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Melissa Chan
Professor Victoria Lawson
Honors 232C
Midterm Examination
13 May 2014

A relational analysis of poverty argues that people are poor

because of powerful otherspoverty is produced through the
exploitive and dispossessive effects of capital accumulation
through representations of poor others as flawed, lacking and
immoralin opposition to middle class subjects who are
framed as whitened, upwardly socially mobile, respectable and
personally responsible (from Lawson, 2012; Lawson, Elwood,
Canevaro and Viotti, 2014).
Reflecting on this quote, respond to the following: Can direct
service delivery solve poverty? What are the potentials and
limits of direct service delivery for addressing poverty and
privilege (i.e. providing direct needs, shelter, food, etc.)?

Direct service delivery is delivered to the poor by the privileged

in order to meet the immediate needs of those in poverty. However, if

the poor are poor because of powerful others (Lawson, 2012; Lawson

et al., 2014) and because of the negative representations of the poor

those powerful others hold, then the solution to poverty lies in

changing the mindsets of the powerful others and the underlying

systems that formed those mindsets. Direct service delivery by itself

cannot solve poverty because it does not adequately address either

the mindsets of the powerful others or the problematic underlying

systems of capital accumulation. Despite their charitable intentions,

current models of direct service delivery can actually function to

perpetuate negative representations of the poor and contribute to,

instead of help solve, the problem of poverty.

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Residents of Seattles Tent City commonly express the view that

even in the spaces of care of enhanced shelters, visibility is often a

liability in that if you say youre homeless, theyll treat you like

youre homeless (Sparks, 2010, 849). Representations of the

homeless as flawed, lacking, and immoral (Lawson, 2012; Lawson et

al., 2014) have become so ingrained in our mainstream culture

because of their juxtaposition to the progressive, profit-seeking values

our capitalistic society holds dear. According to Tent City residents,

these negative representations extend into the environments of many

enhanced shelters, and are manifested in extreme surveillance policies

including constant visual monitoring to timed and scheduled meals,

sleep, and even bathroom visits (Sparks, 2010, 856). This

dehumanization serves to reinforce the dominant ideas of homeless

individuals as deviant and flawed that are part of the mindset of the

powerful others towards the poor. Instead of addressing the problem,

these models of enhanced shelters are reproducing the otherness of

and further marginalizing the homeless individual (Sparks, 2010, 850).

Other forms of service provision also exhibit limitations in their

need to broadly generalize and categorize the poor. The Care Not

Cash program implemented in San Francisco sought to convert cash

assistance to housing referrals for the citys growing homeless

population (Murphy, 2009). However, it assumed a universal set of

causes for poverty and offered a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all set of

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services as remedy (Murphy, 2009). The new housing was reserved

only for the homeless who agreed to the terms of the program, which

included levels of monitoring similar to those experienced by the

homeless in Seattles enhanced shelters, and thus further marginalized

those who found the dehumanizing terms unacceptable (Murphy,

2009). The alternative emergency shelter system was described as

extremely stressful,frightening at times, and at a minimum,

extremely difficult to navigate, especially for those with mental

disabilities and special needs (Murphy, 2009, 320). The inflexibility of

this system created new definitions of the deserving versus

undeserving poor, as those who opted out of the less-than-

satisfactory services were criminalized as service resistant (Murphy,

2009, 321). By ignoring the complexities of individual situations, Care

Not Cash further devalued and depoliticized the root causes of

poverty as merely the problem of the individual.

Both the examples of Seattles enhanced shelters and San

Franciscos Care Not Cash program reveal the limitations of direct

service delivery for addressing poverty in that their dehumanization

and generalization of homeless individuals further reinforced and

reproduced dominant negative representations of the poor. Both

examples also reveal limitations for addressing privilege in that the

services provided and policies made were delivered only by the

privileged without input from the poor. Perhaps this is where direct
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service delivery, if amended from its current model, has the potential

to affect change. Maybe if used in tandem with participatory action

research or ethnographic studies, direct service delivery could be the

way for the privileged to gain insight into the dispossessive effects of

capital accumulation (Lawson, 2012; Lawson et al., 2014) and find the

right of expertise from the homeless individuals themselves for

acceptable poverty policies.

In conclusion, based off the current model of direct service

delivery, there is a need, as Professor Lawson phrased it, to get

beyond the moment of service delivery towards enacting actual social

change (Lawson, class discussion, 04/24/14). If the solution to poverty

is changing the mindsets of the powerful others and the underlying

capitalistic systems behind them, I believe an amended, more inclusive

model of direct service delivery encompassing the bottom-up

perspectives of PAR can slowly make that change. As Werner Kuhn

remarked, Though the world does not change with a change of

paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world (Roy,

2003, 468).

Works Cited

Lawson, Victoria; Elwood, Sarah; Canevaro, Santiago; Viotti, Nicolas.

Poverty Politics Post Crisis in Argentina and the US: class

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subjects and relational practices in urban neighborhoods. 17

Mar 2014.

Lawson. Class Discussion. 24 Apr. 2014.

Murphy, Stacey. Compassionate Strategies of Managing

Homelessness: Post-Revanchist Geographies in San Francisco.

Antipode. Blackwell Publishing Ltd: 2009.

Roy, Ananya. Paradigms of Propertied Citizenship: Transnational

Techniques of Analysis. Urban Affairs Review (2003 38: 463),

accessed May 11, 2014, doi: 10.1177/1078087402250356

Sparks, Tony. Broke Not Broken: Rights, Privacy, and Homelessness in

Seattle. Urban Geography. Routledge: Mortimer Street, London.

31:6, 842-862.