Hustling,Hassling,and Performing Compliance: Waiting for Homeless Housing in Los Angeles

Abstract

This article examines how people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles navigate prolonged waiting for permanent housing within a highly constrained and opaque service system. Drawing on ethnographic research, I show that enrollment in housing waiting pools often signals formal inclusion but rarely results in housing, producing instead varied strategies of waiting rather than reliable pathways to placement. Participants respond to this uncertainty through practices such as bypassing queues, hustling staff, and performing compliance with service requirements—strategies shaped by unequal resources and prior exposure to homelessness services. Rather than determining housing outcomes, these practices shape how clients become legible to street-level bureaucrats and influence staff perceptions and patterns of engagement under conditions of scarcity. By situating waiting as a relational and administrative process, this article contributes an analytic framework for understanding how urban service systems reproduce inequality through the management of time.

Studies of the homeless service industry concur that waiting is an integral part of the journey from homelessness to permanent housing or, in many cases, part of the churning cycle from street to shelter (Martínez 2021; Osborne 2019; Willse [2015] 2016). Although a varied and often extensive array of services seek to resolve homelessness, waiting lists for permanent housing are often stagnant, with demand for opportunities far exceeding supply (Mayberry 2016; Murphy 2022). Scholarship conceptualizes waiting as a process that can be active or passive and productive or unproductive and shows how individuals navigate, endure, or leverage extended delays. This work demonstrates that even seemingly unproductive or passive waiting can carry social and strategic significance (Auyero 2012; Willse [2015] 2016). Consistent with frameworks of administrative burden (Herd and Moynihan 2022), waiting in homeless services imposes procedural and cognitive costs that are not incidental but deliberately structured through policy and bureaucratic design.

Waiting is not merely temporal delay; it is enacted within institutional constraints and shaped by interaction, power dynamics, and site-specific meaning-making. Moreover, the strategies that participants adopt shape how they are interpreted and categorized by staff, influencing access, engagement, and opportunities available. Homelessness services operate under street-level bureaucracies, in which frontline staff implement policies within resource constraints (Lipsky 1980; Martínez 2021; Murphy 2022). Staff navigate institutional priorities, rationed access, and eligibility rules, all shaping the timing and availability of support for participants. Responses to service expectations are thus coproduced with staff and shaped by bureaucratic rules, frontline discretion, and participants’ prior experiences and material resources (Carr 2011; Marvasti 1998; Mik-Meyer and Silverman 2019). Within this context, participants must perform contradictory roles, appearing both active and compliant and motivated yet deferential to sustain legitimacy in the eyes of staff and systems. In this view, waiting is both lived and enacted within institutional constraints, emphasizing its relational and context-dependent nature. Despite these insights, we still know relatively little about the everyday experience of waiting for permanent housing.

To explore unhoused service users’ responses to waiting for housing, I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork at a Los Angeles homeless access center to examine how service users navigate extended waiting times for permanent housing. I focus on the strategies participants adopt to manage waiting, ranging from compliance and performative engagement to hustling, hassling, and bypassing. These strategies reflect participants’ accumulated knowledge of navigating services, their material and social resources, and prior experiences with social welfare programs, highlighting the relational and interpretive dimensions of waiting beyond immediate housing outcomes. These practices are also deeply embedded in power dynamics and institutional contingencies, where the ability to wait productively can shape staff perceptions of participants and participants’ patterns of engagement. I show how even participants who engage actively can be rendered passive by staff interpretations and how those whose waiting is perceived as inactive may face consequences.

These findings contribute to scholarship that conceptualizes waiting in institutional settings not as a passive or empty interval but as an active social process. In a context where housing is extremely scarce and placements are rare, the stakes of waiting lie less in immediate housing outcomes and more in how participants are evaluated, categorized, and engaged by frontline staff. Waiting thus becomes a performative and relational labor with meaningful social and emotional significance. Linking variation in waiting strategies to participants’ resources and prior experiences as well as their legibility to staff, this paper extends understanding of system navigation under conditions of scarcity and bureaucratic constraint and highlights processes of evaluation, discretion, and engagement. This demonstrates that the consequences of waiting strategies lie not in altering housing outcomes directly, but in shaping participants’ visibility, credibility, and influence within bureaucratic encounters. These findings have broader implications for urban sociology and the study of welfare and service systems, illustrating how scarcity, bureaucratic discretion, and relational dynamics shape everyday experiences across institutional contexts.

Waiting as Structure and Governance

Conceptual study of waiting has attended to topics of power, burden, and agency. Enmeshed with power dynamics, waiting is understood as socially stratified, affecting those in lower social strata more because they are unable to access, by purchase or privilege, alternative services (Schwartz 1974; Seefeldt 2017). Waiting is shaped by distinct structures of waiting, including administrative protocols (e.g., “first come, first served”), the authority of gatekeepers, and cultural norms that govern how waiting is performed and interpreted (Price 2021). Failure to understand or navigate these structures can lead to extended delays. As Schwartz (1974) notes, waiting becomes most frustrating when individuals perceive their time as being wasted, especially in the absence of clear explanations or time estimates. “Wait utilization” describes the possibility of engaging in intentional action while waiting, such as working while waiting in line (Price 2021). However, unhoused individuals often lack meaningful ways to “do” waiting. Instead, they are left without information or recourse, caught in a temporal limbo that undermines both action and understanding.

Scholarship typically attends to waiting as an active process, attending to the cases of individuals standing in line or repeatedly visiting government offices and the real-time interactions and in-person waiting involved in these undertakings (e.g., Goodsell 1984; Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald 2016). This interpretation does not fully capture the protracted nature of waiting for homeless services, which typically involves being placed in a waiting pool where delays are diffuse, opaque, and often indefinite. I build on this gap by examining how the dynamic allocation systems employed in homeless housing shape responses to extended waiting.

Across public systems, waiting serves as a deterrent to service participation altogether; in healthcare, waiting lists can function as a rationing mechanism, dissuading individuals from seeking assistance (Goddard and Tavakoli 2008). In the case of homeless bureaucracy, complex and illegible information and procedures effectively filter out those who struggle to meet the demands of services (Murphy 2022). Waiting thus serves as a tool of control, imposed disproportionately upon the poor and marginalized (Appadurai 2023; Auyero 2012). Within the administrative burden literature, waiting and procedural complexity are not incidental frictions but deliberate mechanisms through which a policy structures access, participation, and agency (Herd and Moynihan 2019). From this perspective, the prolonged and opaque experiences of waiting in homelessness services reflect the institutional design of these systems, shaping who can navigate them effectively, who is rendered legible to staff, and how scarce resources are allocated.

Following Lipsky (1980) and other scholars of street-level bureaucracy, I treat discretion and rationing as structural features of work performed under chronic resource constraints. While scholarship has situated street-level practice within layered organizational zones and pressures (DeVerteuil, Marr, and Kiener 2022) and considered whether workers are rule-driven or guided by judgments of client worth (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2000), my concern here is not to adjudicate staff motivations. Rather, I contend that the presence of discretion structures the conditions under which waiting, evaluation, and access unfold. I thus approach street-level bureaucracy as part of the institutional terrain within which participants navigate waiting and access to housing.

Subordination and Resilience

While waiting can enforce compliance, unhoused individuals also engage in practices that reflect resilience within institutional constraints. I view these strategies as forms of negotiated agency—ways in which participants assert control, maintain legitimacy, and navigate institutional pressures even under conditions of scarcity. Previous scholarship has situated responses to waiting along a continuum of subordination and resistance, highlighting ways individuals subvert or negotiate institutional timelines (Borges 2006) or comply with disciplinary expectations (Auyero 2012). In practice, however, responses to waiting often blur this distinction, involving overlapping forms of compliance, resistance, and ambivalence. Katz’s ([2004] 2006) work on resilience and reworking provides a useful lens in this context. Rather than framing resistance solely as oppositional, Katz distinguishes between strategies that sustain life and agency within constraints, defining reworking as practices that incrementally transform, adapt to, or negotiate social and institutional constraints, and resilience as the capacity to maintain well-being and agency under adverse conditions. Drawing on this framework, I view participants’ responses to waiting as forms of reworking and resilience—strategic practices through which they navigate institutional pressures, assert capability, and maintain legitimacy even under scarcity and procedural complexity.

Waiting as Social Practice

Accordingly, I approach responses to waiting, recognizing that acts of compliance, adaptation, and resistance are contextually situated within the systems that structure housing allocation and access. Rather than treating waiting as inherently subordinating or resistant, I explore how its meaning emerges through social and institutional interpretations within the homeless response system (HRS). Structural and procedural aspects of the HRS shape individuals’ capacity to act (Jacobsen, Karlsen, and Khosravi [2020] 2021), prompting strategies to manage uncertainty and scarcity. Such strategies range from subtle and often invisible forms of navigation that unfold within constrained institutional environments (Khosravi 2014; Simone 2004) to more active “hustle” practices, through which individuals assert agency and negotiate delays (Thieme, Ference, and Stapele 2021). Even in more passive forms, waiting may indicate a latent or deferred agency, as individuals engage in subtle acts that preserve their capacity to act when circumstances permit (Brun 2015). Waiting is thus a lived, embodied experience where activity and inaction coexist and, crucially, temporal pace does not straightforwardly map onto agency (Bissell 2007).

Expectations of homeless service participants further complicate waiting. Shelter residents must demonstrate readiness for bureaucratic rituals or workforce training while waiting for scarce housing (Martínez 2021; Stuart 2016; Willse [2015] 2016). Participants engage in “client work”, performing narrative and character work to render themselves “service-worthy”, often adopting recognizable tropes of need, vulnerability, or reform (Carr 2011; Gowan 2010; Marvasti 2002; Mik-Meyer and Villardsen 2012; Spencer 1994). These competing demands render waiting an enactment of contradictory citizenship ideals: to wait quietly but not idly, to be active but not demanding, and to appear committed without appearing entitled. Staff play an active role in these encounters, collaborating with, challenging, or dismissing participant presentations according to institutional logics (Marvasti 2002). Homeless service encounters thus become interpretive sites (Gubrium 2023) where both participants and staff negotiate who participants are, what they deserve, and how they should behave.

Waiting, then, is not merely a logistical or procedural undertaking; it is actively produced through institutional routines, interpretive decisions, and the contingent application of discretion. While existing research has examined waiting in welfare and homeless services, much of it captures interactions at a single point in time. Following service users over prolonged periods reveals waiting as an interpretive process that structures trajectories and functions as a form of labor: visible enough to signal commitment, yet deferential enough to avoid disruption.

Case and Methods

Extended waiting is a defining feature across contemporary homeless service systems, where housing placements are scarce and individuals remain in allocation systems for long periods of time. With the largest unsheltered homeless population in the U.S., Los Angeles is a distinct case in terms of the scale, visibility, and governance of homelessness. Nevertheless, its bureaucratized, contracted system of care exemplifies wider trends in homeless management across U.S. cities. Services are delivered by more than 140 different agencies holding public contracts, and these contracts are standardized by type, such as Housing Navigation or Case Management, ¹ with participant load, milestones, and service scope laid out in standardized service agreements (Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority [LAHSA] 2024). The Los Angeles case thus highlights the limits of increased resources within a system that prioritizes visibility and administrative accountability. To analyze these dynamics, I draw on ethnographic data from an access center in South Los Angeles, collected between November 2022 and June 2024. Access centers, known elsewhere as resource or navigation hubs, serve as single points of entry to homeless services where individuals may be taken on by the managing agency or referred elsewhere. Because they engage participants across service types, stages of homelessness, and residential situations, access centers offer a productive vantage point for examining waiting within homeless response.

A central component of service coordination is enrollment in the Coordinated Entry System (CES), a federally mandated system that allocates housing resources such as vouchers and permanent supportive housing at the local level (Ecker et al. 2022). Enrollment is intended to pair participants with a supporting agency and place them in the housing waiting pool. Those without an agency partner are designated as “access center” participants. Compared to case management or housing navigation, this creates a more arm’s-length relationship, with participants often going weeks or months without agency contact while awaiting a housing match. In Los Angeles, CES eligibility is tied to definitions of homelessness outlined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which includes Category 1 (literal homelessness) and Categories 3 and 4 (youth/families under other federal statutes and survivors of domestic violence). The access center also occasionally served those in Category 2 (imminent risk) through non-CES programs.

LAHSA (2025a, 2025b) reported an average of 322 days from interim housing placement (such as a shelter) to permanent housing and 199 days for unsheltered service users (including access center participants) in the same quarter. During this quarter, 5 percent of unhoused Angelenos residing in interim housing successfully moved on to permanent housing and just 2 percent of those unsheltered. These figures capture different dimensions of system flow—duration and throughput—and together highlight the prolonged and uneven distribution of time within the housing system.

While many scholars and practitioners value the CES for reducing favoritism, centralizing information, and broadening access to scarce housing resources, others argue that enrollment functions less as a pathway to housing than as a mechanism of data extraction and management (Eubanks 2018; Willse [2015] 2016). Eubanks (2018) describes coordinated entry in South LA as “less like finding a date online and more like running an obstacle course” (pp. 84–106), challenging its framing as the “Match.com of homeless services.” In their account, CES is not merely an administrative tool for matching supply and demand but a surveillance infrastructure that sorts and criminalizes the poor.

Field Work and Analysis

To gain access for ethnographic observation, I contacted a range of homeless service agencies identified via the 2021 Housing Inventory Count published by LAHSA. The organization I partnered with offered the greatest connection to infrastructures of homeless management and capacity to support observation. The access center provides a range of access, housing navigation, and case management services to households experiencing homelessness, holding public contracts from LAHSA to deliver these services. The study includes individuals and households enrolled in, or seeking enrollment through, the access center. For the most part, participants self-refer to the access center, and at the beginning of my field work, the agency had a caseload of around 300 participants, although staff explained many of these were inactive files that they did not have the capacity to close out. Most were waiting for CES matches, progress on non-CES matches, or access to case management and housing navigation. To gain access and build rapport with participants, I spent two to three days a week attached to the housing navigation team, totaling over 150 days of participant observation. Most of my fieldwork took place at the access center but also at other service sites, rental properties, street outreach, and city-wide forums, trainings, and meetings—I entered these spaces by shadowing staff, volunteering, or attending publicly. Participant relationships varied: some lasted months or years, others only weeks.

While fieldwork involved sustained engagement with both participants and staff, the analytic focus of this paper is on participants’ responses to prolonged waiting. Homeless service encounters are approached as interpretive sites (Gubrium 2023) in which participants and staff jointly negotiate who participants are, what they deserve, and how they should behave. Staff decision-making unfolds within the structural and procedural constraints characteristic of street-level bureaucracies—fluctuating housing availability, performance metrics, and shifting vulnerability criteria require discretionary interpretation of policy (Lipsky 1980). This framing allows attention to participant strategies while situating them within the institutional conditions that shape frontline encounters.

My analysis draws on both extended and brief encounters, though I generally gathered richer and lengthier insights from those I was able to spend more time with. While I initially conducted some semistructured interviews with participants (n=18), I came to prioritize informal conversations; spontaneous, unrecorded dialogue arising in the course of everyday fieldwork interactions (Swain and King 2022). This choice reflects ethnographic traditions that prioritize immersion, trust-building, and attentiveness to situated meaning over formal elicitation (Behar 1996). It also accounts for specific dynamics within the context of this research; where participants are embedded in high-stakes bureaucratic systems, structured interviewing and recording can create barriers to open dialogue or reproduce dynamics of surveillance (Desmond 2016). Observational data helped identify emerging patterns in how participants responded to waiting, forming the basis for the strategies outlined below. Building on this, informal conversations and semistructured interviews provided opportunities for participants to articulate their experiences in their own terms.

With a staff ranging from 6 to 15 during my fieldwork, the agency lacked the capacity of larger homeless service organizations. Although it had a board on paper, the CEO largely set the vision and managed day-to-day operations, and the agency’s mission had shifted across participant groups over the past decade. A crucial part of its distinctiveness was that it was run by a community-based Black-led nonprofit and located in a neighborhood that in 2014 was 68 percent Latinx and 28 percent Black (Los Angeles County and Department of Public Health 2014). While the center did not track participant demographics, most participants were Black or Latinx, with Black participants overrepresented relative to neighborhood composition. I attribute this partly to the staff’s racial makeup (primarily Black) and partly to limited Spanish-speaking capacity (usually only one staff member). Over several months, staff became increasingly candid with me about race, voicing frustration with the limited respect, support, and funding Black-led agencies received. They criticized the dominance of Housing First models promoted by LAHSA, which they felt disregarded their expertise and failed to address the realities of historically Black, disadvantaged communities. Staff often argued that rehabilitation-oriented programs were essential in contexts of intergenerational poverty and welfare dependency but that funding tied to Housing First and Harm Reduction prevented them from pursuing alternatives.

When I entered the field, I worried that aligning with staff would preclude building trust with participants. This concern proved less significant than expected, partly because my outsider status was obvious: I was the only non-Hispanic White person among staff, and my British accent marked me as foreign. Participants perceived me as an outsider, which seemed to foster openness, and those who engaged often explained their experiences at length, assuming I knew little about the housing process, homelessness in LA, or the United States more broadly. This gave them a sense of authority in our conversations. Staff, meanwhile, treated my foreignness as a reasonable explanation for gaps in understanding and took my research role as a sign I was receptive to their perspectives. Ultimately, I occupied a staff-adjacent position that enabled me to observe how bureaucratic and interpersonal dynamics shaped service provision, from staff decision-making to participant strategies and administrative hurdles affecting housing outcomes.

I spent around 800 hours conducting participant observation at the access center or off-site with participants or staff, and during this time, I participated across all aspects of service enrollment and housing placement: enrolling participants, working with them in document gathering, completing assessments and surveys, securing match opportunities, arranging property viewings, accompanying participants to meetings, and completing housing applications. To ensure informed consent, I communicated my position as a researcher and made information sheets available for participants and staff. To protect the identity of participants, names have been replaced with pseudonyms.

Throughout my time in the field, I took jottings when possible and wrote more detailed field notes on breaks or at the end of the day. Analysis occurred concurrently with data collection, allowing early observations to inform subsequent lines of inquiry (Burawoy 1998). My analytical process was grounded in an inductive, iterative approach characteristic of ethnographic research (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011). Rather than applying a predetermined coding framework, I engaged in repeated readings of field notes, interview data, and other materials over time. Throughout this process, I wrote analytic memos to track emerging insights, patterns, and tensions in the data. As patterns of response around participants’ interactions with and orientations toward waiting emerged, I iteratively compared these accounts and refined a set of four analytical categories that captured the most salient and recurrent approaches. Below, I outline these four approaches as the key findings of the study and then discuss their implications.

Responses to Waiting

Matching to a permanent housing placement is governed by the CES, which is widely framed as comprising four stages: access, enrollment, prioritization, and housing. Securing housing depends not only on receiving a formal match but also on staff assistance in navigating the requirements of each stage. At any given time, participants may be waiting for a formal match, for support from staff, or for a combination of both. Progress toward housing, therefore, relies on staff having the time, capacity, and willingness to guide participants through specific steps, making waiting for assistance and waiting for housing outcomes mutually constitutive rather than easily separable.

In Los Angeles, the CES operates as a weighted prioritization system; following parameters set by HUD and implemented locally by the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, the assessment process produces a vulnerability score that accounts for factors such as chronic homelessness, disability, and veteran status. In principle, this mechanism is designed to ensure that the most vulnerable are served first. In practice, I found that participants often experienced CES as unpredictable and even “lottery-like.” This was because available placements did not always align neatly with their assessed level of need, as housing matches depended not only on scores but also on the timing of one’s assessment, the provider who entered the information, and the availability of a particular housing slot on a given day. For example, someone could be assessed as the highest priority because of domestic violence, but if the only unit available is restricted to veterans, their vulnerability score does not translate into a placement. Because the pool of eligible participants is constantly being reshuffled as new assessments are completed, a person with a lower score might never rise to the top, however long they wait. Several participants with high scores described waiting months or years without a referral, while others with lower scores were matched more quickly because a unit aligning with their needs became available. This tension between the system’s design and its lived experience is central to understanding how people experience waiting in the homeless services bureaucracy.

Analysis identified the four prevalent responses to waiting for housing outlined below: bypassing, hustling, hassling, and performative compliance and explore responses labeled by staff as “passive”. While I cannot provide exact counts for how many times I encountered each type of response to waiting described in the paper, all were observed numerous times and at roughly similar frequencies. Some responses were more aligned with certain participant profiles, which I discuss below. Not necessarily mutually exclusive, these responses were also undertaken across participants waiting for shorter periods of weeks and months and those faced with protracted waits spanning years. The cases highlighted below were selected because they best exemplify the particular response to waiting I wish to illustrate, their contexts are communicable, and their experiences can be adequately de-identified.

Bypassing

Homeless service participants do not always endure waiting patiently and instead challenge waiting times or seek to strategically hasten them. An approach commonly used by participants with less experience of social welfare services is bypassing, undertaking to side-step the waiting process altogether. For newer participants, bypassing often reflects a period of shock and disorientation as they confront, often with reluctance or disbelief, that being unhoused or at imminent risk is unlikely to translate into a housing placement. In this context, participants sometimes push back against the premise of waiting altogether, working hard to bypass the waiting list by disputing the accuracy of procedures outlined, seeking an exception, or emphasizing their vulnerability. These responses seek to circumvent waiting for housing.

Anthony, a retired man who had spent most of his life employed in a professional capacity and had limited prior experience with welfare or housing programs, approached the housing process with urgency and high expectations of staff support. After being handed Anthony’s file and asked to help him and his wife find a rental unit before he was evicted from his current apartment, I explained that affordable units or housing vouchers have wait times of one to two years, so we would need to secure a temporary rental in the interim. Nevertheless, when I emailed Anthony lists of rental units to look at, he ignored these and sent numerous emails with links to affordable buildings, asking me to cold-call them. Despite multiple phone conversations and emails explaining that these units were not viable options—especially within a three-week deadline—Anthony persisted. Sometimes, it seemed he did not fully grasp the improbability of what he was asking. But more often, I sensed he did understand and simply refused to accept it. When I explained how unlikely it was that a building, which had just leased its affordable units over the summer, would have immediate openings in December, he countered, again, with insistence that I call them—believing, I think, that my agency credentials might open doors. In many ways, Anthony’s bypassing was a kind of stubborn optimism, shaped by an understanding of how professional systems often work. He assumed that if he could just find the right building or make the right call, he might get a different outcome. And he expected me to act as his advocate, not only helping with logistics but pushing for him. By the time Anthony accepted that none of these efforts would yield housing before his lockout date, there were only seven days left. We began looking for short-term rentals, but it was too late, and upon their lockout, Anthony and his wife began living in their car.

Like Anthony, many participants are reluctant to wait and instead seek to bypass the pool of unhoused Angelenos waiting for housing. Some participants explained that they did not believe they were being provided the right information, while others hoped that good luck and extensive effort on the part of case staff might produce a more immediate housing option. In Anthony’s case, while he certainly seemed to understand what I was telling him, he did not necessarily believe it precluded him from obtaining immediate, affordable housing, and he continued to divert from the offered plan. In many instances, attempts to bypass waiting rest on a level of misunderstanding that can take multiple forms. On one hand, this can be a misunderstanding of the procedures of housing allocation and the availability of units. More frequently, though, as in Anthony’s case, participants understand in principle that these procedures exist but hope that staff will, through some kind of extra effort or favor, achieve some sort of exception.

Hustling and Hassling

A second pair of responses participants use to hasten waiting are hustling and hassling. Among participants who had come to accept they were unlikely to bypass established waiting periods, many nonetheless sought to expedite the process and ensure their case moved as efficiently as possible. Once embedded within this normative timeline, participants wait not only for housing matches, determined by external providers, but also for assistance from agency staff with tasks such as application completion, property searches, document procurement, and service referrals.

Access center participants often described their efforts to “stay on staff’s minds” as a form of hustle—calling frequently for case updates or showing up in person to avoid “getting lost” in a case manager’s overloaded roster. These actions, while neither required nor necessarily encouraged by staff, were common strategies to ensure visibility within a system marked by long, opaque timelines. Service users repeatedly expressed a “need to know” they were still on the waiting list and sought estimated timelines for housing matches—though staff refused to provide them, citing the unpredictability of the process.

Drawing on Thieme’s (2018) work with Kenyan youth, “hustle” can be understood not as illicit or manipulative but as a pragmatic strategy of survival in conditions of urban precarity. It reflects improvisation and persistence amid scarce resources, institutional bottlenecks, and deferred promises. Hustle, in this sense, is not merely about gaining advantage but about staying in motion within a system that otherwise stalls. I met Latoya, a woman in her early 40s living in a recreational vehicle (RV), after a series of phone calls she made to check on her housing case. Staff viewed her as unobjectionable because she did not create conflict or push aggressively but also not urgent, because her quiet compliance and the scarcity of housing opportunities meant her case did not advance on its own. Because she called fairly often, I became familiar with her, and after a few months of speaking on the phone, we arranged an interview at the access center, where she described the layered, often exhausting attempts she had made to find stable housing:

My voucher [application] hasn’t been assigned to anyone. So it’s just there in the ozone somewhere. As far as I know. I’ve called. I call, I call . . . I’m still trying to put in my own stuff, trying to look for other low income housing because I need a space.

Latoya’s hustle extended well beyond a single agency. She recounted a circuit of service sites she had tried—each offering hope and each falling short:

I’ve gone to other places now too. I’ve actually gone to the Downtown Women’s Center twice. They closed me out in June. I signed up in April. I’ve been to another agency and they told me to go somewhere else [. . .] I went all the way to San Pedro ‘cause I wanted the safe parking, but you had to be outta there like 5:45 in the morning. That throws me off for the whole day. And I went through Volunteers of America.

Despite her persistent outreach, Latoya remained unhoused, navigating a patchwork of options with few guarantees. Her story, like those of many others, illustrates how hustle emerges not from a desire to manipulate the system, but from an acute awareness that without continual self-advocacy, one risks being forgotten altogether.

Those who engaged in hustling to accelerate their progress toward housing often demonstrated a nuanced, albeit not totally accurate, understanding of how the allocation system worked. Latoya, for example, described how her low CES score limited her chances of getting matched, stating, “my CES scores suck. It’s like a 2. And to get an updated CES score you’ve gotta be in somebody’s program.” ² Because participant information is shared across agencies, Latoya explained, seeking help from multiple providers could backfire. Some organizations refused to offer services if a person was already enrolled elsewhere. Still, Latoya continued to pursue every available option, both through formal systems and on her own, driven by a need to secure housing as a precondition for healing and stability. Detailing the extensive efforts she had undertaken to seek wider services both via public and private forms of support over three years of homelessness, Latoya recounted waiting overnight outside various agencies, making frequent calls to different service providers, taking proactive efforts to pitch alternative solutions to case staff, and her efforts seeking low-cost private rentals independently. I encountered numerous agency participants who undertook similar efforts frequently, hustling to find alternative options or to hurry the waiting process with the access center specifically. Latoya’s experience illustrates a core tension within the system: while service coordination is designed to streamline access, it often reinforces exclusionary gatekeeping. Her hustle was not an attempt to manipulate the system but a strategy to remain visible and active within it. In a landscape where waiting times stretch indefinitely and progress feels opaque, hustling became a way to push back against the inertia of waiting and reclaim agency in a system that repeatedly stalled.

As an extension of hustling, I outline hassling to reflect a sometimes purposefully antagonistic approach to achieving case progress, where participants use a wider range of means, including soliciting third-party pressure and invoking the sheer irritation of staff. While some participants are seeking to remain on the hustling side of this division, others strategically move over to hassling. Participants explain that they wonder if frustrating staff will move their case forward, and efforts to do so include calling advocates to instill fear in case workers, emailing and calling repeatedly, and trying to speak to more senior staff. On several occasions, staff recounted stories of participants who had called local political figures or the county board to place pressure on them, something that staff indicated did not increase a participant’s progress and rather could lead to resentment and harm participant-staff relationships.

I had spoken to Monica a few times when she visited the office to ask for property listings. She lived in a nearby privately run shelter, where she was deeply unhappy, often recounting pest infestations and a lack of hot water. Because the shelter was not part of the Homeless Management Information System, I had little information about it. One morning, as I manned the public desk, Monica entered visibly frustrated. She approached to follow-up on a prior visit, explaining that the unit listings she had received did not meet her access requirements as a wheelchair user, and asserting that she needed more support securing housing. Desk staff, unfamiliar with her case, asked what kind of help she needed. Monica’s frustration escalated quickly. With a raised voice, she emphasized that she had been on an emergency housing list for two years without resolution.

At that moment, senior staff, who monitored the desk via cameras, sent desk staff a message that Monica was a “difficult client” and warned that we should not necessarily trust what she said. Soon after, a supervisor came out and, while calm, reiterated that the shelter issues Monica raised fell outside the agency’s scope. Monica pushed back, demanding to know who was responsible and shouting “THEY DON’T DO ANYTHING!” in reference to LAHSA and other agencies. Staff eventually offered advocacy contacts—elected officials, mostly—and Monica left with names and numbers in hand. While often understandable as a rational response to bureaucratic delay, hassling does not always produce results; while Monica’s confrontational hassling reinforced her visibility, it could also strain her relationship with the agency. In this case, hassling yielded no tangible resolution, as staff provided her these contact numbers to direct Monica away from the office, not because they considered it a truly productive step for her. While Monica’s frustration was legible, the fractured, limited system offered no clear pathway for redress, and the gap between Monica’s expectations and the agency’s mandate rendered her persistence ineffective.

Hassling poses greater risk to participant-agency relationships than hustling. Highlighting this risk to staff-participant relationships, one participant reported that their case manager had blocked their phone number because they called too much, reflecting, “I wasn’t trying to be unreasonable, but they didn’t call me like they said they would, and I needed to know something was going on.” Thus, hustling can also lead to accusations of hassling, as one might be accused of “pushing too hard,” or being purposefully difficult, something that some participants are acutely aware of.

Performative Compliance

I term the third observed response “performative compliance”; deliberate, visible acts of meeting or exceeding bureaucratic or program expectations, done not simply to fulfill a rule but to signal deservingness and effort. For instance, during an early interaction at the access center, a participant handed me a copy of his ID to place in his file and immediately asked for a receipt. When I asked why, he shrugged and said, “just to prove that I brought it in.” I soon noticed participants regularly asking for written verification that they had visited the office or bringing extensive folders of documents to appointments that did not require them. Participants told me they did this to show they were “on top of it,” to demonstrate commitment to getting housed, and to protect themselves in case the agency lost paperwork or failed to log a visit. Some also described these records as tools they might use to file grievances or escalate issues. These actions reflect participants’ understanding of the fallibility of the system, but their deliberate visibility and participants’ own explanations show that they also serve as strategies to make their effort and reliability legible to gatekeepers and to position oneself as a credible, deserving applicant within an uncertain housing system.

Such performances emerge from deep familiarity with how bureaucracies work and from a desire to reduce the risk of being disqualified, delayed, or overlooked while waiting. They are strategic acts that reflect participants’ understanding that eligibility is not only technical but also interpersonal—shaped by how their efforts are perceived by frontline staff. Performative compliance is therefore not merely instrumental but also relational, oriented toward being seen as deserving by staff and legible to the system’s opaque logics.

This kind of vigilance is taxing; it requires labor not only to comply with program requirements but to appear to be doing so in ways legible to staff. And in some cases, the performance of compliance is even more burdensome. When I met Crystal, she and her daughter had already waited over a year for housing, living first in their car and later with friends. Eventually, she was advised that moving into a shelter might improve their chances of being matched to housing. Although both situations qualified her as homeless, Crystal believed—accurately, at least in some program contexts—that shelter status would move them up the queue. She and her daughter found the shelter deeply distressing, especially for her daughter’s sense of safety, but Crystal explained that she stayed because she understood it would make her appear more urgently in need. This was not a formal requirement but a widely understood, if unofficial, rule of the system: that the most visibly needy get housed first. In this way, Crystal’s reluctant move to the shelter was not just strategic; it was a performance of the kind of homelessness that the system rewards. Her actions both challenged the moral terms of waiting and attempted to navigate them through visible, embodied compliance.

“Passive” Waiting

Although active responses to waiting, such as hassling, risked being interpreted negatively, more restrained responses were equally construed by staff as being overly passive. During my field work, I was invited to join a housing navigation team supporting a new cohort of participants at a nearby shelter. Throughout the first few weeks, staff appeared frustrated that participants had not preemptively begun obtaining required identity documents ahead of their enrollment in housing navigation. One housing navigator (HN) asked a participant, “why have you been waiting to get your documents together?” to which the participant replied, “I thought you were going to help me. I was waiting.” Staff viewed this waiting as inappropriate inaction and expressed concerns about the readiness and commitment of the shelter cohort. I observed that frontline staff’s ability to code waiting as action or inaction is consequential for participants, shaping perceptions of their commitment and deservingness.

The shelter participants were asked to secure a lease for a private rental so that they could enroll in a subsidy program. One participant, Shona, identified a list of units that she was interested in but struggled to secure viewings, and when she did, struggled to access these viewings on public transport. When I observed Shona’s meeting with housing navigation staff a few weeks later, staff were not especially sympathetic to these difficulties, explaining that she would have to keep trying. After the meeting, I asked a team member whether it would really be possible for the shelter cohort to secure private leases independently, to which they replied that participants were “waiting for everything to be done for them”. Shona and I worked together for a few weeks trying to secure viewings, and while we did manage to arrange a couple, she was not successful in applying to any. Shona, like many of the cohort at the shelter, remained in limbo, waiting for some new development in what they were being told to do because the current expectations seemed insurmountable.

Shona’s case highlights how even active efforts while waiting can remain invisible and unrecognized, labeled passive waiting or insufficient. Staff interpretations of participant waiting informed the view that these participants were not trying. Unlike waiting for welfare, where presence is necessary, absence is typically a condition of waiting for housing allocation, and contacting staff can be frowned upon. Yet too much absence can result in criticism from staff as indicative of lacking commitment. Both staff and participants have varied expectations of the extent to which participants should be active in the process of securing housing. One participant reported that while their first homeless service provider “did all the work”, that generally, “people have the misconception that you can walk in and everything will be handed to you, and it’s not like that. They are asking you to be proactive”. Owing to this variation, participants report having a difficult time gauging the expectations of action and engagement across service providers, staff members, and specific scenarios. This struggle has implications for the relative success of participant responses to waiting, as well as consequences for those whose response is viewed as unduly active or passive.

Discussion

Participants confront structural constraints using strategies shaped by personal resources, social support, prior experience, and the contingencies of institutional contexts. To navigate prolonged waiting and seek progress, they adopt approaches that maintain legitimacy, avoid deprioritization, or assert identity. Practices such as hustling, hassling, and performing compliance exemplify active strategies that blend conformity, evasion, and transformation. While prior research emphasizes that proactive participation is necessary for progress—even when primarily performative—my findings show that staff interpretation can render these efforts passive, influencing relationships, case progression, and access to opportunities. Anthony, who had a spouse, senior-level work experience, and housing at the time of referral, was able to email and call frequently, navigate online platforms, and make reasoned requests to bypass waiting. Latoya, living in an RV, relied on hustling and persistent engagement, benefiting from her mobility and relative autonomy. These differences illustrate that strategy selection is shaped by both participant capacity and opportunity structure and that staff interpretations of these strategies mediate participants’ perceived competence or informal prioritization. Crucially, these strategies matter not because they guarantee housing outcomes, but because they shape participants’ legibility to staff and their capacity to navigate institutional contingencies effectively. Even when immediate housing outcomes remain uncertain, participants’ strategies function to maintain eligibility, assert agency, and signal capability to staff—shaping how they are interpreted, categorized, and prioritized within the system.

While individuals in shelters may face less immediate exposure to crisis, shelter residency can also constrain mobility, autonomy, and opportunities for discretionary engagement. Persistence, follow-up, and visible compliance become markers of capability, but the capacity to attend appointments flexibly or visit multiple agencies may be more limited in shelter contexts. Monica, who fell into a category where she was not seen as in immediate need and could easily be deprioritized, engaged in hassling, confronting staff, and advocating aggressively. As highlighted earlier, LAHSA key performance indicators (KPIs) show that those outside of the shelter system move through to permanent housing faster than those within it (308 days from interim housing placement, such as shelter to permanent housing, compared to 199 days for unsheltered service users). While this study does not establish whether or how differences in engagement style directly shape housing outcomes, the alignment between differential capacities to perform waiting and variation in progression timelines shows that time in the system is enacted under unequal conditions.

Staff evaluation and institutional discretion mediate how participants’ strategies translate into perceived capability, engagement opportunities, and informal prioritization, highlighting the coconstitutive nature of waiting and how street-level bureaucratic processes shape both engagement and outcome. Waiting is shaped by multiple institutional factors, including scarcity of affordable units and the shifting definitions and legibility of vulnerability. Waiting Functioning as a diffuse disciplinary technology, waiting produces compliant subjects while filtering out those unable or unwilling to conform to bureaucratic norms. In this sense, waiting is not merely a temporal delay but a social process through which participants’ identities and capacities are evaluated. These dynamics risk reproducing inequality by privileging those who can perform institutional competence, while marginalizing those whose trauma, disability, or mistrust of the state limit their capacity for sustained performative engagement.

Homeless response institutionalizes time as a mechanism of exclusion. Queues promise housing but, through procedural opacity and sustained compliance demands, function as service denial and incremental harm, often leaving participants without resolution. Illegible bureaucratic information filters out those unable to meet service requirements, and even adept participants face limited prospects for housing. Despite these odds, participants expend extraordinary effort to maintain engagement, laboring in a system that withholds stability. Waiting thus functions as a modality of governance. Strategies anchored in survival, compliance, and hope are effective only insofar as institutional interpretation allows. Even when these efforts do not produce immediate housing outcomes, they reveal how participants negotiate institutional pressures, assert agency, and maintain legitimacy within the system. These findings resonate with scholarship on agency under constraint, participantship, and street-level bureaucracy, illustrating the labor of waiting, the fragility of progress, and the contested terrain of agency under systemic constraint. While this study focuses on homeless services, these findings establish that waiting as a relational, socially evaluated, and bureaucratically mediated process may shape engagement, agency, and outcomes in other urban service contexts, such as government assistance or housing programs. Scholars of urban sociology can apply these insights to understand how institutional time structures, discretion, and resource scarcity shape engagement, agency, and outcomes across diverse service settings.

Conclusion

This study examined unhoused service users’ responses to waiting for housing, highlighting waiting not as a neutral delay but a relational and governing practice. While this study included participants across residential contexts and program types, those who disengaged from services entirely were necessarily excluded, limiting conclusions about the experiences of the unhoused outside of engaged participants. Among engaged service users, I find that participants navigate contradictory expectations within a system where staff discretion, institutional priorities, and resource scarcity shape engagement and perceived legitimacy. In this sense, waiting is coconstructed with staff interpretation, revealing mechanisms through which bureaucratic time mediates access, recognition, and exclusion. Participants’ persistence in waiting reflects not just agency but the cultivation of hope—a hope that structures effort, engagement, and self-presentation. Yet this hope can be precarious: it sustains participation in systems that may never deliver, making hope itself a form of labor that is emotionally costly and sometimes misaligned with actual possibility. These findings suggest directions for future research and practice. Operating within a Continuum of Care committed to trauma-informed care, my findings nonetheless suggest that harm in contemporary homeless response occurs, and inheres not only in interpersonal encounters or institutional design, but in its temporal organization. A system meaningfully committed to trauma-informed principles would therefore need to confront how bureaucratic time itself distributes support, recognition, and the possibility of housing. Given the extended waits observed in these systems, future research should also critically examine what such delays imply for claims that Housing First approaches provide timely housing access and how institutional time and discretion continue to shape participant experiences even under “guaranteed” housing models.

Moreover, for many participants, access center enrollment constrained opportunities for housing, yet the choice of this agency reflected the value of trust, proximity, and racially and culturally responsive staff. As municipalities declare efforts to address inequity in homelessness via service delivery, future research should attend to disparities in funding and resources reported by community-based and Black-led agencies and whether and how this shapes participant experiences of waiting. Finally, understanding waiting as both productive and futile requires attention to the distribution of access and likelihood of resolution for those with low priority status whose engagement is unlikely to yield housing. Such inquiry could illuminate the differential impacts of bureaucratic time and inform more equitable, trauma-informed approaches to homeless service delivery and the mediation of waiting times. Beyond homelessness, this relational understanding of waiting provides a lens for examining other urban bureaucracies, from social welfare programs to housing allocation systems, highlighting how institutional time, discretion, and resource scarcity coproduce engagement and outcomes across urban populations.