Maxwell Akiva Hellmann

MAXWELL HELLMANN, then a graduate student at University of California, Los Angeles, California, was awarded a grant in April 2023 to aid research on “Home- and Community-Based Care and Containment: Residential Long-Term Care and the Management of the Disabled Poor in Los Angeles,” supervised by Dr. Laurie Kain Hart. While Los Angeles has long been recognized as a global leader in the residential long-term care industry, publicly subsidized “board and care” homes (B&C) have been closing rapidly in the last decade. After years of neglect, however, Californian politicians are casting this dying industry as the missing link in a “continuum of care” aimed at keeping people out of jail and off of the streets. The portrayal of B&Cs as a humanitarian solution to a growing homelessness crisis raises the question of how the continuum of care relates to the “continuum of carcerality” and what exactly “home,” “community,” or “care” for poor people with disabilities entails in the present moment? This project brings ethnographic attention to these care facilities in order to examine the interplay between larger social and political economic trends and the intimate, quotidian struggles for a dignified life. By examining a space where the carceral state and (post-)welfare state intersect, the grantee explores the relationship between care, confinement, and social control. In turn, I examine how various actors — from residents, to facility operators, family members, and policy makers — respond to, contest, and attempt to remake the status quo.