RETHINKING THE SECOND-GHETTO MODEL AND DISCOVERING THE THIRD

Black urbanists in the 1980s challenged Hirsch's ghettoization framework, a charge led by Joe Trotter, whose development of a proletarianization thesis provided an alternative examination of black urban populations through the exploration of “community formation.”Footnote ¹⁰ Trotter's exploration of black Milwaukee diverged significantly from Hirsch's “ghetto thesis,” and its notions of segregation and race relations, favouring the examination of black resilience in community building, notably through black labour.Footnote ¹¹ A growing number of scholars supported this shift to community formation and away from Hirsch's thesis, such as Lawrence Levine, who, according to Sugrue's account, rejected the term “ghetto” as an invitation to perceive blacks “as passive victims” rather than “actors in their own right.”Footnote ¹² However, this analysis conceptualized the term as a stigmatizing label instead of analysing the notion of the ghetto as an oppressive urban space that did not systematically encourage victimization and discourage black agency.

The reexamination of this debate elicits an important question: can black agency and community formation be analysed within a ghettoization framework? This study posits that both historical frameworks have merit and offers an alternative to the choice of either the ghettoization theory or the community formation thesis, through the examination of black resilience and agency within the context of public-housing tenant advocacy in the second ghetto of Washington, DC during the 1970s and the 1980s. The District's second ghetto will be examined as an oppressive urban space as opposed to a stigmatizing individual label. For example, the lack of affordable housing, inadequate housing maintenance, and insufficient financial housing assistance in public-housing projects of this second ghetto were the driving force behind local public-housing tenant activism. Kimi Gray, a black single mother of five and DC public-housing resident who became head of the National Capital Housing Authority advisory council in the early 1970s and then chair of the board of directors of the Kenilworth Parkside Management Corporation in 1982, confounded expectations about what a woman on welfare could do and contribute to her community. Her role in tenant advocacy through public-housing tenant management will be analysed within the context of the second ghetto, not as a victim but as an agent of resilience and exemplary indigenous leadership.

In terms of more current scholarship, Rhonda Williams has offered a poignant analysis of Hirsch's second-ghetto thesis.Footnote ¹³ She has asserted that “Hirsch convincingly argued that government not only extended spatial inequalities but also institutionalized and fortified systems of racial power through laws, policies, programs, and bureaucratic structures.”Footnote ¹⁴ Williams's essay accurately assessed the significance of Hirsch's historical intervention. Her study also underscored the unevenness of his analysis, which disproportionately focusses on white historical narratives and white power dynamics, while relegating black residents of the second ghetto to the periphery of muted, cameo appearances that sparsely fill spaces created by white men. However, this article posits that, despite its deficiencies, Hirsch's ghetto formation model remains a viable historical framework that can and should be reappropriated by current scholarship to fill its “created spaces” with the experiences of the black bodies that lived within them.Footnote ¹⁵ These spaces are not limited to Hirsch's geographical or temporal specifications, but can be applied to other public-housing outcomes, such as Washingtonian housing projects in the late twentieth century. Additionally, the space created by Hirsch's second-ghetto thesis can not only be “peopled” with black bodies but also used as a tool, not to stigmatize its residents, but to condemn the injustices of segregation, “racial capitalism,” racial subjugation, negligence, and mismanagement perpetrated within its borders.Footnote ¹⁶ In short, the narrative of the second ghetto can be retold from the perspective of communities fighting against these nefarious forces in a place of empowerment. Finally, Hirsch's second-ghetto thesis can be the foundation for the conceptualization of a third ghetto.

The making of the third ghetto in Washington, DC distinguishes itself from Hirsch's first and second through the examination of the hyperghettoization of African American poor neighbourhoods generated from the concentration of increasingly persistent pockets of poverty, structural challenges due to racial subordination, and the politicization of the homeless crisis which forged local and federal homeless policies. In other words, the primary forces driving Washington, DC's third ghetto were structural, spatial, and political. Tragically, by the end of the twentieth century, this new form of street homelessness had become a national crisis.

From New York City to San Francisco, street people could be seen roaming city public spaces in the late 1970s. The consensus among homeless researchers supports the advent of a major shift between the old and new homelessness in the 1960s and the characteristics of these distinct populations. The “old-homeless” population of the 1950s was characterized as white males in their fifties or older, “living in cheap hotels on skid rows.”Footnote ¹⁷ In the late 1970s, a population of homeless people referred to in the now ubiquitous parlance of poverty scholarship as the “new” homeless were reportedly cited in cities across America.Footnote ¹⁸ They were “younger, better educated, increasingly women and families, veterans, and consisting of greater racial minorities than in the past.”Footnote ¹⁹ Kim Hopper dispelled the notion that this visible homelessness was somehow an extraordinary historical phenomenon: “Appearances may have suggested otherwise, but what the country glimpsed on the streets and in the shelters in the 1980s was not some new species of disorder, but the usually hidden face of poverty, ripped from its customary habitat.”Footnote ²⁰

Although African Americans have always “moved through history” having endured some form of homelessness, precious little has been written about these experiences.Footnote ²¹ This paper challenges the historical typifications of homelessness through analysis of the implications of race and inner-city hyperghettoization of African Americans at the end of the twentieth century in Washington, DC.Footnote ²² Current data concerning urban housing precarity of late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries are increasingly drawing the connection between race and homelessness.Footnote ²³ Urban-poverty scholar Forrest Stuart posited a correlation between the disproportionately high African American street homeless population of Los Angeles's skid row to the long-term consequences of racial subordination which has relegated poor blacks to a surplus army of labour.Footnote ²⁴ In terms of housing outcomes, this conceptualization of racial inequality as developed by Roy Brooks argues that due to the “continuing effects of earlier racial subordination,” African Americans exited the Jim Crow era “with a poverty rate for individual and intact families more than three times that of whites,” were “twice as likely as whites to live in rental housing,” and “endure overcrowding in urban housing.”Footnote ²⁵ Kenneth Kusmer, the author of the definitive opus on twentieth-century homelessness, asked, “Why were racial minorities overrepresented among the homeless?”Footnote ²⁶ Beyond the usual litany of causes such as “structural changes in the economy, tightening housing market, the recessionary periods, and stagnating or declining industries,” African American homelessness as well as low-income housing insecurity in America's postwar inner cities invariably led to the challenges of its ghettos.Footnote ²⁷

REVISITING “OLD HOMELESSNESS” IN THE FIRST GHETTO: A HIDDEN CITY

Behind the residences which lined the streets of the District at the end of the nineteenth century as symbols of comfort, respectability, and the beauty of the nation's capital, there was another city, a hidden city, a secret city of the alley dwellers. Although these alley dwellers did not suffer from the transient lifestyle of white, middle-aged homeless men (hobos) traditionally studied in the literature on the “old” homelessness, the level of housing insecurity, deplorable levels of sanitation, and health conditions they endured merit their consideration as a part of homeless historiography and as the city's first ghetto.Footnote ²⁸ Washington, DC was a pedestrian city. Therefore middle-class landowners built small structures with alley access in the vacant rear lots of “the street houses” for unskilled working-class communities, enabling them to be in proximity to their work. Although specific alleys contained an array of migrant populations, notably German and Italian, the second half of the nineteenth century saw extensive growth in its black residential population, where they counted for no less than one-third of the city's inhabitants.Footnote ²⁹ James Borchert, who penned the definitive treatise on American alley dwelling, notes that “by 1897, nearly 70 percent of all inhabited alleys were completely segregated,” and “of the 19,000 reported alley dwellers, 90 percent were African American.”Footnote ³⁰ Borchert argues that although by the last quarter of the nineteenth century Washington, DC “led major American cities in both the percentage and the numerical size of its black population,” before the Great Migration (1915–70) “no city … had a single concentration that encompassed most of the city's blacks” and “Washington's ‘mini-ghettos’ were spread throughout the city.”Footnote ³¹ Borchert also remarks that concurrent with the Great Migration of African Americans was the intensification of white hostility towards them. However, the importance of attitudes towards the alley dwellers before the Great Migration had a significant impact on slum clearance policy and the creation of private-sector housing for the poor.

Poverty research has not sufficiently acknowledged the importance of the nineteenth-century philanthropic housing movement on slum clearance policy and housing construction at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the late nineteenth century, poverty, crime, and disease had created an indelible image of the poor, and public policies of the time did nothing to stave off the increasing concentrations of poverty in the slums of the inner city. However, private organizations such as the Philanthropic Housing Movement of Washington, DC filled the void. Their primary objective was the eradication of the alleys whose inhabitants they viewed as shameful, immoral, and dangerous breeders of disease – the undeserving poor. As Michael B. Katz noted, “housing reformers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries argued that the unsanitary, congested housing of the poor bred immorality, crime, and disease. Slums, they contended, were viruses infecting the moral and physical health of the city districts that surrounded them.”Footnote ³² Conversely, in Washington, DC, philanthropic organizations such as the Washington Sanitary Improvement Company and the Washington Sanitary Housing Company provided a thousand units of low-cost basic housing for “deserving” low-income citizens.Footnote ³³ Elizabeth Hannold argues that the significance of the movement lay in its ability to “to change public attitudes toward the poor, suggesting that they were not always at fault for their poverty and that at least the more industrious of them were deserving of decent housing.”Footnote ³⁴ In fact, philanthropic housers were able to shape the narrative about poverty by informing the public of the hazards of crowding and disease, and the ravages of free-market solutions. Thus “they helped prepare the way for government interventions including slum clearance and public housing.”Footnote ³⁵

As black migratory influx began shaping post-World War I northern cities, and either creating or expanding the ghettos in cities such as Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, the predominantly white residual workforce continued to join the ranks of “hobohemia,” filling the skid rows of America's cities in the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁶ However, in Washington, DC, under pressure from concerned reformers and two First Ladies concerned with “the character of the people,” alley communities, alley life, and the strong kinships of family and social networks built there were systematically dismantled.Footnote ³⁷ Another important contributing factor to alley destruction was the expansion of the automobile industry, which facilitated commuting capabilities for city center employees to live at increasingly further distances from the District's urban core. Additionally, the transformation of land use capabilities to meet the needs of increased business activity also played an important role.Footnote ³⁸ By the 1930s, housing reformers such as John Ihlder, while recognizing “the potential problems associated with displacing the city's poorest black residents from their alley homes,” could not ignore that “the concentration of blacks at the city core was encroaching on nearby white neighborhoods.”Footnote ³⁹ The solution to this conundrum came through the passage of the Alley Dwelling Act of 1934, which created the Alley Dwelling Authority (ADA), the District's first local housing authority. “In the interest of community welfare,” the ADA was invested with such authority as the condemnation of whole blocks of housing and conversion of residences to businesses or community centers. As for the alleys, the ADA set a goal of vacating alley dwellings of all its inhabitants and displacing them in alternative housing by 1 July 1944 – an objective stalled by the priorities of World War II and a housing shortage in the District.Footnote ⁴⁰

Hirsch demonstrates how black postwar northern migration not only fed the first and second ghettos of urban racial concentrations but also generated racial conflict, as a vast majority of blacks moved into racially segregated housing, incurring white backlash if they tried to move out of it.Footnote ⁴¹ By 1954 in the District, even as the city implemented a large-scale urban renewal project which displaced approximately 23,000 African Americans from the southwestern quadrant, citizen groups committed to the restoration movement successfully orchestrated the repeal of the ban on alley dwellings. Consequentially, by 1970 the occupants of the remaining inhabited alley dwellings primarily constituted professionals as opposed to the vast majority of African American unskilled workers who had begun to fill the alleys following the Civil War. By the end of the decade, these former “mini ghettoes” of the city's first ghetto would become the “expensive and highly sought-after residences of affluent Washingtonians.”Footnote ⁴² Lower-income families and the working poor of the first ghetto were gradually absorbed into increasingly smaller pockets of poverty in segregated black enclaves around the city or gained access to the public-housing system – the District's second ghetto.

THE SECOND GHETTO IN WASHINGTON, DC

Passage of the Housing Act of 1937 (the Wagner-Steagall Act) provided federal subsidies to local governments for the creation of public-housing agencies (PHAs) responsible for housing solutions for low-income families.Footnote ⁴³ On a national level, the Housing Acts of 1937 and 1949 placed a spending cap on construction costs per unit and limited the “use of quality materials despite the inclusion of modern appliances, and restricted the use of annual federal disbursements to only cover the difference between operations needs and rent revenue.”Footnote ⁴⁴ These policies contributed to the general erosion of public-housing stock over time.

Locally, federal policies had two significant outcomes in the District of Columbia. The first was the provision of funding for slum clearance and urban renewal projects which eliminated allegedly “evil, crime-ridden, and diseased,” predominantly black, alley dwellings of the first ghetto.Footnote ⁴⁵ African American lower-income families and the working poor of the first ghetto were gradually absorbed into increasingly smaller pockets of poverty in segregated black enclaves around the city, or gained access to the public-housing system. The District's first public-housing units were built in the early 1940s as segregated low-income housing.Footnote ⁴⁶ Whereas the postwar economic boom and advantageous lending policies afforded whites more housing opportunities to move outside these developments, poor and working-class blacks remained concentrated in the increasingly dilapidated, unsanitary units of DC public housing. Housing shortages in these units were exacerbated by a shrinking housing market due to slum clearance policies that did not provide in-kind housing replacement. This shortage was so pervasive that by 1947 there were already waiting lists for 18,000 units.Footnote ⁴⁷ Prolonged racially segregated residential patterns were the outcome of “citizen efforts to clear the alleys, to develop public housing, to regulate housing, to renew neighborhoods without displacement and to play a significant role in the planning process.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The National Capital Housing Authority (NCHA), which managed the District's public-housing properties in the 1950s, not only saw its housing costs increased dramatically but also “operating costs began to exceed rental income and conditions deteriorated rapidly.”Footnote ⁴⁹ By the mid-1960s, proposed rent increases to offset rental costs and deteriorating conditions in public-housing provision, coupled with an ongoing nationwide tenancy movement, inspired the local struggle for control over public-housing maintenance and self-management. In Washington, DC, public-housing residents organized a rent strike which lasted from 1968 to 1971. Agreements between tenants and management resulted in the adoption of new lease and grievance procedures and the establishment of the National Capital Housing Advisory Board (NCHA). This newly created entity comprised elected members from each public tenant council and ten at-large appointees. Kimi Gray, a grassroots activist, single mother of five, public-housing resident and community leader, asserted that one of the major achievements of the strike was that it forced the administrative staff of the NCHA to create a working relationship with public-housing residents, which in turn commanded respect for this city-wide board. Although many public-housing rent strikers eventually negotiated their rent payments and successfully avoided eviction, two of the unintended consequences of generating rent arrears from the strike was the unresolved issue of property maintenance, which in turn exacerbated the deterioration of the District's public-housing units.Footnote ⁵⁰ In light of these issues, the prospect of self-management was gaining momentum.

In Washington, DC, Gray became chair of the NCHA advisory council in 1976. Under her leadership, the board expanded its membership and held meetings at the property level to increase resident participation. She also implemented a self-help strategy which allowed for housing residents to have more control “in monitoring maintenance work, selecting materials and participating in architectural design decisions.”Footnote ⁵¹ While Gray was settling into her leadership role in public-housing advocacy, Fort Dupont Housing Unit in Washington, DC was experiencing a four-year delay in accessing earmarked funding for residential renovation. This delay led to the demolition of 112 public-housing units. The partial destruction of Fort Dupont was an avoidable situation which encouraged some residents to move out and forced the remaining residents to live under the threat of eviction with no commitment to the repair of the existing units. This common practice, known as willful neglect of housing maintenance, was brought to public attention when its residents filed a lawsuit in 1977 (Edwards v. District of Columbia).Footnote ⁵²

In contrast, Gray's self-management philosophy proved to be an efficacious long-term plan for public-housing residents which she applied to her own housing project at Kenilworth Courts, a 464-unit project located in the northwest corner of Ward 7 in Washington, DC. Built in 1959, Kenilworth was overcrowded; had eroded floors, rotting pipes, and a leaky roof; and the buildings on the property were in a generally dilapidated state by the 1970s. However, with the aid of staff comprising the development's residents, they created a Property Management Administration (PMA) that efficiently collected rents and determined resident selection criteria and other necessary policies that turned the property around.

What power did the residents of Kenilworth Parkside public-housing project have and how did they wield it? In reference to power, Gray's grandmother once told her, “If you are seeking power, you don't receive power as a gift you take power. Respect you earn but power you take.”Footnote ⁵³ Gray's emergence as a community leader came from an intuitive understanding that although the residents of her housing project did not have an abundance of economic capital, they did have political capital. They had the power to organize, strategize, and mobilize as tenant activists and as a constituency. Gray explained the beginnings of the tenancy movement at Kenilworth Court:

Once Marion Barry became mayor he asked Gray what she wanted for her community. She responded, “The right to determine our own destiny.”Footnote ⁵⁵ She counted on Mayor Barry to use his political influence to help the residents of Kenilworth Court to become a part of the solution to their residential problems. The mayor would eventually make good on his promises, by appointing her to the District's public-housing residents’ advisory group.Footnote ⁵⁶

In 1982, the 464-unit in Kenilworth Court became Kenilworth Parkside Management Corporation – a resident management enterprise heralded as a model for other housing projects.Footnote ⁵⁷ Gray believed “that everyday occurrences such as broken windows and toilets [were] matters that residents should be more responsible for while the corporation should concern itself with long-term goals like improved daycare facilities, business cooperatives and the eventual purchase of the property.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The self-management strategies that she implemented led to “declining crime rates, vacancies, and dependency.”Footnote ⁵⁹ However, her metamorphosis from welfare mother to the chair of a multimillion-dollar management corporation was an exceptional one, as no other housing project in the city benefited from their own housing project incorporation and $13.5 million in federal rehabilitation funds.Footnote ⁶⁰ Dilapidated housing projects such as the Ellen Wilson Dwellings, which fell into disrepair and eventually were abandoned in the late 1980s, forced its former residents onto ever-expanding public-housing waiting lists. AFDC recipients, who were disproportionately represented by high levels of African American single FHHs in the District, were left with little or no alternatives to housing solutions. Many were relegated to the city's welfare hotels.Footnote ⁶¹

While indigenous leaders like Kimi Gray were helping to reset the narrative on what public-housing residents were capable of achieving, Washington, DC's urban landscape was changing in other ways. In a LIFE magazine special issue, The Dream Then and Now, Prof William Julius Wilson best described the change through an analysis of the state of single FHHs:

Between 1970 and 1990 pockets of poverty developed particularly in Wards 2, 6, 7, and 8 (See Figure 1). Figure 2 shows the most concentrated areas.Footnote ⁶³ Professor Wilson goes on,

Figure 1. Washington, DC by ward. DC Ward Map 2002, Wikimedia Commons, at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/DC_Ward_Map_2002.png (accessed 5 May 2021).

Figure 2. Concentrated pockets of poverty. From Carol J. De Vita, Carlos A. Manjarrez, and Eric Twombly, “Poverty in the District of Columbia – Then and Now,” the Urban Institute, Washington, DC, February 2000, 16. Reprinted with permission from the Urban Institute.

During the 1980s, public services and public housing in the second ghetto continued to deteriorate through the neoliberal practices and policies which privatized, marketized, and deregulated social services, and cut funding to welfare programs. In this neoliberal city, systemic issues such as inadequate public-assistance benefits, loss of employment, the high cost of living, and the lack of affordable housing led to eviction, an insufficient amount of public-housing units, and the long waiting lists which left many AFDC recipients with no recourse but to enter the third ghetto of the emergency shelter system.

NEW HOMELESSNESS IN WASHINGTON, DC: IN SEARCH OF A LOCAL SOLUTION TO A VISIBLE PROBLEM

As a separate and distinct space with more extreme levels of poverty and marginalization than the second ghetto, the third ghetto did not enjoy the fruits of New Deal entitlement programmes. In fact, the existence of its various subpopulations in the early years of the New Homeless Era was often ignored or denied. Manifestations of a visible “new homelessness” continued to emerge throughout the 1980s in a population of the extreme poor who were becoming younger, more gendered, and racially segregated in urban America. They were some of the faces of “long-standing gender and racial inequities in the postwar economy and the welfare state.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Privatization, marketization, funding cuts, and the deregulation of social services had severe consequences on social-service provision and housing outcomes for the District's low-income residents. In this neoliberal city, systemic issues such as inadequate public-assistance benefits, loss of employment, the high cost of living, and the lack of affordable housing led to eviction, an insufficient number of public-housing units, and long waiting lists, which left many AFDC recipients with no recourse but to enter the third ghetto of the emergency shelter system. In the 1980s, as the crisis in the District was gradually recognized, homeless-shelter provision went from an exclusively informal network of nonprofit, faith-based, and activist providers to the addition of city-run shelter provision and the extended use of welfare hotels for AFDC recipients.

The central struggles for the activists and service providers working on the front lines in the first decade of the homeless crisis were initially to fight for recognition that the crisis actually existed and subsequently to obtain aid to expand its services locally and then nationally. The successes and failures of the central figures in this struggle – Mitch Snyder and CCNV – are well documented.Footnote ⁶⁶ By 1984, the homeless crisis had consolidated on a national level and left an indelible mark on America's urban landscapes. However, locally the need for access to public funding by privately run entities such as welfare hotels would play a vital role in the exertion of what Hirsch describes as “positive power” in the Making the Second Ghetto, in which “public benefits were by-products of a desperate struggle for individual survival and never the primary force.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This study argues that an essential driver of third-ghetto formation in Washington, DC was the scramble for stopgap solutions to the visible street homelessness crisis which was viewed by policymakers not as a human rights problem but as a political problem. Homelessness had also become a national crisis that was framed as an individual problem, reflected in the public statements of a President in denial:

On 31 January 1984, responding to an interview question on ABC's Good Morning America, President Reagan made this infamous statement earning him a reputation as tone-deaf on matters concerning the poor. At a convention later that day, Reagan painted his detractors as “anti-business, anti-success,” and decried “their distasteful attitude toward the profit motive.”Footnote ⁶⁹ As for the poor, they were simply out of place. The deinstitutionalized mentally ill, the allegedly wilful homeless, or the fraudulent “welfare queen” did not fit into the neoconservative framework of family values upon which Reagan had built his political career. However, the public outrage as a result of this callous statement demonstrated that his view of street people was out of step with public opinion. The general public had become more informed about the realities of street life and had become more sympathetic to the notion of homeless assistance.

Among the many pundits critical of the President's position, William Raspberry, a columnist for the Washington Post, weighed in on the homeless crisis, by addressing a positive shift in public opinion both nationally and locally. Raspberry's article “Homeless by Choice?” mirrored the more sympathetic nation America had become. He addressed the plight of the homeless in Washington, DC, making a plea for more beds and better services than the mere two thousand beds in the wretched city-run facilities and alternative shelters run by “groups like CCNV.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, in the District of Columbia, CCNV continued to lead the way in getting the homeless off the streets and into shelters. One of their most important victories was the passage of the District of Columbia Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative of 1984 (Initiative 17).

In the wake of the 1981–82 recession, there was a strong momentum to aid the fast-growing homeless population and to improve and expand the quality of homeless assistance provision in Washington, DC, which left one lingering question: at what cost? This conundrum led to multi-vocal debate between proponents of the “right to adequate overnight shelter,” and opponents such as Mayor Marion Barry. These detractors were against simply “warehousing” the homeless and dealing with the unmanageable fiscal burden the bill created and the city's budgetary constraints it ignored. The weeks leading up to the vote were fraught with legal battles to get the initiative on the ballot, and a highly publicized debate over its merits. In the 14 October editorial page of the Washington Post, arguments for and against the initiative were presented. Marie Nahikian, on the board of directors of the Coalition for the Homeless, a local advocacy network of shelter providers, churches, local organizations, and concerned citizens, was against Initiative 17. Snyder, who by then had become a leading voice in homeless advocacy, argued in favour of it.Footnote ⁷¹

Nahikian believed that the initiative was brought to the ballot by a small group of activists at the expense of ill-informed residents, who would have to foot the bill for an estimated $20 million in operating costs. A plebiscite for “shelter on demand” would lead to public policy that “warehoused” the homeless. Conversely, voting against it would permit the city to deliver adequate “comprehensive support services” and overnight shelter within the city's budget. For Nahikian, the absence of essential wraparound services simply opened a revolving door that ensnared the homeless in an endless poverty trap of dependency. She argued that the estimated 70 percent of the mentally ill homeless population required specialized services, not just shelter. She added that automatic overnight shelter services should be used only in emergencies and as a quick fix to a particular crisis such as extreme temperatures. Additionally, relying on Initiative 17 as a long-term remedy would only relieve the federal government from sharing the financial burden. Finally, she called for a more exhaustive approach to homelessness by creating partnerships with “business, labor, religious and government leaders, and individual residents.”Footnote ⁷²

Snyder's argument supported his conviction that Initiative 17 should be decided by vote and that its passage would not absolve the federal government of its responsibility for helping the homeless. He did not deny that “warehousing” was a potential problem. However, he argued that psychiatric care, medical assistance, and employment and housing services were secondary to the provision of emergency shelter. He also cited the example of New York City, which had passed legislation for the legal right to shelter four years prior without experiencing the frenzy of fraudulent behaviour towards the city's shelter services.Footnote ⁷³ As for the cost, he found the $20 million figure which the city estimated for the initiative implausible, as the actual number of homeless was difficult to ascertain. Snyder claimed that the total cost would not exceed what taxpayers were already paying for the “overinstitutionalization” of the homeless. He concluded his argument by framing the passage of the bill as a moral imperative: “Even if passage of Initiative 17 were to cost millions of dollars a year, it wouldn't really matter. What matters most is that it is the just and necessary thing to do.”Footnote ⁷⁴

In the 1 November issue of the Washington Post, advocates published a testimonial showcasing pro-initiative arguments and listing the many individuals and organizations that endorsed the bill. Other effective strategies that proponents had in their arsenal were effective ground-level organization; broad electoral mobilization across the city's wards, including obtaining the right to vote for the homeless; and a successful information campaign.Footnote ⁷⁵ On 6 November 1984, these strategies paid off as the DC Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative passed with a supermajority of 72 per cent.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, one of the unintended consequences of the initiative was a dramatic increase in the use of welfare hotels as the District became legally obligated to guarantee to the District's homeless persons “safe, sanitary, and accessible shelter space, offered in an atmosphere of reasonable dignity.”Footnote ⁷⁷

WELFARE HOTELS OF THE THIRD GHETTO

Previous studies of the third ghetto have not dealt with the connection between a spatially separate and distinct third ghetto and homelessness in inner cities. Joseph Seliga's work predicates the existence of a third ghetto on the legacy of urban racial segregation while remaining within the confines of public-housing spaces.Footnote ⁷⁸ Although David Wilson acknowledges how Reagan's rhetoric and policies damaged black ghettos in the 1980s and “reduced resource flow resulting in increased poverty [and] homelessness,” his particular focus on the rust belt in “the post-neoliberal ascendancy” of the 1990s does not identify the emergency shelter system itself as the third ghetto in inner cities but rather focusses on a new form of “post-war third-wave of black ghetto marginalization” more broadly.Footnote ⁷⁹ This study argues that in terms of inner-city housing precarity during the late 1970s and the 1980s, race, homelessness, and the third ghetto are most profitably examined together within the broader context of the neoliberal policies and practices which generate social inequality.

How do issues of housing precarity fit it into the larger framework of the neoliberal city? Brenner and Theodore posit the existence of dialectical opposition between the creative and destructive forces of neoliberalism.Footnote ⁸⁰ Hackworth notes that “neoliberal destruction consists of removal of Keynesian artifacts [such as] public housing, public space, redistributive welfare policy, and institutions such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development.”Footnote ⁸¹ Conversely, neoliberal creation involves either the formation of new institutions or the cooptation of old ones for future employment in neoliberal projects, such as workfare requirements in welfare reform and public–private partnerships.Footnote ⁸² Another significant feature of neoliberal development is its division into what Peck and Tickell identify as the “rollback and rollout phases.”Footnote ⁸³ In this evolutionary process, Keynesian policies and artefacts are disintegrated and replaced by “more proactively neoliberal practices and ideas.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Nation-state power over public institutions, which serve as “a buffer between the localities and the machinations of a global economy,” is hollowed out.Footnote ⁸⁵ Hackworth argues that due to “the reduction of national interventions in housing, local infrastructure, welfare and the like, localities are forced to finance such areas themselves or to abandon them entirely.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In the 1980s, many homeless families receiving AFDC benefits found themselves entrenched in this “abandoned city,” where local government turned increasingly to the for-profit homeless business to create “temporary” shelter for these homeless families in inner-city welfare hotels. Mayor Marion Barry played an integral role in perpetuating these welfare hotels in the District.

As a city whose local-government apparatus included a black mayor and a black local city council, Washington, DC epitomizes Adolph Reed's notion of the black urban regime (BUR).Footnote ⁸⁷ One of the great challenges for the first wave of post-Jim Crow black urban politicians who emerged from the 1970s was “balancing the redistributive expectations of Black electoral constituencies and the increasingly hegemonic logic of urban entrepreneurialism produced by … capital flight and declining federal aid to cities.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Several urban scholars examining the nascent BURs of the 1970s have focussed on these regimes and connections with neoliberal development. However, there has been precious little scholarship that demonstrates how neoliberalism within these regimes generates social inequalities particularly in terms of housing and homelessness at the end of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸⁹ Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's study of homeownership, which deals with the predatory practices of lending institutions of the 1970s, recognizes neoliberalism as “a strategic effort aimed at restoring the profitability of business and capital” and “a political, social, and economic rejection of the social welfare state and the social contract more generally.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Vincent Lyon-Callo recognizes the deleterious effects of neoliberalism not only on homeless-policy rollout, but also on its linkages to “privatization, marketization, and deregulation” and how its “structural adjustment policies” lead to “reductions in government spending on … social welfare programs.”Footnote ⁹¹ This paper argues that the convergence of the second and third ghettos in terms of housing precarity for families on welfare reveals the importance of the welfare hotel as a public–private partnership – “a paradigmatic instrument of neoliberal governance.”Footnote ⁹²

Homelessness was not just about the lack of affordable housing within neoliberal urban spaces; it also involved the larger question of poverty in America. In the case of black single FHHs in homeless families, bureaucratized homeless-assistance services that separated soup kitchen aid in one hotel and shelter provision in another offered dilapidated dangerous hotel conditions and poor support services; facilitated the misappropriation of federal and state funds by private vendor profiteers; and left AFDC recipients – particularly black single FHHs living in welfare hotels – to endure the gendered state violence of this poverty trap.Footnote ⁹³ For the residents of these welfare hotels, a fundamental point of consensus in poverty scholarship concerning inner-city family homelessness was the observation that as dramatic as the shifts in the composition of poor families were during the 1970s and 1980s, these trends were even more drastic in the African American community: “during the 1970s, the number of black families in poverty who were maintained by men declined by 35 percent, while the number maintained by women increased by 62 percent.” Over the next ten years, “black … [FHHs] increased from one-half to three-fourths of all poor black families.”Footnote ⁹⁴ While a broad spectrum of ideological perspectives exists on the breakdown of the black two-parent family, Donna Franklin takes a more intersectional approach to FHH poverty by making four main observations. First, although black and white women have a vested interest in “living wage, high-quality child care, and education, affordable housing, safe neighborhoods and meaningful work for everyone,” African American women living in “isolated urban neighborhoods are at the greatest risk of experiencing the most persistent poverty.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Second, while white male patriarchy oppresses white and black women both, African American men do not have “resources or power.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Therefore African American women's struggle is not just a question of uplifting their condition but azlso of bettering the entire black community –including African American men. Third, her struggles for eradicating female poverty must be incorporated into the more comprehensive framework of social and economic transformation for all low-income families, including mother-only families and African American FHHs.Footnote ⁹⁷ Finally, Franklin calls for a reevaluation of the “underlying assumption about the relationship of the state to the family and the ideologies that have shaped these family policies.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Franklin's more comprehensive approach to black female poverty easily fits into more contemporary intersectional approaches to race, gender, and social inequality in BURs.

Barry's first of four mandates as mayor of Washington, DC was not a mere backdrop to the commercial real-estate investment boom in the early 1980s. In fact, he was an active powerbroker in his own right. Barry adopted several strategies to shore up the confidence of downtown business elites. Besides adopting several austerity measures to reduce the substantial budget deficit and his vigorous support of “the policy of aggressive downtown development as the city's primary urban revitalization plan,” he also encouraged the open-marketization of the homeless crisis for homeless families.Footnote ⁹⁹ The third ghetto in Washington, DC was born into a system of public–private relationships between faith-based organizations and nonprofit service providers and the local city government of the late 1970s. The difference between these early partnerships and the welfare hotels which constituted the “homeless businesses” of the 1980s can be distilled into the notion of quid pro quo – influence for profit.

In the 1980s, a demographic development to suit the new configuration of downtown-as-the-silver-bullet paradigm in urban regimes would lead to land grabs in the real-estate boom that reshaped abandoned and deteriorating neighbourhoods. Despite the recovery from a national economic recession during the Reagan era, the rising tide of market-based strategies such as privatization, marketization, and consumerism to promote economic revitalization did not trickle down to those most in need. The working poor could not necessarily earn a living wage and the most destitute were left to eke out an existence in train stations, on benches, or on steamed grates. Palliative measures were offered as solutions from social activists, faith-based crisis-driven service provision outliers, and policymakers on both sides of the political divide. However, the homogenized yet vital remedy proposed in the 1980s – emergency shelters – offered no better argument than a shield against the elements with, funds permitting, a few uncoordinated, stopgap, wraparound services. A prime example of one such a quick fix was the use of welfare hotels in Washington, DC. These commercially owned hotels or motels, known for their inadequate physical conditions and services, provided emergency shelter to homeless families that usually received some form of public assistance. The Pitts Motor Hotel, located at 1451 Belmont St NW, was one of the most notorious welfare hotels in Washington, DC.

The Pitts Motor Hotel began subcontracting its public-housing needs as early as 1968. However, its contract renewals in the 1980s were based on a combination of neoliberal practices that perpetuated housing inequality. First, there was the privatization of food and lodging services to entitlement recipients in the form of lucrative contracts that attracted homeless-business “profiteers” who were either one of Barry's friends or contributors to his election campaigns.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Second, there was the deregulation of service provision, which fostered a lack of accountability and oversight, which then fostered flagrant overbilling of homeless services and lamentable living standards for homeless families.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Some $17 million in public funds were spent on this fifty-room hotel to shelter the homeless during the 1980s until its closure in August 1990.Footnote ¹⁰²

Early on in his first mandate, Barry supported homeless issues, coming out in favour of “shelter as a basic human right,” and officially backing “a comprehensive program of privately staffed, decentralized shelters for the city's homeless.”Footnote ¹⁰³ However, to make up for the $115 million city deficit in addition to the city's long-term debt of more than $300 million and a pension liability of almost $740 million that was left on the books of the previous administration, austerity measures had to be taken.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Tax increases, cutbacks in city services, “layoffs, and pay freezes” were implemented only a year after Barry promised CCNV “a dramatic improvement of homeless services.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ To further compensate for the District's budgetary shortfalls, Barry began reaching out to private-sector actors such as “churches, community organizations, and business groups” for homeless-shelter provisioning. He abused his power by doling out “multimillion-dollar contracts” to cronies who then “warehouse[d] homeless families in broken-down motels and apartment buildings.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The most infamous of these slumlords was Cornelius Pitts.

How did the Pitts Motor Hotel, which once housed prominent African American civil rights figures, musicians, and politicians in the 1960s, become one of the nation's most notorious welfare hotels and “a symbol of financial mismanagement by the District government?”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ By the 1980s, this hotel had fallen on hard times and found itself in a high-crime area of Columbia Heights. Mayor Barry would use his influence to secure a business venture that allowed Mr. Pitts an opportunity to turn things around. The Pitts Motor Hotel had been contracting with the city to shelter single adults and childless couples since the mid-1960s, but the contract the city offered at the beginning of the 1980s was particularly lucrative: a “$1.3 million contract to house an estimated 400 evicted families over a year's time,” a contract which was not opened up to competitive bidding the following year and automatically renewed.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In 1984, Pitts became further entrenched in the homeless business. He dedicated the hotel's rooms exclusively to the homeless, renewing the contract for $1.5 million for the entire fifty-two-room hotel and offering 144 meals a day in dilapidated rooms without cooking facilities.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ An audit investigating mismanagement in DC's homeless programs during the 1980s made several startling revelations: Mr. and Mrs. Pitts had given themselves “exorbitant salaries,” charged the city unnecessary damage and financial-management charges, and were suspected of not giving its residents all three guaranteed meals a day and overcharging for its food-provisioning services.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Additionally, the Pitts Motor Hotel had already gained a reputation as a part of the triumvirate of welfare hotels including the Budget Inn and Capital City Inn plagued by a system of predatory sheltering and drug dealing.Footnote ¹¹¹ As various homeless services were divided between these different emergency shelters, occupants spent their days in a “homeless shuffle” from one hotel to another.Footnote ¹¹² This new permutation of homelessness saw many families go from dilapidated public housing to welfare hotels and makeshift emergency shelters “known as the open-market system” – the only available options in the growing homeless crisis in the District.Footnote ¹¹³

Reagan's 1986 State of the Union address reminded families and communities of their role in the “Great American Comeback,” the industrial and financial challenges they had overcome, as well as the need to redefine poorly crafted policy that went against certain American core values. Reagan declared, “We must revise or replace programs enacted in the name of compassion that degrade the moral worth of work, encourage family breakups, and drive communities into a bleak and heartless dependency.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The nascent welfare consensus of the 1980s “grew out of an inseparable combination of welfare politics, ideological realignment, and new poverty knowledge.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ This ideological shift in the debate over welfare reform was characterized by the reformulation of the poverty problem around issues such as personal responsibility and the elimination of welfare dependency, an agenda that was accepted on both sides of the political divide. This shift was characterized by a sharp focus on the dependency of AFDC families rather than on the creation of solutions to the underlying structural problems hidden behind the symptoms of this “dependency.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

As the country approached the end of the Reagan administration, the crisis in family homelessness in Washington, DC continued to get worse. Due to “increased evictions, the shortage of low-income housing and an influx of poor families” the city turned increasingly to the “open market of welfare hotels.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ By 1986, the number of homeless families in the District had jumped from “a low of 57 to a high of 169” in just five months.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Even the use of welfare hotels proved inadequate to meet the demand of the crisis in family homelessness. By 1988, 525 families (610 adults and 1,338 children) were being sheltered not only in several hotels and motels in the District, but also in an open public-school gymnasium converted into a mass shelter, at $20 million per annum. The 12,000 names on the local waiting list for public housing were a tragic denouement for this segment of the “new” homeless population – families with minor children.Footnote ¹¹⁹ According to studies published by the General Accounting Office, these “families – usually comprising a single parent, often a minority female, and two to three children receiving some type of public assistance – were the most rapidly growing segment of the homeless population, estimated at between thirty-three to forty per cent of the homeless” population in the District.Footnote ¹²⁰ “In reaction to the combination of squalid shelter conditions, harm to children and the needless cost of these shelters,” the DC Council decided to take action.Footnote ¹²¹

On 11 March 1988, the Emergency Shelter Services for Family Reform Act of 1987 went into effect. Its mandate was to “end the hotel style of housing families with minor children,” and “gave the Mayor one year to move families out of hotels and into supervised apartment style facilities.”Footnote ¹²² The Act stipulated that families with minor children were to be placed in hotels or motels only if “some circumstances left no viable alternative,” and “for a maximum of 15 days.”Footnote ¹²³ The District blatantly disregarded the law, spending a total of $10.4 million on hotels in 1989. For example, it gave $4 million to Capitol City Inn, $3.8 million to the Pitts Hotel, and $1.2 million to the General Scott Inn. Although Capitol City Inn was closed in 1990, the city perpetuated the homeless business by simply finding a new hotel vendor (the Braxton).Footnote ¹²⁴ Local policy had not succeeded in curtailing the open-marketization of assistance to homeless families as this practice would continue into the rollout phase of the 1990s.