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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822375180 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/17/2015 |
| Series: | Pete the Bee #11 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Addicted.Pregnant.Poor
By Kelly Ray Knight
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7518-0
CHAPTER 1
consumption and insecurity
Consumption and Insecurity
Consumption
•The process of taking food into the body through the mouth (as by eating)
•Pulmonary tuberculosis: involving the lungs with progressive wasting of the body
•(Economics) the utilization of economic goods to satisfy needs or in manufacturing
•The act of consuming something
Insecurity
•The state of being subject to danger or injury
•The anxiety you experience when you feel vulnerable and insecure
These definitions of "consumption" offer images of both gain (as through eating, or consuming) and loss (as through disease wasting, or utilizing goods). The experiences of consumption in the daily-rent hotels contained these same dualities. As Noah's experience attested, the consumption of everything (alcohol, drugs, food) in the daily-rent hotels was governed by the sense of both acquisition and loss. Insecurity reigned — even among women who did not appear emaciated or in active drug withdrawal. There was insecurity about money, drugs, food, cigarettes, housing, and violence. Women frequently described themselves as "starving" and were always "chasing a high," literally down the hallway. When visiting women tenants I would frequently hear the "Slam. Slam." of room doors closing. A woman would knock on a door. Someone would holler from inside, "Who is it?" Then the door would open and slam closed again. Sometimes I viewed this from outside the room (in other rooms or the hallway), sometimes from inside. Either way, the overall atmosphere was one of tension that seemed to pervade the hotel during the late afternoon and early evening, when most tenants were waking up or gearing up for the night ahead. An ironic feature of this tense atmosphere was its repetitive nature. While a low level of chaos came to feel normal and expected, neither I nor the women I spent time with ever felt relaxed. The doors slamming and the constant traffic were both expected and unpredictable. The needs of the women for food, drugs, water, cigarettes, were constant and inconsistently met. I never knew, on meeting a woman, where in the cycle of buildup and release she might be at any given moment.
Despite the whispers and near constant social interaction that characterized many women's daily lives in the hotels, the hotels did not create a communal environment for the consumption of alcohol, drugs, or food per se. Although women and men would often hole up in rooms to use drugs (especially to smoke crack) together, these were unstable arrangements. They often seemed to depend on which collection of individuals might have landed, or been forced to land, in that particular hallway or room on that particular day. A handful of examples illustrates the random and constantly fluctuating constellations of people, drugs, money, and food that formed life in the daily-rent hotels.
Materiality here is piled up in hotel rooms, the conditions of which are largely invisible to the intersecting social worlds that operate in public, just one floor below. Everyday "stuff" is also necessarily mobile, as women must drag possessions and necessities from daily-rent hotel to daily-rent hotel because they are perpetually displaced. The moral economies of debt that surround the drug-sex economy and the actual financial debts owed on daily-rent hotel rooms create social and physical relations that are unstable. Everyone was seeking something to consume (drugs, food, money for the rent), and constant insecurity bred specific forms of vulnerability. For women in the daily-rent hotels these forms of vulnerability included housing instability, mental and physical health complications, predatory violence, and food insecurity — all of which impacted both drug use and pregnancies. I argue that experiences of consumption and insecurity defined life in the daily-rent hotels, structured risk, and replicated larger debates about the dual, and often competing, demands of pregnancy and addiction.
Persons who are unstably housed are a distinct population whose physical and mental health are inextricably linked to the built environment and housing policies. Understanding the daily-rent hotels as specific ethnographic sites revealed that the term single room occupancy or "SRO" defines certain government policies that have converted private daily-rent hotel stock into publicly managed rooms and buildings for those who are eligible. The conversion of this housing stock and subsequent progressive interventions in the development of supportive housing in San Francisco created housing possibilities for the urban poor that were unfortunately not well matched to the needs of addicted, pregnant women. Even as unstably housed and homeless women were often targets of progressive housing initiatives, pregnancy and later child custody issues complicated their participation in these programs.
Housing Instability and Progressive Interventions
While women navigated their daily lives in the privately owned daily-rent hotels, several experiments in supportive housing were under way in San Francisco. Historically, deinstitutionalization policies in California led to the reintegration of adults with disabling mental illnesses into the community, creating a housing need. Due in part to geographic boundary limitations, housing stock in San Francisco was, and still is, chronically underavailable, which means that large, sprawling housing developments for lower-income single adults and families are not built outside the downtown area (as are, for example, the banlieue of Paris). Thus, existing housing stock had to be repurposed to meet housing need. During this same period, the voting public and city officials expressed growing concern for the highly visible problem of chronic homelessness on city streets. Finally, public health policies promoting a "Housing First" agenda gained institutional support. Housing First argued that in order to address substance use disorders, respond to mental illness, and promote better health among the unstably housed, stabilization in housing had to be an essential first step. In sum, San Francisco's urban center saw a large growth of both chronically homeless men and women with comorbid mental illness and substance use disorders in need of housing during this period and a need to utilize existing housing stock to meet that need.
The necessity of using existing buildings as sites for housing the burgeoning urban poor created a progressive housing opportunity for San Francisco health policy-makers and also created a parallel economy of privately owned hotels whose living conditions and management practices consistently exploited women tenants. The publicly funded buildings take two forms: (1) previously privately owned buildings whose master lease has been purchased by the City of San Francisco, and (2) new buildings built on the demolished sites of older buildings and in other urban spaces.
During my ethnographic work in San Francisco as an outreach worker, and through several ethnographic projects that were contemporaneous with this one, I have worked extensively in both public and privately managed hotels. Clear differences between these housing settings were apparent. One feature of difference was the illegal practices of the daily-rent hotel owners and the variability in the regulation of these hotels, according to the degree of privatization of the particular hotel. Another difference was the way success, or efficacy, was measured. For the private daily-rent hotel owners, the metric of success is profit — the money garnered from exorbitant daily rental charges. In publicly managed hotels, public sector actors may measure a hotel's effectiveness by aspects of tenants' lives, such as "housing tenure" — the percentage of people who stay housed for at least two years in the same building — or by following indicators of health, such as adherence to prescribed psychotropic and HIV/AIDS medications, and consistency in keeping appointments with case managers, psychiatrists, and physicians. These numbers are then aggregated across buildings and programs as a whole to support ongoing city and state resourcing. Rent in the publicly managed hotels is government-managed and paid monthly. Access to publicly funded rooms is influenced by the health status of an individual and was often health provider–mediated; no such person-based evidentiary markers exist in the world of privately managed hotels. Access to private rooms is conditional on producing an identification card and having the money to cover the rent.
My ethnographic focus was on the private daily-rent hotels because I was interested in exploring the relationship between drug-sex economies and economies of temporary housing. In addition, none of the addicted, pregnant women I worked with successfully transitioned to affordable housing in government-funded hotel rooms during the course of my study. The complex configuration of addiction, interpersonal relationships, entitlements, and mental health contributed to this fact. However, it was equally a by-product of the problematic role of pregnancy in this setting. Women could not return to either the private daily-rent hotels or many government-funded hotel rooms because neither of these were housing sites for families — they were intended to be SRO. Thus while progressive housing initiatives were being implemented in San Francisco, addicted, pregnant women often "fell through the cracks" of these policy effects. To begin to understand this complexity, one needs to explore how SRO hotel rooms and their payment structures are rendered in both policy discourse and on the street.
The "SRO" in Our Political Imagination, in Name, in Actuality
"SRO" does not mean what we — service providers, policy people — think it means. It is a term that is used in government, for policy. It is not a term that really works for the people who rent the actual rooms.
— Member of the Mission SRO Collaborative (October 2009)
The most direct rendering of the term "single room occupancy" is that only one person may occupy each room. There seems to be agreement that a "typical SRO is a single 8x10 foot room with shared toilets and showers down the hallway." From the perspective of the epidemiological categorization, and in official language, privately owned daily-rent hotels would be included under the term "SRO." This is, in part, an artifact of history. Single room occupancy hotels began as temporary housing for low-wage workers and migratory laborers. While rooms might well have been occupied by more than one person, they were not specifically intended for families or single women.
Currently the blurring between public and private management of individual hotel rooms and buildings makes "SRO" terminology problematic. Deeming a hotel, or a hotel room, an "SRO" because of its physical characteristics and layout does not reveal the important detail of how it is paid for, either daily, weekly, or monthly. All "SRO" rooms do not reflect an equal economic burden on their occupants. When progressive supportive housing movements began to take over the master lease on "SRO" buildings and rooms in buildings in order to manage them publicly, rents were stabilized at 30 percent of the occupant's income. Because the two managerial types — private verses public — had two divergent markers of success, these hotels were managed differently. Supportive housing hotel rooms did not have any daily or weekly rent and offered varying degrees of social and physical health services support onsite. Success in these programs was evidenced by persons staying housed, consistent with the original intention of the public takeover: to expand housing affordability in a geographic environment of chronic housing shortage and widespread housing instability among the urban poor. Privately managed buildings, running on a profit model, measured success by counting rooms filled.
My misunderstanding of this differentiation helped to explain why I had expected, when first approaching the "SRO" hotels I studied, to find their rental populations fairly stable. I had assumed the majority of the rooms (even in the private hotels) would be filled with welfare-entitled or other entitled renters because their access to a government subsidy ensured consistent rent payment, which I presumed to be desirable to hotel managers and owners. But this was only the reality for publicly funded hotels. Welfare-entitled clients, specifically tenants with access to Supplemental Security Income (SSI), could incur some portion of the rent cost, which balanced some of the cost of providing affordable housing. For private hotels, however, daily renters were a source of exceedingly more profit than welfare-entitled tenants who paid lower, negotiated weekly and monthly rates. Private hotels thus were run as de facto brothels, gouging renters and their visitors for fees, so that the notion of "single" occupancy at any particular moment was comical at best.
I learned that women were keenly aware of economic differences between publicly owned and private hotels, and some, like Ramona in the field note below, do not see the daily-rent hotels as "SROs." Whatever cachet the term had in relation to public subsidies, the SRO, according to Ramona, had little in common with the daily-rent hotel.
Ramona points out that in the daily-rent hotels, with extra pay a renter can have more than one person sleep in his or her room. This is demonstrative of the fact that one is paying daily. If you have access to an SSI entitlement and have a monthly rental arrangement, then you are not allowed to house another person in your room. Having an extra renter or tenant paid for with SSI funds is illegal from a governmental perspective because the SSI benefits are linked to the mental and or physical health disability of the beneficiary, not to one's girlfriend, boyfriend, brother, or running buddy. Ultimately this links back to the evidentiary basis on which this system depends. Disability welfare entitlement cannot be shared because it is linked to the individual to whom it is granted. For this reason, persons who have housing benefit entitlements are monitored, and hotels (even privately owned ones) are supposed to enforce the "single" in SRO or risk possibly losing their payee status.
In fact, the term "SRO" could reference both privately owned daily-rent hotels (which are sites of illegal gendered exploitation) and publicly governed housing (which serve as sites of progressive housing policy implementation). Ramona's protest to me, to the contrary, was that if she was paying for her room with her SSI, and it was garnered through a governmental case management apparatus, then it was an SRO. If she hustled for the daily rent, it was not. These distinctions are not simply about linguistics. Many women (and men) lose access to entitlements and face eviction if it is discovered that they are harboring another person in their entitlement-subsidized room. Those who have subsidized "SRO" rooms have limited "overnights" — nights in which partners, friends, children, or others are allowed to stay the night without jeopardizing an entitlement benefit and risking the loss of housing. This limitation led Ramona to not pursue the "paperwork" she would need in order to garner the subsidized SRO room she mentioned. Although her baby could have roomed there with her, Duke, her partner and the baby's father, would not have been allowed to legally live with them under the conditions of the public housing allotment. She chose to put herself on a waiting list at a family shelter instead, a shelter spot for which she never became eligible postpartum. Ramona's experience points to the messy problem of housing, public support, and family eligibility in an environment where what she considered the best option was the most exploitative.
Daily-Rent Hotels as Spaces of Illegality and Debt
To housing policy-makers efficacy is measured by extended housing tenure of tenants in supportive housing; these tenants are often dually or triply diagnosed and usually engaged in health care. The metric that measures efficacy in the daily-rent hotels is money: cold, hard cash. A room can be rented if one has money to pay, and a valid form of identification. Otherwise, one is out on the street. Private hotels may have offered credit to some of the women I studied, but that debt eventually had to be paid. The insecurity of indebtedness produced risk for the women in their illegal activities, when they were frequently harassed to "get outside" (engage in sex work to pay for rent) by hotel management. Abstract behavioral constructs such as "sex work" lost their meaning, unless they were linked directly to the women's housing status. The economic exploitation of the women in the daily-rent hotels was dependent on the built environment (the hotel itself) functioning as a de facto brothel, such that the hotel managers and owners made a profit off of the women's work. Hotel managers charged women fees for each "visitor" and regularly verbally harassed women and intimated them into engaging in sex work or risk eviction. The following field note excerpt provides further examples of the constraints of debt and sex work in the daily-rent hotels.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Addicted.Pregnant.Poor by Kelly Ray Knight. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1
1. Consumption and Insecurity 33
2. Addicted Pregnancy and Time 68
3. Neurocratic Futures in the Disability Economy 102
4. Street Psychiatrics and New Configurations of Madness 125
5. Stratified Reproduction and the Kin of Last Resort 151
6. Victim-Perpetrators 178
Conclusion 206
Appendix 240
Notes 247
Bibliography 279
Index 297