Better Must Come: an Interview with Matthew Marr
- Oct 20, 2015
- 5 min read
Better Must Come: Exiting Homelessness in Two Global Cities, a new book out from Florida International University Professor Matthew D. Marr, is both ethnography and investigation of homelessness and the people experiencing it in Los Angeles and Tokyo. In the book, Marr follows thirty-four people in transitional housing programs. He argues that these experiences show homelessness to be not a stable condition, identity, or culture, but rather a socially-generated and traumatic predicament that can be overcome.
We spoke with Professor Marr about Better Must Come and his thoughts on homelessness in Los Angeles and Tokyo.
In the book you mention that early on, you worked as a volunteer at the Midnight Mission in Los Angeles. Can you talk a little about how that experience influenced your work?
At the Mission, now they have a new big building, but the old building was smaller. So I was sleeping in a dorm with people who were in the program who staffed the facility and with folks who were coming in off the street. Being there made me wonder what really happens long-term to people who experience homelessness. What explains why some people might do better than others?
That experience exposed me to the hope and camaraderie that exist when people are reeling from structural exclusion and vulnerability … socially marginalized folks who have often experienced a lot of trauma. [Midnight Mission] was a place where people together try to resist that, and put pieces of their lives back together, and since then I’ve been interested in places like that, and keep going back to them.
Which similarity between experiences of homelessness in Tokyo and experiences of homelessness in Los Angeles did you find most striking? Which difference?
The similarity, I think, was mostly at the individual level. It was the general poise that I found people had in front of some real dismal conditions. In both places the people I interviewed had a focus on the future and were unwavering that eventually they would be in a better state and get out of that predicament.
The differences are really the heart of the whole book. The most glaring thing was people’s relationships with their families. In Japan people were completely disconnected with their families, whereas in L.A. people could be in contact with their families on a daily basis but the family wasn’t in a position to help.
I argue in the book that it had something to do with the welfare regimes in the two countries. In Japan it’s built on this breadwinner model and that’s become a norm for folks. When people can’t live up to it, they tend to leave the family.
How do you think Los Angeles might learn from Tokyo, and vice versa? Are there lessons there in terms of pathways out of homelessness the cities could learn from each other?
It’s more about broader structural differences—things that might prevent homelessness in addition to providing pathways out. In L.A., something that could be learned from Tokyo—there’s a wider social safety net in Japan. In more recent years Japan has expanded access to livelihood protection. That has dramatically reduced street homelessness in Japan and has played a role in keeping it much lower.
Along the lines of really broad things … in Tokyo you don’t have the socio-spatial or racial inequalities that produce so much homelessness in the U.S. All that American-style institutionalized racial inequality, they don’t have it in Tokyo. On the ground you can see how different that is, in terms of the level of homelessness in the two places and who’s affected by it. It’s important for Americans to know this isn’t inevitable—in other places it doesn’t exist.
Tokyo could learn from the service delivery system in L.A. Basically, Tokyo has subcontracted programs to a collective of social welfare organizations that have provided social services to the metropolitan area for decades, and it’s basically a vertically organized corporation with subcontractors of the Tokyo metropolitan government. I’ve found it’s led to rigid programs that are disconnected from private non-profit organizations. It’s affected the trust that program participants place in staff.
In L.A., organizations were encouraged to have ties with other organizations, so caseworkers had a tendency to treat people more holistically; in Tokyo, there was a rigid time constraint imposed. So Tokyo could learn from service delivery in L.A.
You talk about global cities and globalization as being “contingent,” meaning that they play out in multiple contexts (social, individual, economic, etc.). Does that also mean we are also looking at many globalized communities, rather than a single “global community”?
I try to show in the book that this experience of homelessness is tied to neoliberal globalization, like the shortage of living wage, employment, shortage of affordable housing, and some of these individually focused programs. But the way those things play out are very different in the two cities.
So yes, I agree there are different global communities, but I think that doesn’t mean places are just too different and that we can’t communicate with each other or that policies applied in one place can’t be applied to others. Some of these similarities can promote connections between different communities, but the differences provide lessons so communities can learn.
Through comparative research we can find out what I call in the book ‘more forgiving contexts’ that can reduce homelessness or provide pathways out of homelessness, and we can think about how they can be adapted and applied in different places. But if you’re not in communication with other places you can’t learn. By being aware of these things we can learn from each other and address these more structural problems.
Is there anything you’d like to add?
The focus on identity and culture builds discussions of deviance into policy measures. You see programs focused on changing individuals rather than addressing the structural things in society. In the book I show how important it is to connect with staff of agencies. When an entire program is built on idea that people have this identity of being homeless and this deviant sub-culture, programs become too disciplinarian. Some social scientists stick to this idea of “homeless people” and scientifically, I believe it’s an invalid concept. HUD has turned away from “homeless people” and now talk about “people experiencing homelessness.” We should move away from that not just to be politically correct but for scientific reasons as well.
About the Author
Matthew Marr is an associate professor of sociology for the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies and the Asian Studies Program in the Green School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University. Focusing on American and Japanese cities, Marr's research explores how overcoming homelessness is shaped by contexts operating at multiple levels of social analysis, from the global to the individual. He is particularly interested in the role of social ties in this process, and how ties are affected by organizational, neighborhood and policy contexts. In addition to his book Better Must Come: Exiting Homelessness in Two Global Cities published by Cornell University Press, Marr has published articles in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Journal of Urban Affairs, Cities, Urban Geography, and Housing Policy Debate. He is currently conducting a comparative ethnographic study of “service hub”/ “service ghetto” neighborhoods of Miami (Overtown), Los Angeles (Skid Row), Tokyo (San’ya), and Osaka (Kamagasaki) tentatively titled “Recovery Zone? Human Security at the Margins of Four Global Cities.”
You can reach Matt Marr at mmarr@fiu.edu.
Disclaimer: The opinions, representations and statements made within this guest article are those of the author and not of the Institute of Global Homelessness as a whole.
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