Homelessness in Orange County: Examining the Role of the State through Street-Level Encounters

This research study centers the everyday interactions between street-level bureaucrats at the frontline of public service and homeless residents. It follows in the tradition of examining the state ethnographically which allows for the monolith that is the state to be disaggregated into its different parts by zeroing into different bureaucracies, in this case the homeless social service bureaucracy. This, to examine how and why discretion—the legal authority of government officials to enforce the law—is exercised. Street-level bureaucrats are low-level public service employees such as teachers, police officers, and firefighters (Lipsky, 1980). In the case of homelessness policy and service delivery, street-level bureaucrats are most often law enforcement, code enforcement, public health workers, and non-profit sector workers. Using qualitative methods including interviews, ethnographic observation, and document analysis, this study seeks to understand how and why street-level bureaucrats use their discretion to regulate homelessness and poverty and how this regulation fits within a larger backdrop of urban governance, institutional behavior, and structural violence in a Southern California city referred to here as, Beach City