Abstract
In Struggling in the Land of Plenty, Roschelle effectively situates individual experiences of poverty among families affected by homelessness within larger systems. These include social, political, and historical structures and American ideals like work and self-sufficiency. While it is well known that homelessness has plagued the United States since the 1980s, Roschelle’s book provides an insightful narrative that helps us to better understand what was happening in 1990s in San Francisco and other urban centers across America. This decade was a time of major shifts including soaring housing costs, erosion to affordable housing stocks and rent control, gutting of public funding for vouchers, welfare reform, the dot-com boom’s influx of entrepreneurs, mostly young white men, and gentrification efforts in San Francisco. This book illustrates these large structural shifts with the help of some voices of disenfranchised individuals, those who are often silenced and invisible to society.
Roschelle’s work offers her research in a time capsule, effectively looking at a vital point in social welfare history, begging the question, “Where are they now?” As we approach the 25th anniversary of welfare reform, poverty and homelessness are still major social problems. In 2018, over 38 million people were deemed to be living in poverty. On any given night in 2019, over 560,000 were experiencing homelessness. When President Clinton declared that reform would end welfare as we know it, social workers everywhere worried about those at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum. Roschelle posits that the goals of welfare reform were to eliminate welfare dependency, promote heterosexual marriage, and get poor women into the workforce. She argues that these were implicitly achieved through punishment. She writes, “Women were being systematically expunged from the welfare rolls for minor infractions, compounding the violence in their lives” (p. 60). While this policy successfully reduced the rolls, Roschelle’s work adroitly shows that the poorest in society disappeared from public services and continued to suffer in ways both unseen and unknown to the historical record.
Roschelle’s ethnographic method allows for a unique exploration of individual experiences and impacts of policies and events. Roschelle details support (or the lack thereof) from homeless services and poverty policy initiatives that have explicit goals to help individuals. The author identifies poverty and homelessness as socially stratified problems with solutions affecting groups overrepresented by race, class, and/or gender. For example, the author notes that poverty disproportionately affects African American and Latina women; furthermore, “90% of welfare recipients are single mothers, and half with children under 6 years old” (p. 56). While the explicit goal is to help people experiencing poverty, the book draws attention to the implicit racialized anti-welfare agenda. Although institutions and policies name explicit goals, they often include implicit agendas that risk marginalizing vulnerable populations and causing ambivalence around seeking support.
The book shows how the erosion of familial supports, historically the result of cultural and economic survival practices among African American and Latino/a families, became unavailable due to protracted economic disenfranchisement. Impoverished families were left to turn to the government for support families previously provided within kinship circles. As the author notes, while homeless services met vital needs, they were unable to fill the void left by eroding familial support. In this book, Roschelle brings to light the dissonance felt by those impacted by systems of care who often described a sense that services were also meant to punish and control them.
Roschelle’s final chapter focuses on the most vulnerable among homeless families: the children. The narratives in this research support what we know about adverse childhood experiences; chronically homeless children with experiences of trauma and abuse are at the greatest risk of lifelong problems. Roschelle states, “…[T]heir lives are constrained by their social structural location and a society unwilling to eradicate the causes of their oppression” (p. 153). In total, this book effectively links structural oppression from 25 years ago to a lost generation of homeless kids. Given the structural violence afflicting historically oppressed populations, including women, black men, immigrants, indigenous people, and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer + community, we need more researchers shining a spotlight on the ways systems oppress and how this is felt in individuals’ daily lives.
