The local state and homeless shelters: Beyond revanchism?

Within a context of the purported punitive or revanchist city, I examine a seemingly more accommodating, social welfare response to homelessness—the homeless shelter—and examine if it may provide an empirical and theoretical counterweight to the current understandings of homelessness that narrowly focus on anti-homeless ordinances and expulsion from public spaces. Upon an empirical profiling of the provision, location, growth and form of shelters in the city of Los Angeles (1996–2000), I surmise that there was little evidence to suggest that Los Angeles shelters were systematically punitive/revanchist. I then propose an alternative framework—poverty management—to understand homeless regulation in a more managerial and ambivalent way.