'No relief but upon the terms of coming into the house' - controlled spaces, invisible disentitlements, and homelessness in an urban shelter system.

• Author: Bennett, Susan D.
• Position: District of Columbia

The waiting area is a stark, oppressively stuffy room with dim lights and pale walls. A yellowed map of the United States hangs conspicuously in one corner, while the remaining walls are bare, except for the black and white flyers dot[ting] them, commanding "NO EATING IN THIS WAITING AREA." The gray floor is strewn with broken crayons, pencils, and scraps of paper filled with child[ren's] scrawl, perhaps representative of their own innocent frustration in the waiting. There is no clock on the wall - a fitting omission in a room where time stands still.... By 2:00 p.m. children who have been at OESSS since 8:00 a.m. are either crying from hunger or falling asleep. Women cannot feed their children in the building, nor can they leave to get food for fear that they will be called for their intake interview and miss it. One woman fed her children sandwiches in the bathroom so they would not starve while waiting to be called.[1]

1. INTRODUCTION

   From roughly September of 1991 through May of 1992, a group of community activists and law students spent time in the waiting room of the District of Columbia's Office of Emergency Shelter and Support Services (OESSS).[2] They had two goals: to provide basic information and assistance to homeless families applying for overnight shelter, and to note how those families were being treated in the application process, which, up to that point, remained unobserved and undocumented.[3]

   This perspective on applicants' experiences revealed a waiting room ethos of undisclosed information, unexplained delays, and, above all, endless waiting, punctuated by humiliating demands for information. Sometimes the applicants' search ended in the waiting room before it had truly begun - not because the applicants failed to qualify for public assistance benefits, but because they never got the chance to ask for them. Discouraged by the demands of the application process itself, impoverished would-be applicants dropped out before they could be officially denied or counted - or even noticed.

   The disjunction between a system of emergency relief, designed on paper to meet desperate need as expeditiously as possible, and the treatment that applicants actually received, inspired this investigation into the range and historical context of preapplication discouragement practices. This Essay outlines the ways in which access to social services is frustrated in informal settings, such as the waiting room at OESSS, and explores the genesis of such practices.

   Litigators use the term "discouragement" to refer to informal practices that deter poor people from applying for public benefits.[4] These tactics form a virulent subcategory of the informal "bureaucratic disentitlement" processes used by public assistance offices to withhold benefits from arguably eligible recipients.[5] Bureaucratic disentitlement can be achieved through any practice that frustrates attempts to apply for benefits, or that delays actual receipt of the benefits once the applicant's eligibility is officially confirmed. The term discouragement refers specifically to those practices implemented by public assistance offices that make the process of applying for benefits so wearisome and unpleasant that the applicant simply gives up and goes away.

   Discouragement practices can take many forms. The most frequently noted method of discouragement is "verification extremism": the unnecessary demand for hard-to-obtain proof of eligibility for the benefits as a prerequisite to filing an application.(6) Other means of discouraging applications for benefits include misinforming or withholding information - about benefits generally, the applicant's eligibility for a particular benefit, or the status of her application for that benefit - and demanding the physical presence of the would-be applicant during every step of the process.

   Most of these practices are invented and implemented by front-line welfare workers. Since preapplication procedure is informal and largely unregulated, line workers are forced to improvise. Welfare workers interpret articulated pressures from above - for example, to increase efficiency and reduce error rates - through their own conflicts about the poor and through the unarticulated messages they receive from the bureaucratic culture of disentitlement. Informal discouragement practices, implemented before formal eligibility criteria take precedence, strongly reflect workers' personal conceptions of the causes of poverty and its proper cures. These beliefs reflect ancient debates about the extent of communal obligations to the poor.

   Not all manifestations of discouragement are the result of decisions by individual line workers. Many are the consequence of higher-level government decisions about relief policy. For example, the enforced sequestration of would-be applicants in one isolated physical space, a common feature of many public assistance systems, is the result of a government decision about where to locate an intake center. The sheer inconvenience of traveling to and from an isolated intake center can clearly discourage would-be applicants from seeking benefits, or from persisting in their quest for these benefits. Other seemingly neutral and system-based forms of discouragement stem from the administrative inability of social services staffs to cope with increased demand. Long lines, interminable waits, and sometimes closed doors, when offices must shut down intake to deal with their backlogs, all exhaust applicants; often they deflect them absolutely. This Essay explores the facial "neutrality" of such practices, and suggests that they are neither so neutral, nor so separate from the actions of individual workers, as they appear at first glance.

   Paradoxically, the very constitutional principles and statutory and regulatory safeguards designed to protect the rights of individuals and to safeguard the administrative integrity of welfare programs may provide perverse incentives to cut individuals off before the application process has begun. Due process protects access to benefits as a "matter of statutory entitlement for persons qualified to receive them."(7) "Qualified to receive" is the "trigger";(8) entitlement status depends on the behavior of those in a position to determine eligibility.

   Federal and local benefits statutes and regulations grant applicants enforceable guarantees of procedural openness, promptness, and certainty in the evaluation of their qualifications. But only officially designated "applicants" - that is, the people who actually get to fill out an application - can invoke these norms. The whole point of bureaucratic disentitlement is to keep the key event of filing an application, with all the administrative and legal scrutiny it can precipitate, from happening. This Essay will discuss why would-be applicants, more than any other actors in the benefits system, need the protection of an encompassing "dignitary" due process now more than ever.(9) Without such a safeguard, applicants are no better than supplicants.

2. FACES OF DISCOURAGEMENT

   1. Two Faces of Preapplication Discouragement: Tanya and Shauna

      The informality of preapplication discouragement practices makes them difficult to categorize. They take shape in countless variations and recombinations. But several recurrent "faces of discouragement," observable across a wide range of welfare interactions, can be isolated. Most discouragement practices that we observed at OESSS fall within four basic categories: the demand for the applicant's physical presence as a precondition to application, the physical isolation of the applicant in the waiting room, the withholding of information from the applicant, and verification extremism.

      These preapplication discouragement processes and their effects are best understood through the experiences of would-be applicants. The following stories, drawn from the waiting room of the OESSS, begin to define the meaning of discouragement.

      1. Tanya

         Tanya was nineteen years old. She had two infant daughters with whom she was living temporarily in a shelter for adults. The shelter could no longer accommodate the three as a family. Tanya exhausted the rest of her limited housing resources - friends, family - and then tried OESSS. She visited OESSS twice. The first time the intake supervisor refused to give her an application because, although she brought her children, she failed to bring their social security cards or birth certificates. In connection with her application for federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Tanya already had sent requests to the Maryland Department of Vital Statistics for copies of the birth records, but had not received them yet.(10)

         After her first unsuccessful attempt at applying for shelter, Tanya called the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless (WLCH),(11) and was referred to two law student advocates. At her request, they called the supervisor that afternoon, to emphasize Tanya's need for shelter and to explain that she had already requested and paid for her children's birth certificates but had not yet received them. He told the students to send her to OESSS, where she would be placed if there was room. Hoping to obviate the need for Tanya to make another useless trip, the students called the supervisor an hour later. They assured him that Tanya would arrive and asked him to hold a space for her. He refused to do so.

         For the second time that day, Tanya traveled to the waiting room to apply for shelter. Once again, her two children were with her; this time, they were feverish and coughing. After she arrived, the intake supervisor told her that there was no space left, and refused to give her an application. She and her daughters departed into a rainy October afternoon. At 10:00 p.m., she called an ambulance to bring the children to Children's Hospital, where the children were diagnosed as having ear infections and bronchitis. Despite its unsuitability as a...