Hustling, Hassling, and Performing Compliance: Waiting for Homeless Housing in Los Angeles

This article examines how people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles navigate prolonged waiting for permanent housing within a highly constrained and opaque service system. Drawing on ethnographic research, I show that enrollment in housing waiting pools often signals formal inclusion but rarely results in housing, producing instead varied strategies of waiting rather than reliable pathways to placement. Participants respond to this uncertainty through practices such as bypassing queues, hustling staff, and performing compliance with service requirements—strategies shaped by unequal resources and prior exposure to homelessness services. Rather than determining housing outcomes, these practices shape how clients become legible to street-level bureaucrats and influence staff perceptions and patterns of engagement under conditions of scarcity. By situating waiting as a relational and administrative process, this article contributes an analytic framework for understanding how urban service systems reproduce inequality through the management of time.