Abstract
The past two decades witnessed a resurgence of interest in working-class suburbs and suburbanites. Policy experts, demographers, and other social scientists have studied trends in suburban poverty, particularly in older, “inner ring” areas that now exhibit signs of distress once commonly associated with the postwar city. Many poor families in these areas rely on welfare (Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC]/Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF]) as one of several survival strategies. Yet even though suburban poverty came into prominence during an era of welfare retrenchment, the suburban impacts of reform remain largely unexplored.
Terese Lawinski’s thoughtful ethnography begins to fill this gap. Her case study focuses on Westchester County, a relatively affluent jurisdiction with concentrations of poverty, just north of New York City. Lawinski’s multiyear research, conducted primarily in 2004, includes interviews with suburban welfare recipients and welfare agency employees, as well as participant observation in membership and advocacy organizations.
The author’s goals are broader than specifically suburban ones—perhaps too broad, as I discuss below—and extend to a consideration of welfare reform in general. Lawinski uses interviewee narratives to challenge stereotypes about welfare recipients and to illustrate how reform has contributed to economic insecurity, psychological stress, and family disruption. After a brief introduction, the second chapter introduces us to a number of key informants, while the third provides a concise summary of welfare politics during the twentieth century. The remainder of the book examines the struggles that poor families face in a post-PRWORA (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) era. Lawinski and her informants guide us through a welfare bureaucracy that often enough operates to the recipient’s detriment, both when caseworkers exercise their judgment and when they follow the labyrinthine letter of the neoliberal law. Applying a life-cycle analysis to her recipients’ histories, Lawinski argues that TANF’s lifetime restriction disregards the pressures and contingencies that push some recipients into the welfare system repeatedly. On entering the world of work, these recipients are at the mercy of their employers, who demand worker flexibility (in the form of hours worked, etc.), without allowing workers the flexibility to meet their own caregiving obligations. New work requirements render welfare bureaucracy similarly inflexible: whereas welfare recipients were able to pursue education under AFDC, TANF’s “work first” approach reduces their options and confines them to positions with little opportunity for advancement. Lawinski ends her book with a welcome policy update that brings us through the recent recession, to the eve of the 2010 TANF reauthorization.
Throughout these chapters, Living on the Edge in Suburbia provides a wealth of ethnographic detail. Lawinski’s approach gives the reader a sense of her informants’ life courses, which often include long periods of economic insecurity and frustrating odysseys through a bureaucracy that often seems designed to aggravate instability rather than alleviate it. Lawinski’s exposition is direct, and she allows her interviewees to tell their own stories. There are advantages and drawbacks to this approach. The book is accessible, and some selections (e.g., the chapter on labor flexibility) could work well in an undergraduate course that explored poverty, welfare, and low-wage work. But as a whole, the book tips too far toward description at the expense of analysis. The narratives are vivid, but at points seemed to be evidence in search of strong claims.
When the author turns to analysis, her approach raises deeper questions about the book’s focus. Much of Living on the Edge is devoted to understanding welfare reform and recipients generally, rather than their suburban context or character. As a result, many of the narratives presented here are familiar from the welfare reform literature; most of this terrain has been explored by other academic and popular writers, such as Sharon Hays, Jason DeParle, Andrew Cherlin, and Katherine Newman (see Hays 2003 inter alia). This is not to say that more research along similar lines is not needed. Stereotypes have endured, and policies have become more punitive; Living on the Edge laudably provides still more empirical support for existing critiques, but without adding many new insights of its own.
These limitations are partly a product of Lawinski’s site. Given the timing of the case study, readers might expect the book to provide new insights on what happens to those who exhaust their TANF payments. Such insights would be especially useful in the aftermath of a recession, during which welfare receipt increased only slightly. But New York’s relatively generous system—which uses state funds to extend benefits beyond the five-year time limit—leaves fewer poor families without any vestige of a safety net. (One could make the argument that if families struggle in the context of generosity, the conditions in other, more punitive states must be considerably worse.)
The author does take steps toward understanding welfare’s specifically suburban effects. She describes her field site, and notes Westchester County’s marked race and class segregation; when Lawinski describes her research, many are surprised that poverty exists in the area. She considers the high cost of living in the suburbs, and examines the gross inadequacy of local entry-level service-sector wages in light of local housing prices (pp. 109-11). Interviewees who lose welfare and housing subsidies worry that their families will be forced out of Westchester. These are suggestive points that call for sustained consideration—the invisibility and/or segregation of the suburban poor, the role of government action in providing a suburban “housing wage”—but for the most part, the suburban dimension is relegated to the background.
This is unfortunate, as many interesting questions about the suburbs remain unanswered. Given that the rhetoric of welfare reform drew so heavily on the discourse of concentrated poverty, what effects have suburban race and class segregation had on local welfare politics (and potentially bureaucracy)? We learn much about the personal histories of these informants, but far less about their time-geographies—how do they move through suburban localities that hold different sets of opportunities for more and less affluent residents? Studies by Scott Allard and others, for example, underline the paucity of social services available to the suburban poor (most recently, Allard and Roth 2010). A more geographical approach might also consider how welfare reform takes place in the context of complex rescalings— not just the devolution of public assistance to states and local level, but the reorganization and coordination of regional economies and the development of regional social movements.
Welfare recipients’ struggles may include race and class exclusion by suburban governments, residents, and businesses. In Westchester County, local antidiscrimination activists sued the county government, alleging that it had failed to comply with federal fair housing mandates; under the resulting desegregation pact (ratified in September 2009), the county agreed to build and acquire affordable housing and to challenge local zoning that impedes affordable housing construction. This is the type of political context that faces the suburban poor when they lose Section 8 vouchers (as one of Lawinski’s informants did) and attempt to find replacement housing.
Living on the Edge in Suburbia offers the reader a window on the struggles of the suburban poor. Lawinski evocatively illustrates how welfare reform has produced instability and stress for recipients by stretching them between the competing obligations of caregiving, work, and bureaucracy. In so doing, Living the Edge adds empirical detail to a critical literature that has highlighted the shortcomings of PRWORA in practice and called for a reconsideration of policy. At the same time, the book only begins to explore what will undoubtedly become pressing concerns for social scientists and policymakers alike in the coming years: the condition of the suburban poor, the rescaling of the welfare state, and the shifting relationship between the two.