains a reverberating critique of federal policy and local welfare state implementation. Under-funded and disorganized, the local welfare state fails to provide even basic coverage. In its place emerged a local ‘shadow state’ that is spatially contained in the most impoverished and disenfranchised communities. Such ‘service ghettos’ form in large part because more affluent, homogeneous and white communities use their power to prevent homeless people and their service facilities from locating in ‘their’ backyards. Wolch and Dear reveal the “poverty of public policy” and the power dynamics of homelessness and thus the structural and institutional forces used to displace, exclude, and criminalize the homeless in the name of globalized business interests and local protectionism. 

Malign Neglect has affected my understanding of homelessness, my approach to urban studies and social problems, and my own academic career in profound ways. It shaped my theoretical understanding of urban homelessness as the complex interplay of structures, institutions, and individual agents over time and urban space. It influenced my approach to urban studies as an interdisciplinary field of study relying on deconstruction to analyze urban problems in similar fashion as Malign Neglect did. The book and its empirical basis provided me with the background information for a comparison to original ethnographic research in Berlin, Germany—and thus my current research on policy impacts on homeless people’s life chances.

I use chapters from the book in my classes. The introductory chapter, "Explaining Homelessness" shows students how to deconstruct a social problem and isolate the economic, social, and political processes affecting homeless people’s lives and life chances. I use "Life without a Home" (Chapter 9) to introduce qualitative insights that illustrate homeless people’s strength and ingenuity under adverse conditions. Given that much remains to be understood about urban homelessness, I will continue to conduct research on and teaching about homelessness with Malign Neglect as an important intellectual point of departure.

•    NSOC 3786 Engaging Homelessness: Civic Engagement and Activism in the City (online, Fall 2008)
•    LURB 3003 Urban Homelessness: Power Space and Time (Fall, 2005, Fall 2007)
•    LURB 3003 Engaging Homelessness: Service Learning (Fall 2007)
•    NSOC 3786 Homelessness and Homeless Policy (Spring 2006, Spring 2007)
•    LURB 1026 Urban Problems, Urban Actions: First Year Advising Seminar (Fall 2007)
•    NSOC 3670 Urban Spaces (Fall 2006, Fall 2008 online)