How Homelessness Does Not Become a Housing Problem

Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman

This chapter explores how, if at all, housing and homelessness advocates made claims about both homelessness and housing problems together. Many advocates make fleeting claims about homelessness or homeless people. Yet they do not talk much about homelessness as a housing problem, even though it may seem like the most urgent one. Here is where investigating discursive fields and style can help. The chapter compares Tenants of South Los Angeles and Housing Justice coalition members' claims about homelessness with those of professional-led volunteer efforts organized to address homelessness as a problem in itself. The evidence suggests that in Los Angeles, cultural conditions conspired to make homelessness a marginal topic across different quarters of the housing advocacy world. And homeless service workers talked little, if at all, about affordable housing as a public issue.

Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman

This chapter evaluates how the close juxtaposition of civic and noncivic in hybrid civic action provides better ways to discern whether or not, and how, nonprofits express the will of people in their immediate locale, and whether or not they pose an effective alternative to governmental action, as some commentators argue. All that should help clarify how civic action really works. The chapter focuses mostly on a locally prominent and successful, nonprofit affordable housing developer, Housing Solutions for Los Angeles (HSLA). It then compares HSLA briefly with efforts by a Tenants of South Los Angeles (ISLA) committee to administer the housing provisions of the community benefits agreement (CBA) that ISLA's campaign won from the Manchester apartments developer. This was a different kind of hybrid. ISLA's affordable housing work for the community ultimately was both financed and constrained by a big, for-profit real estate developer — the Manchester property owner.


Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman

This chapter looks at scenes from the two main coalitions (Housing Justice and Tenants of South Los Angeles) to show just how different their campaigns were and why that matters, even though both fought for affordable housing. Accomplishments make sense only inside strategic arcs; scene style shapes the strategic choices advocates make. Scene style inflects the meaning of particular strategies and goals as well as winning itself. The chapter presents two trajectories of collective problem-solving that unfold on varying timelines, toward tentative and evolving goals. The two coalitions and their trajectories reveal different trade-offs that go with each, differently styled line of action. None of this is to imply that goals and outcomes themselves do not matter. In fact, accumulating evidence shows that different styles do shape outcomes that matter to advocates and the scholars who study them. There is much more to find out about how style contributes to outcomes as scholars usually treat them. The point is that one learns valuable and practical things when one understands particular outcomes in the context of strategic arcs that make those outcomes more, or less, meaningful to advocates and their constituencies.


2005 ◽  
Vol 95 (4) ◽  
pp. 668-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
LaVonna Blair Lewis ◽  
David C. Sloane ◽  
Lori Miller Nascimento ◽  
Allison L. Diamant ◽  
Joyce Jones Guinyard ◽  
...  

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 605-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shamika Ossey ◽  
Sharon Sylvers ◽  
Sona Oksuzyan ◽  
Lisa V Smith ◽  
Douglas Frye ◽  
...  

AbstractThe Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) concept was initially developed for adult members of the community to help prepare for disasters and minimize damage when disasters occur. CERTs also served as a tool for building community capacity and self-sufficiency by supporting a diverse group of people working together in dealing with challenges affecting their communities. The novel approach to CERTs described here sought to involve high-risk youth from low-socioeconomic status communities in CERTs and first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training to help them build ties with communities, stay off the streets, and become leaders in the community. It also helped to provide different perspectives on life, while building more resilient communities better prepared to minimize damage when a disaster strikes. After the successful launch of the first high-risk teen CERT cohort in Watts (27 CERT-trained and 14 first aid/CPR-trained), the project was expanded to other community groups and organizations. Seven additional cohorts underwent CERT and first aid/CPR training in 2013 through 2014. This initiative increased CERT visibility within South Los Angeles. New partnerships were developed between governmental, nongovernmental, and community-based organizations and groups. This model can be used to expand CERT programs to other communities and organizations by involving high-risk teens or other high-risk groups in CERT training. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2017;11:605–609)


Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman

This book renews the tradition of inquiry into collective, social problem-solving. The book follows grassroots activists, nonprofit organization staff, and community service volunteers in three coalitions and twelve organizations in Los Angeles as they campaign for affordable housing, develop new housing, or address homelessness. The book shows that to understand how social advocates build their campaigns, craft claims, and choose goals, we need to move beyond well-established thinking about what is strategic. The book presents a pragmatist-inspired sociological framework that illuminates core tasks of social problem-solving by grassroots and professional advocates alike. It reveals that advocates' distinct styles of collective action produce different understandings of what is strategic, and generate different dilemmas for advocates because each style accommodates varying social and institutional pressures. We see, too, how patterns of interaction create a cultural filter that welcomes some claims about housing problems while subordinating or delegitimating others. These cultural patterns help solve conceptual and practical puzzles, such as why coalitions fragment when members agree on many things, and what makes advocacy campaigns separate housing from homelessness or affordability from environmental sustainability. The book concludes by turning this action-centered framework toward improving dialogue between social advocates and researchers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 586-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise D. Payán ◽  
David C. Sloane ◽  
Jacqueline Illum ◽  
Roberto B. Vargas ◽  
Donzella Lee ◽  
...  

This study is a process evaluation of a clinical–community partnership that implemented evidence-based interventions in clinical safety net settings. Adoption and implementation of evidence-based interventions in these settings can help reduce health disparities by improving the quality of clinical preventive services in health care settings with underserved populations. A clinical–community partnership model is a possible avenue to catalyze adoption and implementation of interventions amid organizational barriers to change. Three Federally Qualified Health Centers in South Los Angeles participated in a partnership led by a local community-based organization (CBO) to implement hypertension interventions. Qualitative research methods were used to evaluate intervention selection and implementation processes between January 2014 and June 2015. Data collection tools included a key participant interview guide, health care provider interview guide, and protocol for taking meeting minutes. This case study demonstrates how a CBO acted as an external facilitator and employed a collaborative partnership model to catalyze implementation of evidence-based interventions in safety net settings. The study phases observed included initiation, planning, and implementation. Three emergent categories of organizational facilitators and barriers were identified (personnel capacity, professional development capacity, and technological capacity). Key participants and health care providers expressed a high level of satisfaction with the collaborative and the interventions, respectively. The CBO’s role as a facilitator and catalyst is a replicable model to promote intervention adoption and implementation in safety net settings. Key lessons learned are provided for researchers and practitioners interested in partnering with Federally Qualified Health Centers to implement health promotion interventions.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valesca Lima

This paper explores the responses to the housing crisis in Dublin, Ireland, by analysing recent housing policies promoted to prevent family homelessness. I argue that private rental market subsides have played an increasing role in the provision of social housing in Ireland. Instead of policies that facilitate the construction of affordable housing or the direct construction of social housing, current housing policies have addressed the social housing crisis by encouraging and relying excessively on the private market to deliver housing. The housing crisis has challenged governments to increase the social housing supply, but the implementation of a larger plan to deliver social housing has not been effective, as is evidenced by the rapid decline of both private and social housing supply and the increasing number of homeless people in Dublin.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Shannon ◽  
Christina Hood

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