Vincent Lyon-Callos Inequality, Poverty, And Neoliberal Governance Ethnographic analysis emphasizes that there are systemic causes to homelessness. Shelters are resources for the homeless, but their strategies for providing assistance doesn’t address these systemic causes. The staff at shelters often have programs that ‘normalize’ homelessness and provide medicalized treatment plans as if homelessness individuals simply need to be cured. If an individual doesn’t conform to the shelter’s rules or challenges them or their programs in any way, become labeled as deviant and essentially get left behind. Shelter staff have little room to work with to make any changes and this lack of power within the system causes many problems and shortcomings with assistance.

This system is toxic and unproductive. They do not help the people and often blame the individual when that is not the case. Vincent Lyon-Callos arguments about systemic change mirrored much of the same notions from another book, Daniel Kerr’s Derelict Paradise. Daniel Kerr provides an in-depth history of the city of Cleveland’s homeless probelms and how it developed due to the influence of structural causes. Shelters are  a huge part of the causes Kerr mentions as the assistance to the homeless is institutionalized, which we see in Vincent Callo’s ethnography. The formula that the shelters today have been shaped to adhere to focus on the individual rather than the structure.

To see Daniel Kerr’s book: http://www.amazon.com/Derelict-Paradise-Homelessness-Development-Cleveland/dp/1558498494

For Vincent Lyon-Callo’s book: http://www.amazon.com/Inequality-Poverty-Neoliberal-Governance-Ethnographies/dp/1442600861