Governing homelessness through instruments: a critical perspective on housing first’s policy instrumentation

ABSTRACT

In recent years, Housing First (HF) has become a prevalent public response to homelessness in North America. In Canada, several communities have been called upon to implement a system-wide HF orientation. Based on an ethnographic study in Ottawa (Canada), this article focuses on HF’s policy implementation process and, specifically, on ‘policy instrumentation,’ the modalities by which a governmental action is concretely implemented using ‘instruments,’ seemingly technical or neutral tools and procedures for delivering policy at a local level. This article will analyze more closely the Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool (SPDAT) used by frontline homelessness services in over one thousand communities across the United States, Canada, and Australia to assist in identifying, selecting, and prioritizing HF’s beneficiaries. By analyzing the rationale and effects of this tool, we argue that HF reveals a neoliberal art of governing homelessness, which aims to tackle, at a macro-level, the wider biopolitical issue of the aging baby boomer population and reinforces, at a micro- level, intersectional inequalities within the homeless population.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing first
• homelessness
• policy instrumentation
• biopolitics
• governmentality

Acknowledgments

This article is based on work supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under grant 230915. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations do not necessarily reflect those of the SSHRC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This support may include accompanying people to medical appointments or court hearings, helping them make safety plans if they’re in crisis, referring them out to mental health or addiction services using a harm reduction approach, showing them how to access food banks, teaching them how to cook or clean an apartment effectively, or mediating with landlords to avoid evictions.

2. The same political enthusiasm for HF has also been observed in Europe, where the European Commission funded ‘Housing First Europe’ (HFE), a social experimentation project similar to the ‘At Home/Chez Soi’ program, which was implemented in five European cities (Amsterdam, Budapest, Copenhagen, Glasgow, and Lisbon), resulting in positive outcomes comparable to those in the US and Canada (Busch-Geertsema 2013; Pleace 2016).

3. Notably, OrgCode Consulting, Inc., a consultancy organization located throughout the United States and Canada that works with non-profits, government, private companies, and non-governmental organizations. It has created ‘Plans to End Homelessness’ and ‘Affordable Housing Strategies’ for many communities across North America and been engaged by organizations to provide strategic planning as they go through transitional periods (moving toward an HF system-wide approach). See http://org-beehivegroupcadev.nationbuilder.com/.

4. Besides the SPDAT score, the information provided to the city to fund managers includes, upon consent of the individual, his or her name, date of birth, Indigenous status (clients with such status are matched with Indigenous organizations), language, and length of shelter stay.

5. Common Ground was among the first agencies in Boston to use the VI as a tool for political leverage.

6. The VI-SPDAT was created by merging the vulnerability index with the SPDAT pre-screening tool, which is part of the suite of tools owned and created by OrgCode Consulting, Inc. According to this company, any community can use the VI-SPDAT for free, provided nothing is altered, and they read and follow the manual and/or the instructions given in the training video. In-person and online training is also available.

7. The notion of ‘acuity level’ is a concept commonly used by nursing health caregivers, without specificity or consistency of definition or measurement within the health science literature. his measure is also often used for estimating and adjusting nursing staffing allocations and budget determinations. See: https://www.mediware.com/rehabilitation/blog/defining-acuity/.

8. In order to respect the anonymity of the participants, we used pseudonyms.

9. The term ‘ghost’ is often used informally by case managers to describe people who leave few or no traces in the system (i.e. very irregularly use or avoid using public resources and/or tend to move from one province to another) and who are therefore hard to count or track down.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) [230915].

Notes on contributors

Dahlia Namian

Dahlia Namian (PhD, Sociology) is an associate professor at the School of Social Work, at the University of Ottawa in Canada and co-director of the Social Sciences of Health Interventions research Group (SSHIRG, University of Ottawa). Her research focuses on homelessness, urban marginality, mental health, and ethnography.