Entrepreneurial Governance and the Biographical Inertia of Place: Homeless Men’s Life-Course Trajectories into Nashville’s Lafayette District

• In Event: 084 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Paper Session. Extreme Poverty

Abstract

Many poverty scholars have analyzed welfare state restructuring, charting how the war on dependence, the devolution of public authority, and/or the dominance of market-oriented public policies impact homeless Americans. While we know a good deal about the ways in which this restructuring limits homeless individuals’ options for social reintegration, we know very little about how their biographical trajectories into particular places shape their ability to negotiate contemporary reintegration mechanisms. Drawing on ethnographic observation and 56 interviews with unhoused men, the first part of this paper casts light on the prevalent pathways that lead unhoused individuals into the Lafayette district, Nashville’s repository for homeless men. The second section unearths the constraints generated by Nashville’s affordable housing crisis and its atrophied public housing system as well as those generated by a mismatch between welfare delivery and eligible homeless citizens. It reveals how these constraints coalesce into a mutually reinforcing structure that interacts with homeless men’s biographies, setting strict limits to what they can think, hope, and attempt to achieve in their extrication efforts. The local knowledge (un)available in the district constrains homeless habitués’ ability to navigate the complex social welfare bureaucracy, preventing many eligible men from applying for welfare provisions. The Nashville case thus raises important implications for research on homelessness policy, suggesting that understanding its effects requires mapping the variable ways in which it refracts through a given place.

Author

• Damian T. Williams, Concordia University