Coercion Through Procedure as Poverty Infrastructure

Abstract This article presents a journal-format case study of Family Xavier, a long-term public-housing household subjected to escalating administrative enforcement following boundary assertion and grievance filing. Using the analytic framework of coercion through procedure, the study demonstrates how public housing systems operationalize poverty not as a condition to be resolved but as a control environment sustained through delayed notice, debt re-aging, surveillance without remediation, and credibility asymmetry. The case is explicitly cross-cited with the author’s prior poverty framework and procedural-harm analyses to show convergence between theory and lived administrative outcomes. A comparative table situates the case alongside documented patterns in housing, benefits administration, and child-welfare interfaces.