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Area (2012) 44.2, 208–216
doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01061.x
Resisting gentrification-induced displacement: Advantages and disadvantages to ‘staying put’ among non-profit social services in London and Los Angeles Geoffrey DeVerteuil School of Geography, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ Email:
[email protected] Revised manuscript received 30 August 2011 This paper focuses on resistance to gentrification-induced displacement among non-profit social services in London and Los Angeles. I identify three key strategies for ‘staying put’: private, voluntary sector embeddedness, and public sector support. Results suggested both advantages and disadvantages to resisting displacement, which also varied by city. Key words: gentrification, displacement, non-profit social services, Los Angeles, London, comparative
Introduction It is an auspicious time to be considering issues of gentrification and displacement, with a recent surge in the attention paid to the exclusionary displacement of the less well-off (e.g. Atkinson 2000; Crump 2002; Perez 2004; Freeman 2006; Newman and Wyly 2006; Slater 2006; Lees et al. 2008). Nonetheless, there remain important gaps, especially with regards to how gentrification-induced displacement may be resisted, despite the assumption that effective resistance has in fact waned since the 1980s (Watt 2009). In this paper, I make three contributions to understanding resistance to gentrification-induced displacement. First, there is a lack of comparative studies on resistance to displacement, despite the significant amount of literature on comparing gentrification patterns (e.g. Carpenter and Lees 1995; Lees 1994; Harris 2008; Smith 1996). Second, almost all the focus on resistance to gentrification-induced displacement noted above has been on residents (especially in public housing), rather than other potentially vulnerable actors such as non-profit social services.1 As Walks and August noted, gentrification presents a policy problem regarding how to maintain low-income communities in the inner city, where the non-profit social services that such communities depend upon are typically concentrated. (2008, 2595)
Third and finally, the literature on displacement seldom mentions the advantages and disadvantages of resisting displacement, nor does it explicitly consider active and passive resistance. The paper begins by conceptualising a threefold set of active strategies to resist gentrification-induced displacement. This is followed by an account of the context and methods, focusing on case studies in London and Los Angeles. The results are then outlined and filtered by the three anti-displacement strategies. Finally, I discuss the wider implications with regards to popular concepts of urban space, such as ‘rights to the city’, revanchism and mobility.
Conceptualising active resistance to displacement My conceptualisation of resistance to gentrificationinduced displacement draws inspiration from, and reworks to some extent, two existing literatures: more broadly, (1) the barriers to gentrification (Ley and Dobson 2008; Shaw 2005; Walks and August 2008) and, more specifically, (2) the geographies of anti-displacement, based primarily on the work of Newman and Wyly, who sought to explain why gentrified neighbourhoods in New York City do not always produce displacement – that after two generations of intense gentrification, any lowand moderate-income renters who have managed to avoid
Area Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 208–216, 2012 ISSN 0004-0894 © 2011 The Author. Area © 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
Resisting gentrification-induced displacement displacement are likely to be those people who have found ways to adapt and survive in an increasingly competitive housing market. (2006, 28)
Just as there are limits to gentrification, so too are there limits to gentrification-induced displacement. I identify three strategies of active resistance adapted from these two literatures, and then apply them to the case study data in the subsequent section. First, Newman and Wyly (2006) identified a variety of active private residential strategies – including overcrowding, enduring high housing costs and poor housing quality, and owner-occupation – that effectively inhibited displacement. For non-profit social services, these private strategies can be translated into two key barriers: owning your own premises, or leasing it from a supportive landlord that is not profit-seeking. As Shaw noted at the neighbourhood scale, the higher the owner-occupation levels to start with, the lower the likelihood of gentrification gaining a strong hold. This is due in part to the restriction on the number of properties entering the market . . . (2005, 176)
These two private strategies are conceptualised as an obvious barrier to being displaced by gentrification. In essence, they involve removing oneself from the vagaries of the private real estate market, which is linked to de-commodification and the tenets of the public city (Dear 1980). Second, voluntary sector strategies may draw strength from the efforts of community mobilisation and entrenched community solidarity, producing ‘cultures of alternative values’ and ‘a politics of resistance’ that are facilitated through concentrated place-embeddedness (Ley and Dobson 2008; Newman and Wyly 2006; Shaw 2005, 179). This translates into the entrenchment of displacement-resistant clusters of non-profit social service facilities that provide a common front against gentrification-induced displacement and dismantlement. These clusters, service hubs or even service-dependent ghettoes, seen as beneficial to clients because of their agglomeration economies,2 now also appear as protective to individual facilities. Of course, non-profit social service clustering has not always guaranteed absolute protection: Chicago’s notorious ‘Hobohemia’ was gradually dismantled in the 1980s and 1990s, and the Bowery District, once America’s most prominent Skid Row, was unrecognisably gentrified by the early 2000s (DeVerteuil and Evans 2009). Nonetheless, the conspicuous concentration of like-minded non-profit social services and their clientele have proven invaluable in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Lees et al. 2008; Ley and Dobson 2008), San Francisco’s Tenderloin (Hutton 2010) and Sydney’s Redfern (Shaw 2000). Facilities may also be protected if
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they are part of a larger, overarching and resource-rich non-profit social service network, such as the Salvation Army or the Catholic Church. Third, Newman and Wyly (2006) pointed to the vital role of local state interventions, essentially public housing and rent stabilisation schemes, in guaranteeing that some poor renters in New York City ‘stayed in place’. Shaw referred, in the case of Melbourne’s St Kilda, to the extraction of ‘substantial state support for the fledgling community housing program – an act that was instrumental in perpetuating a culture of egalitarianism’ (2005, 181). Supportive local governmental interventions exist and persist, running contrary to Smith’s (2002) globalised heuristic of a locally subsidised strategy of revanchist gentrification. For non-profit social services, local government interventions that may inhibit displacement can include direct financial support to services, land use controls and dedicated space that guarantee a persistent and legally-legitimate base for services, a recognition that central locations are essential for non-profit social services in terms of maximising visibility and client accessibility (despite also rendering them potentially vulnerable to gentrification-induced displacement), and the fact that charitable organisations may pay reduced property taxes where otherwise they would have been priced out with pervasive gentrification.
Context and methods Gentrification involves at least four key elements (Lees et al. 2008): reinvestment of capital; social upgrading of locale by incoming high-income groups; landscape change; and, crucially for the purposes of this paper, direct or indirect displacement of low-income groups. For the purposes of this research, two global city-regions were chosen, each offering differing yet insightful experiences of gentrification and resistance to displacement (DeVerteuil 2011). Greater London’s overspill gentrification has been well-chronicled, and features a distinctly centripetal model based around a highly desirable central core (e.g. Butler and Lees 2006; Hamnett 2003). Conversely, Los Angeles County is far more polycentric and patchy, leading to a weak-centre pattern of gentrification structured by multiple and competing cores (Reese et al. 2010). Moreover, the timings and intensities of gentrification differed: simply put, London has been more intensely gentrified, and over a more sustained period, than Los Angeles (DeVerteuil 2011). Los Angeles-style gentrification is more recent, and appears driven more by new-build citadels and closeness to natural amenities (especially ocean and hills). The study period was 1998– 2008, thereby overlapping with the return of gentrification after the early 1990s
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recession, its escalation with the housing bubble of the early and mid-2000s, and the 2007 market peak (Lees 2009). As part of a larger comparative project on whether gentrification was displacing non-profit social services (see DeVerteuil 2011), a total of 81 non-profit social service facilities (35 in London and 46 in Los Angeles) were personally interviewed in eight different upgrading areas (Islington, Lambeth, Southwark and Westminster boroughs in London; Downtown, Hollywood, Santa Monica and Venice areas in Los Angeles) that held significant concentrations of non-profit social services. The London boroughs were selected based on the extensive quantitative and qualitative literature on measuring and identifying gentrification within central London (e.g. Hamnett 2003; Butler and Lees 2006); for Los Angeles, research is thin on the ground, requiring that gentrified areas be identified when median sale prices during the study period (1998–2008, per square foot) rose more quickly than for Los Angeles County as whole (see DeVerteuil 2011, 1567). The sampling was based on customised social service databases with a 1998 start point and a 2008 end point (see DeVerteuil 2011, 1568). For Los Angeles, the 1998 database featured 376 unique facilities, while in 2008, the figure was 429; for London, 214 facilities in 1998 and 273 facilities in 2008. From there, three sample frames were employed. The sampling strategy for the first and third frames was purposive and variability-maximising, rather than random or stratified, following the need to encapsulate a highly diverse range of social services, rather than just those catering to the homeless and mentally ill (e.g. Dear 1980). The second sampling frame was based on a convenience strategy. The first sampling frame selected a wide range of social services – 20 facilities in each borough/area – with the same name, but not necessarily the same address, between 1998 and 2008. This strategy, combined with the relatively expansive geographies of the boroughs and areas, contributed in some ways to avoiding the predictable error of looking for displacement only in the immediate area where it is thought to occur (Atkinson 2000). The second frame selected facilities that began in one of the eight study boroughs/areas in 1998, but had disappeared by 2008; these facilities were identified through convenience sampling from facility interviews from the first and third sampling frames. The third sampling frame involved selecting 10 facilities from each borough/area that appeared on the databases in 2008 but not 1998. Together, 240 facilities were contacted between November 2008 and March 2010, about 30 in each borough/area, and primarily through sample frames 1 and 3. The response rate was 34 per cent (81 facilities), a fairly typical rate for studies of the voluntary sector. Interviewing was essential to ascertain the motivations
behind (or the nature of) movement/non-movement, so as to distinguish between voluntary movement/nonmovement, movement/non-movement due to gentrification effects or other circumstances such as changes in funding or the need for expansion. Moreover, I interviewed one or two community spokespersons (e.g. nonprofit social service umbrella organisations, local politicians or planners) for each borough or area in an effort to obtain a ‘big picture’ of gentrification, social change and non-profit social service dynamics. This person was selected through a convenience strategy, based on interviews with the facilities. For this study, displacement was defined as involuntary movement in terms of address, or what Hartman described as ‘changes of residence which are hoisted on people, which they did not seek out on purpose, for which they may lack the social and economic coping resources’ (1984, 302). This is in contrast to his idea of ‘staying put’, whereby facilities remain in place, whether actively (using the three strategies outlined in the preceding conceptual section) or more passively, given that gentrification may induce immobility when the upgrading of surrounding (central-city) areas and its attendant rise in NIMBY (‘not in my back yard’) make it impossible to move and/or expand in situ. I found that 21 per cent of all facilities had experienced at least one episode of gentrification-induced displacement in the 10-year study period, compared with 63 per cent who had primarily experienced immobility or ‘staying put’ (DeVerteuil 2011). This threefold difference motivated me further to understand why so many facilities ‘stayed put’, especially their use of active resistance strategies. This difference also pointed to the ironic outcome that alongside displacement, gentrification can also engender considerable immobility, aligning with Newman and Wyly’s (2006) insights. My analytical strategy focused on applying the three conceptualised resistance strategies to the actual results, limiting the analysis to the 51 facilities (out of 81) whose primary outcome over the 10-year period was ‘immobility’; it should be noted that not all of these 51 facilities practised active strategies of resistance. The results were then analysed comparatively between London and Los Angeles. My comparative approach was important to grasp how barriers to displacement varied according to different urban contexts, to understand how the barriers to displacement emerged and developed differently in different places. For instance, although the extent of immobility in the larger study was not significantly different between London and Los Angeles (DeVerteuil 2011), the exact nature of the resistance was not studied in depth. Doing so would shed light on the local contingencies that shape distinctive local geographies of resistance to displacement.
Area Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 208–216, 2012 ISSN 0004-0894 © 2011 The Author. Area © 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
Resisting gentrification-induced displacement
Results: active strategies of resistance The facility interviews provided rich material for understanding the complex entanglements of gentrification, displacement and resistance to displacement (Newman and Wyly 2006). Table 1 identifies, from within the proportion of facilities experiencing immobility (n = 51), which active resistance strategies were employed, bearing in mind that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive (e.g. beneficial leases may be a private strategy, but if the landlord is part of the voluntary, faith-based or state sector, then there would be overlap with up to two other strategies). Figures 1 and 2 show the spatial patterning of involuntarily immobile facilities in London and Los Angeles. From the two figures, no dramatic spatial differences between London and Los Angeles can be ascertained, although Table 1
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there are several conspicuous clusters that will be further discussed under ‘voluntary sector strategies’. These clusters seem to be more centrally located, rather than peripheral, suggesting greater immobility (and perhaps more advantages to stay) in more intensely gentrified areas.
Results: private strategies Overall, the profile of those who employed private strategies to avoid displacement did so mostly through advantageously cheap leases in London, and owning outright in Los Angeles; moreover, they tended to serve more clients and be part of larger service networks. Despite some of the most expensive real estate in the world, several facilities in London managed to resist displacement through beneficial lease arrangements. The first example is from
Overall results
London Los Angeles Totals:
Immobile facilities
Resistance 1: private strategies
Resistance 2: voluntary sector strategies
Resistance 3: political strategies
21 out of 35 (60%) 30 out of 46 (65%) 51 out of 81 (63%)
14 out of 21 24 out of 30 38 out of 51
10 out of 21 16 out of 30 25 out of 51
10 out of 21 8 out of 30 18 out of 51
Figure 1
Patterns of London facilities experiencing immobility
Area Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 208–216, 2012 ISSN 0004-0894 © 2011 The Author. Area © 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
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Figure 2
Patterns of Los Angeles facilities experiencing immobility
Southwark, and in particular a facility within the rapidly redeveloping Bankside/London Bridge Station area, which has effectively become an extension of the City (Harris 2008; Hutton 2010). More to the point, Southwark Borough Council has been aggressively pushing for redevelopment around the London Bridge Station area, including Europe’s tallest building (Plate 1). From the larger study on gentrification-induced displacement of non-profit social services, this area also featured some displacement, especially directly north of London Bridge Station, once a magnet for rough sleepers (DeVerteuil 2011). In the shadow of all this redevelopment pressure, however, was a day centre serving upwards of 200 homeless and precariously housed, with food, showers, medical care, clothing and welfare advice. Since 1982, this day centre has remained in place because the building is owned by the Catholic Diocese of Southwark and is rent-free. Since the landlord was not profit-seeking, and that currently there are no equallycentral (to its clientele) locations available in highly gentrified Central London, the day centre saw no reason to move but is also effectively trapped. A similar story emerged for another day centre for rough sleepers in Westminster, this one but a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square, the Strand and the Theatre District. The day centre
Plate 1
Image of the Shard under construction Photo: G DeVerteuil 2009
has been in the area since 1988, and its highly central location has been instrumental in helping rough sleepers stay off the nearby and heavily-touristed streets. Since its beginnings, the local church (St-Martin-in-the-Fields), which owns the facility, has charged £1 rent per annum.
Area Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 208–216, 2012 ISSN 0004-0894 © 2011 The Author. Area © 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
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Plate 2
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Concatenated image of Los Angeles and Fourth Streets in Skid Row Photos: G DeVerteuil 1998 and 2009
While there were some similar examples of privatelyarranged minimal leases in Los Angeles, the predominant experience was private ownership. A prominent private foundation bought a 12-story former hotel building for transitional housing for the homeless in Downtown Los Angeles, and helped finance a facility for a health clinic in Venice. Neither facility needed to worry about displacement, although they were equally challenged by their gentrified surroundings and its attendant rise in NIMBYism. Finally, a drug rehabilitation clinic on the Venice boardwalk, with million-dollar views of the Pacific Ocean, bought its property in 1987. It did so by being part of a nation-wide rehab non-profit that had deep pockets, and is now displacement-resistant despite rapid gentrification along this once affordable stretch of coastline in Los Angeles County.
Results: voluntary sector strategies The overall profile of these facilities was quite heterogeneous, especially with regards to funding and ownership status, yet spatially they tended to operate within distinctive service hubs or clusters, as Figures 1 and 2 suggested. The most prominent service hub was Skid Row in Downtown Los Angeles, which in its 40-block ‘homeless containment zone’ has the highest concentration of shelter beds, subsidised housing and rehabs than anywhere else in the Western United States (Reese et al. 2010). As interviews with the dozen emergency facilities emphasised, the Skid Row homeless service community has become so large, dense, vested and publicly-funded over such a long period that it would be a gross waste of taxpayers’ money to actually dismantle it; rather, the market strategy has been to compress Skid Row and gradually erode its sharp boundaries, particularly on its western (gentrifying) edge (see Plate 2) (DeVerteuil 2011). Large Downtown Skid Row emergency shelters (with up to 1000 beds) were stuck between a rock and a hard place as well: either stay in place involuntarily or disap-
pear completely, since no other neighbourhood in Los Angeles County would conceivably accept such a stigmatised clientele (DeVerteuil 2006; Reese et al. 2010). So the very conspicuousness of Skid Row’s concentrated homeless facilities mitigated against its displacement; another reason may also have been that Downtown’s ‘weakcentre’ gentrification is simply not strong enough to overcome 30-odd years of inertia and stubbornly entrenched non-profit social service community (Reese et al. 2010). Therefore, the concentrated presence of non-profit social service itself becomes a barrier to gentrified incursions, a finding that belies notions of dismantlement and displacement. In London, similar hubs on a lesser scale existed near Victoria (Westminster), Waterloo (Lambeth) and London Bridge (Southwark) train stations, although all of the surrounding areas have witnessed strong gentrification pressure since the 1990s. For those outside of major hubs, one favoured strategy was minimising client interaction and visibility with the neighbourhood.
Results: political strategies The overall profile of facilities that used political strategies was a combination of (1) reliance on direct and consistent statutory funding from local government and (2) subsidised leases to rent space in publicly-owned buildings. A borough-wide example of this in London was Islington, where until 2003 the council provided all registered non-profit social services with subsidised space owned by the council (personal interview). Not surprisingly, the Borough currently boasted a very large voluntary sector, comprising 14 per cent of the workforce, many localised, but also a remarkable collection of national headquarters, including the Red Cross and UK Age Concern. Another example from London was a multi-purpose community centre in Southwark (Bermondsey) for youth, those with special needs or those fleeing domestic abuse. While not run by the Borough, most of the funding was statutory, and the site was bought in 1938 as part of the settlement
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movement, when the area was still mostly heavy industry. Despite this and the strong council support that virtually guarantees in perpetuity its current location, the facility could not move into a much-needed newer and larger building, given surrounding upgrading from new-build riverside gentrification. In Los Angeles, supportive local initiatives were essential in keeping facilities in gentrifying areas (albeit involuntarily), especially in Hollywood. Hollywood was characterised by supportive council members, businesses in the Hollywood Entertainment Business Improvement District (BID) and planners in the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA)3 that made the retention (rather than dispersal/displacement) of non-profit social services a priority. A spokesperson for the Sunset and Vine BID mentioned that there is no policy to evict non-profit social service agencies; the spokesperson for the CRA confirmed that the redevelopment plans in the 1990s and 2000s all conserved an important non-profit social service component. Equally, Santa Monica sought to retain its non-profit social service mix, despite its feelings of being overburdened when compared with neighbouring areas on Los Angeles’ Westside. These two examples are in direct contrast to the Downtown CRA’s ‘managed displacement’ strategy (DeVerteuil 2011), whereby facilities were moved deeper into Skid Row to make space for gentrification on its western edges, as previously mentioned. Several large emergency shelters thus experienced ‘subsidised immobility’, but one that came at the price of being previously displaced by the CRA.
Comparing results in London and Los Angeles Like gentrification, displacement ‘plays out differently in different places, and that the process is deeply affected by local context’ (Shaw 2005, 168). It follows that London and Los Angeles both featured some key differences, as well as overarching similarities. Overall levels of resistance did not vary appreciably by intensity of gentrification, such that London, with its more sedimented upgrading over a more sustained period of time, did not feature appreciably more resistance than Los Angeles. Percentage-wise, facilities in Los Angeles were more likely to use private strategies (80%) than in London (67%), with voluntary sector strategies running at about the same levels (Los Angeles at 53%, with London at 48%). However, the greater reliance on ownership (as well as embedded non-profit social service communities) in Los Angeles (especially Downtown facilities) was more out of necessity rather than by design, given the much weaker governmental supports and greater displacement pressure overall, exacerbated by a more stigmatised and racially stigmatised clientele (DeVerteuil 2011). Given this, it should come as no surprise that political strategies were more extensive
in London (48%) than Los Angeles (27%), indicating a more supportive local government environment, although again this differed by borough: Islington was generally the most supportive, while Southwark, with its ambitions for a ‘second City’, was most probably the least (personal interview). Overall and when compared with Los Angeles, there was a far greater degree of local council intervention, ownership and rent subsidisation in London, not to mention greater governmental funding of day-to-day operations that further ensured locational stability and passive resistance to gentrification-induced displacement (Watt 2009). Intraurban unevenness was also apparent in governmental support in Los Angeles, with Hollywood and Santa Monica enjoying higher levels than Downtown.
Discussion and conclusions: the costs and benefits of ‘staying put’ in a gentrifying city The foregoing analysis clearly demonstrated the benefits of actively ‘staying put’ despite gentrification pressures, and that the three strategies of active resistance were effective in this pursuit of immobility. The most obvious benefit is the maintenance of centrality, of maximising accessibility to the most clients across urban regions who may, because of gentrification, be increasingly suffering from spatial dispersal. Alongside this, ‘staying put’ enables the persistence of service hubs in the gentrified inner city and guarantees the continued existence of the public city; the very presence of non-profit social services then may act as bulwarks against further gentrification. I may go further to speculate that gentrification itself cannot proceed if non-profit services do not exist to hide the abrasive presence of the homeless and other servicedependent clientele, but that once services do exist, subsequent gentrification is potentially blunted. So gentrification has tended to freeze social service geographies rather than disrupt or displace them, leading to resistance to further displacement and a rough co-existence, the modalities of which are characterised by countervailing practices: of increasing community NIMBY and entrepreneurial politics on the one hand, non-profit social service solidarity and uneven (yet crucial) political support on the other. As such, the legacy of the public city and its non-profit social service geographies cannot be easily remade (or undone) by gentrification in the entrepreneurial city, despite the former’s obvious vulnerabilities. However, it is essential to consider the disadvantageous consequences to actively (and especially) passively ‘staying put’ for social services, especially given that the current literature on resisting displacement, as well as the larger literature on revanchism and the ‘rights to the city’ (Smith 1996; Purcell 2002), all treat immobility as inher-
Area Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 208–216, 2012 ISSN 0004-0894 © 2011 The Author. Area © 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
Resisting gentrification-induced displacement ently positive and unproblematic. The interview material suggested several downsides to immobility, as demonstrated by the various case studies. First and foremost is the inability to find feasible locational alternatives in a gentrified city, thereby locking in facilities to their locations (and locking out newcomers). Second is the inability to expand in situ due to gentrification-infused NIMBYism. The vast majority of the 51 immobile facilities complained that gentrification had increased the level of NIMBY in their neighbourhoods, making it necessary to improve their community image and micro-manage their clientele even more. Third, there is the inability to re-balance the inequities in the non-profit social service geography of the city, especially for saturated service hubs such as Downtown Los Angeles. This confirms Dear’s remarks on the public city: the concentration of clients and facilities seems to provide a supportive environment for the user, but this environment is dominated by society’s wounded. From the exclusionary community’s viewpoint, however, the concentration of ‘deviants’ in the transient, variegated city core probably seems the least threatening solution. (1980, 238)
Fourth, staying put means that while facilities stand their ground and actively (or passively) contest displacement, the clientele themselves may be displaced further and further away to cheaper and more socially amenable locales. This is particularly a problem for very poor renters in places like Los Angeles, where governmentalsubsidised tenure is exceedingly low when compared with London (Watt 2009), but it can also apply to homeless people who have been ‘moved on’ by street clearances. Finally, my findings on the advantages and disadvantages of immobility also connect to the broader mobilities literature that postulates no inherent benefits or power to im/mobility.
Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the anonymous referees, the Nuffield Foundation and the social services themselves for their precious input. All solecisms are mine alone.
Notes 1 Non-profit social services (or human services in the UK) operate within the non-profit voluntary third sector, set across state, private market and informal sector influences. 2 Dear and Wolch (1987) caution, however, that overagglomeration and pervasive NIMBY may lead to service saturation, trapping clients within degraded, stigmatised non-profit social service ghettoes.
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3 The CRA has a contradictory agenda in Los Angeles: to redevelop the city into a world-class metropolis, while simultaneously safeguarding non-profit social services and providing affordable housing.
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Area Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 208–216, 2012 ISSN 0004-0894 © 2011 The Author. Area © 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)