Abstract
Is it possible to provide a home away from homelessness? Anne Roschelle’s ethnographic account of homeless families in San Francisco during the mid-1990s who are Struggling in the Land of Plenty reveals the sad truth: only momentarily. Although these families long for a place they can call their own, their stories demonstrate the ways in which wider social forces such as housing, employment policies, welfare reform, and community violence all work to quash their ambitions. Poignant and provocative, Roschelle’s analysis reveals that for women, whose accounts are focal in this book, the experience of homelessness is in many cases launched and perpetuated by insurmountable inequalities in gender, race, and class.
Roschelle, a feminist ethnographer and anti-racist activist, conducts her research in conjunction with her work at Home Away, an organization dedicated to providing broad-based assistance to homeless families. The accounts she presents, offered with integrity and grace, are frequently delivered from the temporary places where homeless mothers and families await their next move. Roschelle’s detailed analysis gives voice to otherwise hidden elements of the homeless experience, elements that reveal its complexity and help us to understand its sometimes chronic nature. As we listen to homeless mothers convey the rationality of their seemingly irrational choices, we come to understand the difficult decisions they sometimes must make for the sake of their families.
Indeed, there is very little stability in the lives of the many struggling women, children, and occasional fathers who speak in this monograph. The story of homelessness Roschelle exposes is peppered with the ever-present tension between pervasive uncertainty and the drive for permanence. Macroeconomic changes that provoked the problem of homelessness laid out in chapter one are contrasted in chapter two with interpersonal tensions and violence within the home. Here, we witness the degradation, the pain of interpersonal violence that turns home into hell for many of Roschelle’s female subjects. With no place left to turn, these women land on the street and on welfare (chapter three) where bureaucratic agency rules that are seemingly in the same state of flux as their personal lives often rob them of whatever self-esteem they have left. In the fourth and fifth chapters, we witness the erosion of kinship networks that once provided females with opportunities for both self-respect and empowerment. Thus, the oppression of homeless women becomes as much cultural as it is economic. Their prospects for gaining status through kinship and support are as limited as the chance to earn a living wage.
While Roschelle takes us far in these early chapters, it is her final two chapters that offer the most vivid portrayal of the human costs of homelessness for these women. Here, we are privy to children and families discussing their coping and survival strategies among themselves. If there is a criticism of this book, it is the author’s failure to include more of these exchanges, for it is in these moments when the author briefly steps aside, that we confront the most challenging realities of homeless life. When 15-year-old Rebecca and her 17-year-old brother Brian, forced out of their home by a fire, reminisce about life before and after the fire, we witness the intensity of human emotions that policy-level debates often mask. Likewise, through stories like those shared by Tiffany and Pamela, two homeless mothers who find friendship for an all too brief period, we are able to empathize with the victims of a welfare system that privileges rules over relationships.
Roschelle’s account of the experiences of these homeless women demonstrates that they are not alone in their journey to find a safe place. Instead, their path is more often defined by the social structure and the agency of powerful others. Ediliana, a homeless teenager, expresses the helplessness that this ever-present sense of disempowerment can bring: “It was our city first” (p. 138). Her comment reveals the sad truth that welfare workers and those who gentrify formerly low-income neighborhoods can often have a greater impact on the fates of homeless women and children than any agency they themselves can exert.
This book would fit nicely in course on social stratification or gender as it vividly portrays both the structural and interpersonal disempowerment that can render women homeless. At the same time, the accounts presented here remind us that the hopes and dreams of homeless families are not all that dissimilar from our own. In conclusion, Roschelle takes us out of the 1990s, back into present-day San Francisco where “supergentrifiers” are in the midst of displacing those who forced out the families she has studied. As the stark inequalities that prompted her research have only worsened, we are left wondering whether there will be any space left, perhaps somewhere beyond the margins, where these homeless women and children will ultimately be pushed.