Regulating Space and Time
Regulating Space and Time
The Disciplining of Latina and Black Sheltered-Homeless Women in NYC
In 2019, an average of 62,590 people slept in New York City homeless shelters, the majority who are Black and Latinx. Women with children make up three-quarters of the city’s shelter-homeless population. Today’s homeless crisis is the largest since the Great Depression. While New York City is one of three places that mandates legal right to shelter, the average person lives in a shelter for seventeen months. This paper explores the punitive rules that monitor and punish families living in homeless shelters. This paper frames the discussion of contemporary homelessness within the realm of social regulation, policing, and surveillance, connecting shelter-homeless experiences to structural inequalities and legal and extralegal forms of violence experienced by Black and Latinx populations. This paper is informed by in-depth interviews with women who were either currently living in the shelter or had formerly lived in a shelter for at least a year during the summers of 2017 and 2018. I argue that the state’s management of people navigating through the shelter does not guarantee “permanent” housing but wastes time and humiliates and infantilizes individuals into accepting inhumane conditions, long-term confinement, and state-dependency, while reinforcing gendered and ethnoracial hierarchies.
Keywords: homeless, shelter, New York City, social regulation, policing
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