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Abstract
This article explores the emergence of neo-liberal housing policy and programmes in the United States, focusing in particular on the rise of social service initiatives targeting what is known as ‘chronic homelessness’. These initiatives are notable for the ways in which they privilege long-vilified populations for immediate placement into housing with no social or medical services required. While this represents a significant break from social service protocols that previously demanded compliance with service requirements, the article argues that understanding chronic homelessness initiatives as economic rather than social programmes reveals the ways in which they enable the reproduction of the same neo-liberal conditions that produce housing insecurity and deprivation. The article concludes by reframing housing issues in terms of racial subordination, which suggests that, in the neo-liberal context, social abandonment and economic investment may persist side by side.
Acknowledgements
Many people gave generously of their time and intellectual energy to help with my development of this article. I would especially like to thank Greg Goldberg, Soniya Munshi, David Proterra, Barbara Katz Rothman, Rachel Schiff and Dean Spade, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for Economy and Society and editor Samantha Ashenden. I thank Patricia Clough for her continued support of my work. Dean Spade, Chandan Reddy, Travis Sands, and Jackie Orr facilitated opportunities to present this research, and I thank them for bringing me into contact with those thoughtful and challenging audiences.
Notes
1 In this article, ‘chronically homeless’ should always be read as if in scare quotes. As will become clear, I want to foreground the provisional and constructed nature of the term, even as I investigate its deployment. I take the term seriously due to the very real material consequences of being identified with it, but I aim to resist its reification. In my use, it should be understood to mean ‘populations targeted as chronically homeless’. Like this new iteration, the term ‘homelessness’ is also used with caution in recognition of the cultural, social and ethical meanings concatenated within it. Instead, I will generally use the term ‘housing insecurity’ to signal the structural reproduction and circulation of vulnerability in relation to shelter and ‘housing deprivation’ to describe the condition of living without shelter.
2 Launched in 2006, the so-called Safer City Initiative, which has targeted unsheltered individuals in Skid Row for criminal punishment, represents one of the greatest concentrations of police force in the United States. For a critique of the programme, see Blasi and Stuart (Citation2008).
3 On the shift from welfare to workfare, see Peck (Citation2001).
4 The association of ‘chronic homelessness’ with racial status and substance use was developed in Culhane and Kuhn (Citation1998), to be discussed later in this article. As I will elaborate in the conclusion, racially subordinated populations are disproportionately exposed to housing insecurity and deprivation.
5 In interviews and public talks, service providers and advocates have criticized my use of the word ‘invention’. These critics have suggested that it minimizes the medical dangers associated with living without shelter. I do not take these criticisms lightly, but feel that destabilizing the category in the academic discourse can proceed alongside documenting the harms to health and life posed by housing deprivation.
6 Not until 1969 did the United States Supreme Court put an end to settlement issues regarding social welfare programmes.
7 As a social category, women have also been organized as forms of property or as incapable of holding property. While, of course, some women have always been housed in shelter programmes, other administrative means for managing them as a population have been developed, especially coercive welfare regimes. See, for example, Mink (Citation1998). As homelessness programmes have increasingly understood their mission to be housing men, women in need of shelter have been increasingly channelled through family shelter systems and domestic violence programmes. I thank Lauren Jade Martin for pointing me to these mechanisms through which homelessness gets gendered.
8 Kusmer (Citation2003, p. 242) points specifically to the intensification of African American exposure to housing insecurity, naming urban renewal, declining employment opportunities, barriers to education and new job industries and the racialized effects of recession and housing market prices as factors.
9 On the co-construction of race and property, see Harris (Citation1993).
10 There is very little documented history of HUD available. Lawrence L. Thompson, who worked in the department for over twenty-five years, self-published A history of HUD (Citation2006) following his retirement. His account has helped form my own, which is also based on Congressional records and HUD's technical documents.
11 In addition to Jessop (Citation2007), for this model of neo-liberalism I am drawing from work in political sociology and geography, including Brenner (Citation2004), Brenner and Theodore (Citation2002), Peck (Citation2002) and Smith (Citation2002).
12 I investigate technologies of domestic structural adjustment in Willse (Citation2008).
13 Foucault suggests that disciplinary programmes precede biopolitical programmes both historically and technically; see Foucault (1990 [1976], pp. 139–41, 2003, p. 257).
14 For a comparison of different approaches to analysis of ‘economization’, see Çaliskan and Callon (Citation2009).
15 I am repeating the classification categories used in the cited studies.
16 Seeking out what life beyond its own the invention of chronic homelessness makes possible leads to thinking about what kinds of race state racism makes beyond what it targets for elimination. Rey Chow offers a description of this as the ‘ascendancy of whiteness’. She writes: ‘I would like to propose that Foucault's discussion of biopower can be see as his approach, albeit oblique, to the question of the ascendancy of whiteness in the modern world’ (Citation2002, p. 3). The whiteness produced through biopowerful welfare policy and administration, along with other technologies including mass incarceration, the war on terror, bioprospecting and global trade in blood and organs, may, like the blackness of chronic homelessness, have both direct and tangential relationships to taxonomic racial categories. I take the whiteness Chow points to as describing an organization of survival within a general terrain of economic, social and political insecurity. If chronic homelessness initiatives economize and marketize housing insecurity, then chronic homelessness becomes the condition of possibility for a biopolitical whiteness and the investments of health and life that category secures.