| For many inner-city neighborhoods, welfare payments help stabilize the local economy. In these so-called "welfare neighborhoods," local agencies and service-dependent individuals engage in mutually-dependent interactions at the scale of service delivery settings. Increasingly, these interactions are being influenced by new modes of poverty management, stimulated by economic and political shifts at various time-space scales. The hallmarks of this new management are the localization and privatization of service provision, and the re-circulation of clients through multiple service delivery settings. In this dissertation, I focus on whether the welfare reforms of 1996 are reconfiguring the settings in which neighborhood institutions interact with local service-dependent populations, particularly single women without children, within the welfare neighborhood of University Park, Los Angeles.;Analytically, I focus on detecting change to (1) the institutional practices of 28 local agencies and (2) the subsistence patterns of 25 single homeless women at a local shelter. At the institutional level, the impacts of welfare reform were somewhat mixed, with little evidence pointing to fundamental change at the level of institutional goals, policies and service delivery settings. However, impacts were already evident in more immediate forms, including needier clients and institutions, pervasive increases in inter-agency and community collaboration, and staffing change. Welfare reform is also beginning to shift client targeting towards families and employable clients and away from single people and so-called "difficult-to-employ" clients.;Change to individual subsistence patterns were also somewhat muted, given an already austere local welfare landscape. Nonetheless, welfare reform did negatively impact those women dependent on locally-funded General Relief (GR), itself restricted in response to fears that former federal welfare recipients would flood the local system. For these women, welfare reform was linked to residential instability and a greater likelihood of negative interactions with service delivery settings. For most other women, impacts were modest because of lack of reliance on welfare, or reliance on benefits not touched by welfare reform, namely Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Welfare reform did not directly improve any of the women's lives, because they were single, unattached individuals, many of whom were not employable. |
