Hope, Help and Freedom in Atlantic City's Un-Housed Underworld

Background & Purpose: Social science and social service research has consistently found that the chronically homeless are a notoriously difficult-to-serve population. This project draws on ethnographic data to uncover social psychological features that impact service delivery and receipt.

Methods: Based on fifteen months of daily fieldwork with a network of chronically homeless men in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Results: Informal gift-giving and norms of mutual exchange among these men – in the form of money, favors, and alcohol – facilitates their everyday survival; but, at the same time, these local norms and the moral economy of favors creates barriers to improve their health, functioning, and self-sufficiency.

Conclusions and Implications: The behavior of these men can be understood not as the natural consequent of economic marginalization, mental illness, substance abuse or emotional stunted-ness, but rather as quite reasonable and rational behaviors given the social context of the local urban ecology and social service system. In their subjective sense, the freedom and sociability they have “right here” on the streets outweigh the help that exists “out there.”