‘Not in My City’: Local Governments and Homelessness Policies in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Region

Abstract

To understand local government social welfare policies in large metropolitan areas, we need to pay attention to the processes by which amorphous social problems are translated into well-defined services amenable to local government structures of provision, and we need to place these processes within an interjurisdictional context that is more complex than a simple ‘city-suburb’ binary opposition. In this paper I explore the interjurisdictional allocation of responsibility for social welfare in a fragmented metropolitan region, through a case study of city responses to the suburbanisation of homelessness in Los Angeles County in the 1990s. The results of a 1991 survey of all eighty-five local governments in the county revealed wide variations in the extent to which cities acknowledged responsibility for dealing with homelessness, and in the forms of actions adopted by cities. Some city characteristics (population size, median household income, and charter city status) were significant factors affecting the level of action on homelessness. However, the variation in city action must also be understood as a product of the metropolitan context, where city officials develop welfare policies with close attention to the actions of neighbouring cities, and with a keen awareness of the opportunities for burden shifting and ‘beggar thy neighbour’ responses. Although the relative mobility of homeless people (both forced and voluntary) heightens the impact of policy disparities among cities, a similar scenario can be imagined for other social needs in a politically fragmented region.