RURAL POVERTY AND SOCIAL STIGMA: HOUSING INSECURITY IN AMERICA’S DAIRYLAND

Abstract

To explain the stigma around housing insecurity, scholars often rely on urban samples and focus on the hypervisibility of people sleeping in public spaces, on park benches, and on public transportation in cities. Unlike in urban contexts, people experiencing housing insecurity in rural places are often unseen: they are doubling up with friends and family, living in vehicles or abandoned buildings, and camping in state parks. As such, rural housing instability is often referred to as “hidden.” This hiddenness makes theories built on hypervisibility and urban samples partial and unable to account for the stigma around homelessness and housing insecurity in rural contexts. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork and 37 in-depth interviews in five rural counties in Wisconsin, this paper finds that the stigmatization of housing insecurity in rural areas hinges on its social hypervisibility. Limited public services and infrastructure force rural residents experiencing housing hardships to rely on their social networks, making their struggles known to others, even when they are not directly observed. Social hypervisibility contributes to stigma by hindering access to jobs and housing, as well as discouraging individuals from seeking help. These findings demonstrate that existing policies and resources not only fail to support people experiencing housing insecurity in rural areas but also exacerbate stigma, intensifying the marginalization of people struggling to survive in rural poverty.