Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

The coordinated entry system in Los Angeles is “touted as the Match.com of homeless services” (84). However, Eubanks argues that this infrastructural system poses a dangerous erosion of privacy because it “collects, stores, and shares some astonishingly intimate information about unhoused people. It catalogs, classifies, and ranks their traumas, coping mechanisms, feelings, and fears” (85).

First Eubanks goes over the long and difficult history of the poorhouse in downtown Los Angeles. In the early 1920s, Skid Row was incredibly diverse, but after WWII, as white Los Angeles residents protested public housing initiatives, available housing on Skid Row was decimated. During 1980s deindustrialization, many Black residents who lost their jobs moved to Skid Row. South LA has experienced higher rates of homelessness and crowded housing since. For a while, social segregation preserved the neighborhood, but in the past decade, younger and wealthier workers have gentrified the area. The slow decline of housing for the poor has never stopped: “Since 1950, more than 13,000 units of low-income housing have been removed from Skid Row” (90)—enough to house all those currently without a home who live there. Eubanks provides this history in order to draw a connection between poorhouses and the modern equivalent—what used to be flophouses and tenements are now tent cities.