Social housing after neo-liberalism: new forms of state-driven welfare intervention toward social renters

Abstract

Allocation policies to provide social housing to people with the highest needs means that a significant portion of tenants have complex, and often unmet, physical and mental healthcare requirements. Consequently, some tenants require health and psychosocial services integrated with housing. Drawing on a mixed-method design including administrative data from an Australian public health and social housing authority, and tenant qualitative interviews, this article demonstrates how integration assists tenants to improve their psychological health, reduce their use of emergency health services, and receive fewer tenancy problems. In addition to the health and psychosocial resources provided, tenants with high needs benefited from integration through housing providers having greater knowledge of the problems and solutions salient to their tenancies. The article’s theoretical contribution is to demonstrate how neoliberalism drives residualization, which in turn creates the need for a well-resourced integrated model. The integrated model constitutes a form of social housing provision after neoliberalism with a discernible but incomplete rupture with neoliberal logics.

Keywords:

• Health
• social housing
• integration
• administrative data
• mixed methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Queensland Government under an evaluation of the Mental Health Demonstration Project

Notes on contributors

Cameron Parsell

Cameron Parsell primary area of research is poverty, homelessness, supportive housing, social services, and charity aimed at addressing social disadvantage.

Lynda Cheshire

Lynda Cheshire is a sociologist who undertakes research in the areas of community, neighbourhoods, and housing.

Zoe Walter

Zoe Walter has a background in social and clinical psychology, and her research so far has examined the psychosocial factors that contribute to wellbeing and mental health in socially disadvantaged populations.

Andrew Clarke

Andrew Clarke is an urban sociologist working in the area of governance, poverty, and homelessness.