House broken: homelessness, housing first, and neoliberal poverty governance

ABSTRACT

Housing First (HF) is the new orthodoxy when dealing with the small, long-term, visible and recalcitrant fraction of the greater homeless population. Unlike more traditional, “treatment first” models that expect “self-sufficiency” before clients should achieve housing, this markedly cost-effective program/policy rapidly places homeless people who “consume” the most state resources into their own subsidized apartment. Many conclude that such an upending renders HF an exceptionally progressive program that ousts the disciplinary, paternalist traditions of poverty governance. Using evidence from two programs in metropolitan Phoenix, AZ, however, I argue that housing indeed comes first, but paternalism is right there behind it. Further, I argue that the program’s apartment lease – in what remains commodified housing – is no benign social relationship. It is, rather, a lever of market discipline. In HF, the abstract compulsions of the market significantly but incompletely replace the older, more paternalistic and personal models of disciplinary case management. As such, HF exemplifies a form of neoliberal poverty governance despite its relatively “progressive” platform.

KEYWORDS:

• Homelessness
• housing first (HF)
• poverty management
• neoliberalism
• paternalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who participated in interviews, and particularly Kim Van Nimwegen who was indispensable and ever helpful in the field. A special thanks (and apologies) to Don Mitchell, who provided seemingly endless volleys of comradely criticism on earlier drafts. Thanks is also in order for Gretchen Purser for her thoughtful comments and encouragement. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers at Urban Geography whose insights greatly strengthened the article’s empirical and theoretical foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Department of Housing and Urban Development declares an individual “chronically homeless” if they are “either (1) an unaccompanied homeless individual with a disabling condition who has been continuously homeless for a year or more, or (2) an unaccompanied individual with a disabling condition who has had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years” (HUD 2007a, p. 3).

2. The term “chronic homelessness” existed before Kuhn and Culhane’s 1998 publication, cropping up in HUD reports on homelessness as early as 1983 (see HUD, 1986, p. 139).

3. Speer (2016), likewise, mentions HF only in passing.

4. As a best practice, the tool is available for homeless service providers across the United States, available through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website, see HUD (2007b).

5. We should pause and think about the magnitude of “psychosocial.” The Oxford Dictionary defines the adjective as “of or relating to the interrelation of social factors and individual thought and behavior.” This is an extremely broad category for a case manager to “assess” and thereafter rehabilitate; it goes far beyond the other required skills teaching and services, focusing upon reforming an individual’s entire social personality.