Making the Third Ghetto: Race, Gender, and Family Homelessness in Washington, DC, 1977-1989

Abstract

This article posits that the emergency shelter system which emerged in the 1970s, first as an informal network of local and faith-based assistance and then institutionalized by the late 1980s, was Washington, DC's third ghetto. Defining this new, visible homelessness in the context of the third ghetto exposes its points of convergence with the second ghetto in the increasing use of welfare hotels. This study revisits Arnold Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto to examine housing precarity and racial subordination in Washington, DC's first and second ghettos. Additionally, I argue that acknowledging the resilience of the black female heads of household (FHHs) living in the public housing of the 1970s and 1980s in the second ghetto and examining homeless families living in welfare hotels in connection with neoliberal policies and practices in homeless assistance service provision during the 1980s are essential to understanding the making of the third ghetto in Washington, DC.