Abstract

Globalization is described as driving growing inequality and social polarization in the world's leading cities. However, rates and characteristics of income inequality, poverty, and homelessness show wide local variation. I use a combination of qualitative research strategies to examine how an understudied form of social mobility, the process of exiting homelessness, is shaped by conditions at various social levels. I find that conditions at the global, national, local, institutional, micro-social, and individual levels in Los Angeles and Tokyo combine and interact to shape the process of exiting homelessness. In Los Angeles, greater economic restructuring, immigration, and retraction of welfare services interact with a cultural context characterized by high rates of substance abuse and systemic racial exclusion to more strongly impede exits through mainstream labor and housing markets. Individuals exit by using ties with housed family, friends, and program staff, as well as subsidized SRO housing. These exits are stable since housing is long-term subsidized. In Tokyo, social capital and beneficial relationships with staff are scarce, due to a stronger stigma of homelessness and a more restrictive organizational culture. Individuals exit by obtaining low wage, non-standard employment and cheap, simple apartments. But these exits are unstable, given their employment conditions.

I develop a multilevel theory and research approach of social mobility and role transition at the margins of global urban society. While globalization constrains efforts to exit homelessness, particularly by limiting opportunities for living wage employment, welfare benefits, and affordable housing, local contextual conditions such as cultural attitudes towards homelessness, public policy, structural racism, and organizational culture intervene to mitigate or exacerbate these constraints. My findings challenge both explanations of homelessness that reduce causality to within the individual, as well as deterministic depictions of globalization that neglect more local contexts. I find that social ties via family, friends, and welfare organizations are more important for the extremely poor when market conditions are unforgiving. My findings also provide support for long-term, service-rich, subsidized housing to end mass homelessness: it addresses the problems of unstable low wage employment and high rents and allows for the development of social ties with welfare organization staff.