Homeless Mobility, Institutional Settings, and the New Poverty Management

Poverty management involves organized responses by elites and/or the state to contain potentially disruptive populations. As a result of global, national, and institutional compressions, the new poverty management tends to circulate these populations, especially the mentally disabled, across an array of unrelated and frequently institutional settings. This restructuring of interactions between mobility and institutional settings, in the form of institutionalized cycling, has yet to be investigated for other potentially vulnerable groups, such as single homeless women. Using a convenience sample of twenty-five women at a shelter in Central Los Angeles, I seek to understand their residential patterns, identify evidence of institutionalized cycling through a fivefold typology, and to elucidate the personal and structural factors behind why some women were prone to institutionalized cycling whereas others were not. Results point to highly uneven evidence of institutionalized cycling across the sample, with the most obvious impacts in the institutional cycler and institutionally accommodated categories.