Abstract
In The Value of Homelessness, Craig Willse brings attention to a significant but often overlooked feature of urban life: the homeless services industry that manages the casualties of neoliberal housing policy. In his focus on the emergence and consolidation of this industry, Willse complements work in the “critical homelessness studies” tradition, including the foundational work of Snow and Anderson (1993) and the more recent work of Gowan (2010). But rather than looking at how the institutions that comprise this industry mediate the homeless experience, Willse shifts the gestalt by analyzing the constellation of discourses, institutions, policy decisions, administrative measures, and social scientific statements that shape and bound the philanthropic propositions and practices of contemporary homeless services. The result is a book that ambitiously sifts and sorts through a surfeit of archival data and interviews with homeless program directors, service providers, and advocates in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle in search of the “diagrams” that reveal how the contemporary system of homeless management is structured.
In this sweeping history of housing insecurity from the New Deal to present, Willse maps how the Keynesian welfare state that underwrote the Fordist mode of growth gave way to a “post–welfare” regime suitable to the free market imperatives of neoliberalism. He argues that homeless services, in this context, have transformed from social enterprises invested in rescuing unhoused citizens into economic enterprises that extract value from their social redundancy. The source of homeless men and women's value derives from their status as a surplus population, meaning that homeless service providers gain financial backing through their “promise to reduce the negative impact of those neoliberal surplus lives on the social and economic order.” The result is a historically specific reorganization of homelessness centered on managing the “costs of social abandonment,” and the transformation of the “illness and death that result from housing deprivation into productive dimensions of postindustrial service and knowledge economies.” In short, the “homeless management industry” that has incrementally emerged over the past couple of decades—an extensive apparatus of “competitive neoliberal industries of population management,” is devoted not to ending homelessness but to securing “the very economic conditions that expose populations to housing insecurity and deprivation.”
Willse uses the Doe Fund—a Manhattan service agency that runs housing programs for homeless individuals, families, and recent parolees—as a window on this neoliberal reorganization of homelessness, casting its “Ready, Willing & Able” job–training program as a privatized form of workfare. The Doe Fund, Willse contends, has mobilized an army of street–cleaning “men in blue” who work for this program into a force of economic production by extracting surplus value from their minimum wage labor, all while hiding this intent behind the “humanitarian sheen of nonprofit intervention.” While founder and president George McDonald's 2011 weekly salary was approximately $10,450, the average weekly salary of a man in blue was just $282.25, meaning that McDonald earned approximately 37 times the average worker's wage. Willse takes this pay disparity as an indication of a new alignment between the homeless services sector and urban elites where the former governs the housing deprived population on behalf of the latter, turning a handsome profit in the process.
In an effort to understand the emergence and consolidation of homeless services like the Doe Fund, Willse trains a critical eye on the sociology of homelessness and indicts scholars in the subfield for creating a conceptualization of homelessness that is complicit with federal policies of homeless management insofar as it obscures the “material conditions that produce housing deprivation” and proliferates “expertise and management techniques” that both underwrite Doe Fund–like services and allow “housing insecurity to expand.” Central to Willse's argument is his indictment of the statistical work of Culhane and Kuhn for its role in inventing the “chronic homelessness” concept: a subset of the homeless population that has a “disabling condition” and has “either been continuously homeless for a year or more or has had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years.” This concept of homelessness, which currently frames federal homelessness policy initiatives, is an outgrowth of Culhane and Kuhn's argument that individuals “of black race” disproportionately experience extended shelter stays and recurring bouts of homelessness, making them a drain on shelter system resources. Willse argues that these analysts' statistical modeling of chronic homelessness reifies the interactive and systemic processes of racial discrimination – including discrimination in the labor market, criminal justice system, and the educational system – because it inappropriately isolates the individual characteristic of race as a primary “cause” of chronic homelessness and correlates it with the costs of leaving this homeless subset without housing. The concept of chronic homelessness consequently both obscures the effects of “antiblack discrimination” on housing insecurity and stimulates the federal government's re–imagination of social services as economic enterprises. Rather than addressing the relationship between racial discrimination and homelessness, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) therefore seeks to “solve” the problem of homelessness by developing strategies and instruments that better manage “social welfare administration through the application of business principles.”
Willse concludes his analysis with a close look at the “tools and techniques” that attach this sociological conceptualization of homelessness to neoliberal structures of federal governance, including locally administered “vulnerability indexes” that measure homeless men and women's life expectancy; homeless management information systems that store, distribute, and calculate shelter–use patterns; and 10–year plans to end chronic homelessness, adopted by select U.S. mayors. He argues that these administrative devices allow HUD to implement a new form of “metagovernance” that reasserts “authority over decentralized welfare apparatuses and reorganize[s] the structure and delivery of social welfare services.” HUD regulates the philanthropic propositions and practices of homeless service agencies through the funding parameters and reporting requirements instantiated in these tools and techniques, allowing it to govern local welfare systems at a distance. In essence, HUD has crafted a mechanism of crisis displacement that insulates urban elites from one salient and enduring market, state, and governance failure of urban entrepreneurialism: housing insecurity.
Despite its stimulating and ambitious analysis, The Value of Homelessness has several notable limitations. The first problem lies in the empirical evidence the book offers in support of its sweeping theoretical claims. Willse's articulation of the contemporary apparatus of homeless management hinges on the development and function of recent chronic homelessness programs and initiatives that render “housing insecurity and deprivation” into “sites of economic productivity in which individuals organized as ‘chronically homeless’ become the raw material” out of which “services are produced.” Although he notes that these programs and initiatives only target a small number of clients who fit this profile, Willse goes on to contradictorily argue that the notion of chronic homelessness creates the condition of possibility for homelessness policies—such as the federal Housing First model and the 10–year plans to end chronic homelessness it engenders—that administratively and spatially reorganize the management of urban homelessness writ large. These policies, in other words, supposedly steer homeless service providers into creating programs that “attempt to clean up the mess made by the evaporation of SROs [Single Room Occupancy] and other forms of low–cost housing by removing the individuals left behind.” Yet the “chronically homeless” are only a small fraction of the homeless women and men abandoned by local, state, and federal governments. If Willse limited the scope of his argument to this subset of the homeless population, his argument would be more persuasive. (Indeed, it seems the book would be better titled The Value of Chronic Homelessness.)
Given that this study of homelessness focuses on a feature of urban life that is of central concern to scholars of urban poverty, it is also surprising that Willse does not engage recent studies of homelessness that complement his analysis. Such an omission is a second limitation of the book, especially given that Willse indicts homelessness studies for “asking only limited questions”—such as “how to manage better homeless services, or how to get the homeless to best manage themselves”—that “perpetuate the conditions of surplus life, accepting those conditions as inevitable, rather than a historical arrangement.” Willse prescribes a “bad” social science as a corrective to this “good” social science, one that undermines rather than endorses the imperatives of neoliberal economics and governance. Yet making this argument requires overlooking equally, if not more compelling critical analyses of (near) homelessness, such as Bourgois and Schonberg's (2009) Righteous Dopefiend, Fairbanks’ (2009) How it Works, Gowan's (2010) Hobos, Hustlers, & Backsliders, Lyon–Callo's (2004) Inequality, Poverty, & Neoliberal Governance, and Wright's (1996) Out of Place. Willse's studious disengagement with this literature not only makes his prescription for a “bad” social science unsatisfying, but also makes it difficult to assess how his ideas compare with those artfully articulated in these very important works. The significance of his contribution to the urban poverty literature is consequently hard to assess.
Taken as a whole, The Value of Homelessness provides important and timely insights into the emergence and consolidation of the contemporary homeless services industry. The problems with Willse's analysis mainly underscore how little we know about the numerous moving parts that comprise this component of the “nonprofit industrial complex” and how challenging it is to elucidate its “diagrams.” Nonetheless, the book lays out a promising line of inquiry for future studies, which makes it an essential read for upper–division or graduate courses in urban poverty.