Care at a Distance: Social Solitude,Emotional Capitalism,and Homeless Citizenship in Neoliberal Australia

Introduction

Here, “familiarity” refers to routine recognition practices—greeting by name, joking, and brief conversational check-ins—that make service encounters resemble ordinary social interaction. Such ordinary recognition also enables reciprocity: visitors sometimes assist with setting up, distributing items, or maintaining order, momentarily occupying provider-like roles. This everyday scene illustrates the complex moral and affective landscape in which homelessness support operates. The striking ordinariness of these encounters, where the boundaries between giving and receiving blur, has long characterized charitable interaction but has become more visible and intensified within contemporary welfare restructuring. Under recent forms of welfare governance, the partial retreat and retrenchment of public provision have increased reliance on civil society actors (Palley 2018; Sahdan and Gregorius 2023). In this context, charity organizations, nonprofit groups, and volunteer initiatives have assumed expanded roles in addressing both material and affective needs. These community-based efforts have become integral to contemporary welfare landscapes. Importantly, charitable support for people experiencing homelessness long predates neoliberal reforms; what has changed is not the existence of charity itself but its expanded role and moral significance within restructured welfare systems. This dynamic is particularly pronounced in the field of homelessness, where housing precarity is shaped by broader transformations in welfare provision and urban governance, alongside longer-standing structural inequalities.

Recent studies on neoliberal austerity highlight that these transformations are material and profoundly affective. Austerity operates through emotional regimes that shape how citizens feel, relate, and navigate precarity (Hitchen 2019; Jupp 2021). Emotions such as shame, deservingness, and hope mediate welfare encounters and influence service uptake. Here, “welfare encounters” refers to interactions both within formal state welfare institutions and in charitable settings, where moral expectations about responsibility and deservingness circulate across institutional boundaries. Governments increasingly rely on emotional engagement, especially volunteering, as a moral supplement to shrinking welfare infrastructures (De Wilde and Duyvendak 2016; Muehlebach 2012). Within this affective landscape, people experiencing homelessness are expected to interpret their difficulties through personal responsibility. Under Australia’s mutual obligation framework, welfare recipients are positioned in policy discourse as lacking moral discipline and adequate self-management capacities, thereby legitimizing the state’s disciplinary interventions aimed at modifying their behavior (Marston et al. 2016; Peel 2003).

These emotional expectations intersect with broader neoliberal technologies of self-governance. As Foucault (1977) mentioned, neoliberalism governs by cultivating responsible, self-regulating individuals. In homelessness discourses, welfare beneficiaries are routinely pathologized as deviant or irresponsible, and shaming becomes a disciplinary tool for internalizing productivity and autonomy (Strong 2021). Hence, individuals experiencing homelessness often view their struggles as personal failings rather than consequences of structural violence, obscuring the possibility of collective resistance (Lyon-Callo 2008).

These dynamics manifest in everyday encounters between homeless visitors and the charitable organizations they rely on. The literature shows how such interactions evoke shame, embarrassment, fear, and disgust, which are reinforced by assessments of “deservingness” embedded in the giver–receiver asymmetries (Johnsen et al. 2005; Parsell and Clarke 2020). Spatial dynamics, such as the stigma linked to specific service locations, further shape emotional responses, sometimes prompting avoidance (Cloke et al. 2010; Fahnøe 2018). Service providers may attempt to counteract negative emotions with hope; however, their efforts often fail to resonate with individuals whose everyday lives are saturated with hardships (Stambe and Parsell 2023).

Nonetheless, charity spaces are not only sites of discipline but also facilitate care, intimacy, and forms of belonging (Conradson 2003). These affective possibilities challenge neoliberal norms of individual autonomy and responsibility. However, research shows that such communities frequently become entangled with neoliberal logics by compensating for the failures of state welfare (Cabot 2016; Muehlebach 2012). Thus, care-based community formation may inadvertently reinforce the structures that produce precarity. Although much of this literature is grounded in case studies from the Global North, scholarship increasingly highlights how homelessness, shaped by neoliberal urban restructuring, emerges at the intersection of multiple forms of inequality and oppression across diverse global contexts. Ethnographic studies have further demonstrated how homelessness is produced through urban governance, criminalization, and spatial exclusion, often resulting in increasingly punitive forms of regulation and control directed at people living on the streets (Herring 2019; Mitchell 2020). Building on these developments, Speer (2024) argues for broadening dominant conceptions of homelessness by incorporating perspectives from the Global South, particularly those centered on informality and housing precarity.

Relationships among homeless individuals offer another crucial domain of emotional life. Studies of homeless social networks, particularly in the United States, document long-standing patterns of mutual help that support practical survival and provide emotional grounding (Rowe and Wolch 1990). However, in contemporary Australia, such networks are marked by heightened ambivalence. Stigma-driven exclusion, fractured family ties, and the transient nature of service systems limit the depth and durability of connections. Although some people experiencing homelessness develop a sense of belonging through shared marginalization and reciprocal support, these bonds remain fragile and shallow, shaped by mistrust and structural instability (Bower et al. 2018; Parsell 2011).

Recent qualitative research further highlights how this ambivalence is not only structural but also moral in nature: Stonehouse et al. (2021) reveal tensions between neoliberal discourses and the lived experiences of homelessness, arguing that while people experiencing homelessness recognize the importance of personal responsibility, they also emphasize shared responsibility for homelessness between individuals, government institutions, and mainstream society.

By tracing the circulation of emotions, such as shame, compassion, fatigue, and hope, within charity sites, this analysis demonstrates how affective negotiations shape moral subjectivity for service providers and homeless visitors. It reframes the “homeless community” as a space of fragile belonging, where even brief gestures, such as shared silence, momentary protection, or mutual recognition, sustain affective connections despite pervasive instability. Furthermore, the study argues that neoliberal governance operates through institutional arrangements and affective atmospheres that blend care with control, blurring the boundaries between support and discipline.

To theorize about these dynamics of proximity and distance, the study mobilizes Illouz’s framework of emotional capitalism and Coleman’s theory of social solitude (Coleman 2013; Illouz 2007). Emotional capitalism highlights how market rationalities shape interpersonal relationships, reducing emotions to objects of calculation and exchange (Illouz 2007). Within emotional capitalism, emotions can be detached from the subject for reflection and control, transforming relationships into cognitive and exchangeable objects subject to cost–benefit calculations. Hence, intimacy and care are increasingly shaped by economic models of bargaining, reciprocity, and equity, rendering emotions and relationships fungible—exchangeable like commodities.

The logic of emotional capitalism permeates social relationships in urban spaces, where citizens experience precarity and ontological insecurity under exclusionary regimes, such as dispossession, eviction, and displacement. However, solidarity among marginalized citizens emerges as spontaneous and situational modes of resistance, not in the classic form of collectivism (Courpasson et al. 2021; Shachar 2020). These dynamics necessitate the examination of how citizens, under neoliberal surveillance, cultivate connections that deflect dominant logics while fostering a fragile sense of ontological security.

In this context, Coleman’s (2013) theory of social solitude offers useful vocabulary for understanding co-presence without intimacy as a meaningful social form rather than a deficit. Social solitude allows us to see how emotional distance, calibrated sociality, and minimal forms of recognition sustain everyday survival under austerity.

This study contributes to scholarship on homelessness and care by moving beyond the binary that frames care either as an instrument of governance or as a site of resistance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a Sydney service site, it conceptualizes care as an ambivalent moral and relational practice that operates within, yet is not reducible to, broader welfare and market logics.

By engaging with perspectives on affective citizenship, emotional capitalism, social solitude, and ontological security, the analysis shows that care is neither purely disciplinary nor emancipatory. Instead, it functions as a pragmatic everyday infrastructure through which individuals secure recognition, routine, and survivable co-presence under conditions of precarity. In this sense, care becomes a medium through which belonging is negotiated, calibrated, and sustained rather than simply imposed or resisted.

The Local Context: Neoliberalism, Displacement, and Homelessness in Sydney

As Australia’s primary economic center, Sydney is among the cities most profoundly shaped by neoliberal reforms (Kwok et al. 2018). While Australia remains one of the wealthiest countries in the world, income and wealth are unevenly distributed. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Gini coefficient for household net worth was 0.606 in 2022–23, indicating substantial wealth inequality. International comparisons also reveal that Australia ranks relatively high in wealth inequality, placing twentieth among twenty-nine OECD countries (ABS 2025).

Since the early 2000s, economic restructuring—including the decline of manufacturing and the reduction of stable full-time employment—has contributed to growing labor market insecurity for certain segments of the population (Mitchell and Bill 2006). These shifts have disproportionately affected low-income and marginalized groups. Simultaneously, urban neoliberal policies promoting deregulation, privatization, and liberalization have contributed to rising household debt and severe housing unaffordability. During the first wave of gentrification in the late 1960s, several low-income residents were able to remain in inner-city areas due to the retention of public housing (Palen and London 1984). However, subsequent waves of gentrification displaced working- and middle-class residents, as the “new middle class” (Ley 1996) was priced out of previously gentrified suburbs and moved outward, alongside the impoverished (Luckins 2009; Pegler et al. 2020).

Hence, most newly built inner-city housing now caters to owner occupants and private investors rather than renters on restricted budgets. Those evicted from private rental housing face difficulties securing adequate and affordable accommodation and are often relocated to outer suburbs, far from their social networks (Atkinson et al. 2011). Several displaced residents, particularly older people with long-standing community ties, reported anxiety, depression, and profound sadness associated with the loss of their social environments (Morris 2017). Such displacements disrupt community life and, for some, precipitate homelessness (Cartier 2017).

The national welfare context has exacerbated this situation. Since the late 1970s, neoliberal welfare reforms have reframed welfare from a civil right to a conditional privilege reserved for “deserving” citizens (Findley and McCormack 2005). The introduction of “mutual obligation” requirements in 1997 made welfare recipients responsible for demonstrating economic contribution in exchange for benefits, framing dependency as a moral failure. This logic was subsequently extended to people experiencing homelessness in Sydney, who were required to modify their behavior and demonstrate themselves to be “housing-ready” (Clarke et al. 2020). This expectation was also reflected in participants’ lived experiences at the service site. As one participant described, while staying in a temporary housing, he was required to apply continuously for alternative accommodation and to provide evidence of these applications, regardless of whether such housing was financially accessible or realistically attainable (Interview, 23 February 2020). Along with rising rents and the lack of affordable housing, these policies intensified evictions and displacement (Atkinson and Jacobs 2008; Marston et al. 2016). For instance, in inner Sydney, the average waiting time for public housing exceeds ten years (New South Wales Government [NSW Government] 2024). Although successive national strategies aimed to reduce homelessness, they failed to address structural housing shortages and increasingly individualized the problem through intensified case management and surveillance (Coleman and Fopp 2014; Pawson et al. 2024).

Although housing affordability is a nationwide concern in Australia, the crisis is particularly acute in New South Wales (NSW), where stagnant wages, soaring property prices, and the outsourcing of state housing responsibilities have intensified pressures (Wynne et al. 2022). In 2021, only 33% of private rentals in NSW were affordable to households earning the minimum wage, and just 1% were affordable to income support recipients (Hartley et al. 2021). In early 2025, 2,192 people were recorded sleeping rough in the NSW street count—an 8% increase from the previous year (NSW Government 2025). At the same time, 67,316 households were registered on the social housing waiting list as of December 2025, including more than 12,000 priority applicants (NSW Government 2026). Social housing accounts for only 4.2% of total dwellings in Greater Sydney, below the OECD average of 7%, and is projected to decline further over the coming decade (Launch Housing 2023). These conditions form the structural backdrop against which homelessness unfolds in Sydney.

Within this broader structural context, Martin Place, located in Sydney’s Central Business District (CBD), has become a critical urban site for homelessness and social support. Widely recognized as Sydney’s financial and insurance hub, Martin Place is home to the head offices of major Australian banks, including the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Commonwealth Bank, Macquarie Bank, and Westpac, as well as numerous corporate institutions. Surrounded by heritage buildings such as the General Post Office, along with water fountains, entertainment spaces, railway access, and pedestrian seating, the area attracts large numbers of tourists and businesspeople during the daytime. From evening into the night, however, the character of the space shifts, as Martin Place transforms from a polished and orderly business district into a more ambivalent yet vibrant urban site, where people marginalized by mainstream society become increasingly visible.

As night falls, the space becomes populated by people waiting for services to be provided, others engaged in quiet conversations with fellow visitors, and individuals who deliberately distance themselves from the crowd. Although services are delivered in a largely peaceful and orderly manner, minor tensions occasionally surface, including small arguments or brief altercations over food or other seemingly mundane matters.

Home to major financial institutions and heritage landmarks, Martin Place has also served as a hub for nongovernmental organization-led welfare services. In this area, up to sixty homeless individuals once formed a semi-permanent camp, developing their own infrastructure—such as a free twenty-four-hour kitchen—and cultivating a community composed of homeless residents, food service providers, volunteers, and advocates. The camp had a recognized leader, an activist who negotiated with state authorities and service organizations on behalf of homeless rights. However, as in other global cities, public spaces where people experiencing homelessness gathered increasingly became subject to surveillance and control (Mitchell 1997). Extending this analysis, Mitchell (2020) argues that contemporary urban governance reshapes public space to prioritize commercial circulation, rendering visible homelessness vulnerable to regulation and removal. In 2017, police removed the camp on the grounds that it disrupted public use.

Although no camps remain today, the Martin Place service site continues to function as a meeting point for homeless and low-income residents, including those relocated to public housing. Here, individuals access food, clothing, and health services provided daily by a diverse range of civil organizations, including Christian and Sikh religious groups, left-wing political collectives, and independent advocates. Thus, the site exemplifies the ambivalent geography of care and control under neoliberal urbanism—a place of solidarity and mutual aid, as well as regulation and visibility. Within this fraught environment, the present study examines how care, connection, and distance are negotiated in everyday encounters between homeless citizens, volunteers, and service providers in Sydney.

Method

This study draws on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork on the social networks of individuals experiencing housing difficulties, including those who are homeless and the groups providing support to them. The main site is Martin Place in Sydney’s Central Business District, supplemented by fieldwork in the Western suburbs, where civic and charitable services for people experiencing homelessness are regularly delivered.

The research combined participant observation at a central service site with semi-structured interviews involving both service providers and service recipients, some of whom occupied both roles over time. Fieldwork was conducted intermittently over a period of approximately five years, between August 2019 and September 2024, totaling fifteen months of in-person fieldwork.

Over the course of the research, the author conducted participant observation across dozens of service sessions, including both morning and evening programs. Participant observation primarily took place during service hours, including morning observations during a free breakfast program hosted at a nearby church in Martin Place, as well as evening observations between approximately 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., when dinner and other free meal services were provided in the adjacent outdoor space. The author initially spoke with regular visitors introduced by service providers about their experiences at the service site. As field visits continued, the author developed rapport with several regular visitors and conducted more in-depth conversations, asking about their life trajectories and the circumstances that had led to their homelessness. Interviews typically lasted between thirty minutes and one hour, depending on participants’ availability and circumstances. To capture temporal variation in the use and meaning of the site, the author also conducted daytime observations in Martin Place, enabling comparison between daytime and nighttime atmospheres. In addition to observations at Martin Place, the author occasionally conducted interviews at St. James Station with people experiencing homelessness who were attending services accompanied by civil society service providers.

The in-person fieldwork excluded the COVID-19 period (2021–2022), during which digital ethnography was conducted through social media monitoring and document analysis of civil organizations. The collected data includes fieldnotes, interview recordings, and transcripts.

A total of twenty-six individuals in their 20s–60s were interviewed, including Anglo-Australians, Indigenous Australians, Māori from New Zealand, and migrants from the Pacific Islands, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Of these participants, five were primarily involved in service provision and twenty-one participated as visitors, although roles were often fluid and several visitors had also served as service providers at different times.

Service providers from each organization were contacted as key informants and invited to participate after providing informed consent. The beneficiaries were recruited onsite from among regular visitors who agreed to share their experiences after the research aims were explained to them. Besides in-person fieldwork, information from organizational websites and social networking sites was collected to supplement the observational data. All names appearing in this article are pseudonyms, and identifying details have been altered to protect participants’ privacy.

Participants were asked about their housing situation at the time of interview. In line with the ABS definition of homelessness—which includes rough sleeping as well as temporary or crisis accommodation—most participants were either sleeping rough or residing in temporary accommodation in Sydney’s CBD or nearby suburbs, and outer suburban areas. Those in temporary housing were categorized as experiencing homelessness according to this national definition. While this study adopts the ABS operational definition, it remains attentive to the cultural and relational dimensions of homelessness that may not be fully captured by standardized categories.

The term “service providers” refers to individuals engaged in organizing and delivering support at the site. These included volunteers affiliated with religious and political organizations, members of donation-funded community initiatives, and organizers who described their activities in terms of a social enterprise model emphasizing sustainability and empowerment. While most were unpaid volunteers, organizational forms and funding structures varied.

During participant observation, the author occasionally assisted the service providers when they lacked sufficient resources or manpower, for example, by helping distribute clothes or setting up food stalls. These collaborative moments offered insight into the everyday dynamics between volunteers and service users. The author spent time sitting, conversing, and informally interacting with the participants experiencing homelessness. The service providers frequently mistook the author for a recipient; in such instances, the author clarified her role as a researcher and declined to receive aid. These experiences provided a valuable perspective on the blurred provider–recipient boundaries in charitable spaces.

Care and Emotional Capitalism

This section examines how care is enacted and reciprocated within service encounters at Martin Place. The following cases demonstrate how boundaries between helper and helped are negotiated through affective labor and moral positioning. Although the purposes of the services vary, they share a concern with fostering connection while simultaneously managing moral distinctions between those who give and those who receive. One such figure was Charls, who had been operating free clothing services for people experiencing homelessness since 2016 with his partner. He stated that the goal of his activity was to foster a sustainable, inclusive, and caring community. The couple provided clothing and fostered connections with visitors by actively communicating with them.

I know everyone by name. I think it’s really important to, you know, have some energy and fun when you are doing it. These guys have pretty tough days. If you don’t sit with them, you might just feed into the narrative of “poor you, poor you.” I think one of the things that I learned, that I did not know before we started, is that these guys are just like us. One of the things we try to do every time here is to make it the best half hour of the day or week for these people. So, people smiling and having fun, those sorts of things; there is no service that does like us. . . . We are pretty under-resourced tonight, with these guys helping us. They came up here before we started because I didn’t have time to sort things out today. Now, they are helping hanging the clothes. This is the service for the homeless, by the homeless. (Interview, February 28, 2023)

While Charls’ relational approach was more explicitly articulated than that of many other service providers, similar dynamics of boundary negotiation were observable across the site, albeit in less overt forms. His approach therefore represented a more relational and sustained mode of care within a field where engagement was often brief and task-oriented. At the service site, most visitors expressed appreciation for service providers such as Charls for their assistance. In some cases, former service recipients became volunteers. For instance, Blenda, a woman in her 30s who now volunteers in the clothing service, had once been homeless and was supported by Charls. This spirit of volunteerism was actively encouraged by Charls. He recognized that his service was not an ultimate solution to homelessness. Rather, the solution he envisioned involved “actually getting people engaged in something meaningful” (Interview, February 28, 2023). While such an emphasis on meaningful engagement echoes broader discourses of self-responsibility, it also reflects an attempt to restore dignity and reciprocity within the service encounter. Hence, he encouraged homeless visitors to assist him in tasks, such as sorting and hanging clothes.

Although Blenda was still a welfare recipient and received no monetary payment for her work, this did not preclude her participation in unpaid or informal forms of labor, which are common within Australia’s welfare framework. She expressed satisfaction in being able to help others while continuing to receive clothing support for herself and her partner, and she actively assisted visitors in ways tailored to their individual needs:

Approximately 40–50 people visited the service site on a warm summer day. Blenda and her partner were familiar with several visitors and chatted with them. While they were handing out clothes, a woman in her 50s approached and said, “Oh, this is a nice skirt, but I don’t know if it fits me. These clothes are too tight for me.” Blenda replied, “Here are some larger sizes,” and helped her look through the rack. A little later, while Blenda was still assisting visitors, a man came up and asked, “Do you have any shoes?” Blenda responded quickly, “Yes, there are some nice sneakers over there,” guiding him to a corner of the service area where several pairs of shoes were displayed. (Fieldnote, February 27, 2024)

While Blenda had not yet achieved economic independence, she viewed her voluntary participation as a step away from dependency—a deliberate choice to help those still struggling with poverty. Like Blenda, several visitors valued the kindness and generosity of service providers. In numerous instances, the service recipients actively assisted volunteers in preparing and serving meals rather than passively receiving aid. Several leading figures within the “homeless community”—mostly older, regular visitors—helped set tables, distribute food, and maintain order at the site.

Bob was a migrant in his 50s from New Zealand who had been visiting the Martin Place service site for about five years. He expressed deep gratitude for the volunteers for providing food and clothing and engaging him in conversation, unlike passersby who ignored him:

People walk past you like you’re nothing because you’re homeless. It’s beautiful that they talk to us, joke with us, and make us feel normal instead of just running to the other end. (Interview, March 4, 2023)

Bob also assisted the volunteers before and after the service. As reflected in his remark, he understood his participation—working alongside volunteer staff and, by extension, contributing to society—as a part of what it means to be “normal.” His involvement, like that of others, blurred the boundary between giver and receiver and illustrated how reciprocity and care emerged within unequal relationships.

Furthermore, Charls had broader ambitions beyond everyday service. He described his initiative as a form of social enterprise, aspiring to establish an “academy” to help people experiencing homelessness achieve economic independence, with the support of the local council. Hence, the relationship between the service provider and recipient became increasingly interdependent. While service providers encouraged the recipients to pursue self-realization and self-reliance, former recipients expected their mentors to guide and empower them. These dynamics illustrate how empowerment and compassion can coexist with subtle expectations of self-improvement and self-governance within contemporary welfare contexts.

The interactions surrounding Charls’s clothing service illustrate how care operates as an affective and disciplinary practice within the broader landscape of emotional capitalism (Illouz 2007). Rather than functioning solely as a material intervention, it cultivates forms of recognition, normality, and relational attachment, which foster a sense of moral personhood among visitors. Former service recipients such as Blenda reenter the service as volunteers, framing their participation as a pathway away from dependency and toward self-realization. While such narratives resonate with broader discourses of responsible citizenship (Muehlebach 2012), they also reflect personal desires for dignity, reciprocity, and belonging. These practices blur the boundaries between giver and receiver, creating spaces in which compassion coexists with subtle expectations of self-improvement. Through these everyday exchanges, visitors like Bob describe moments of “feeling normal”—an affective sense of citizenship that emerges not primarily from state institutions but from relational encounters in precarious urban spaces.

Managing Expectations and Emotional Distance

While visitors generally appreciated the kindness and generosity of service providers, service recipients sometimes emotionally distanced themselves from civil groups or volunteers, such as Charls, who genuinely sought to build an equal relationship between himself and people experiencing homelessness. For instance, Peter, in his 40s, had been homeless since his teens. While expressing gratitude for the services he received, he was cynical about the activities performed by individuals like Charls or other civil groups:

I believe him, but he is technically brainwashed, as he is a product of the Reserve Bank. I believe money controls the government these days. I believe people like Charls, but will he be there for us 24 hours, 7 days, always? No. (Interview, February 26, 2024)

Peter realized that, although Charls appeared friendly toward him, he was an entrepreneur, made a profit by “helping” the homeless, and maintained personal connections with the local council. To Peter, this suggested that Charls might receive financial benefits from institutions such as the Reserve Bank, toward which Peter harbored deep resentment. Other homeless men expressed similar cynicism, remarking that church groups also benefitted from their charitable work through the tax reductions granted for providing services to people experiencing homelessness. Such disappointment or cynicism prevented service recipients from fostering attachment to service providers or expecting excessive generosity. Peter described difficulties in navigating services for people experiencing homelessness in the city:

You have to know lots of different places, and, the thing is, over time, they all change. (Interview, February 26, 2024)

Hana, an Indigenous woman in her 20s who regularly visited the service site from an outer suburb, spoke about the fragility of the available services:

I’ve known Charls since he started coming here; he’s just always around, every Tuesday, even during COVID. You’ve got people like Jesus Care who bring hot coffee and sometimes meals; Charls provides clothing; Amanda, who’s coming tonight, brings food on Mondays; and the State Library gives out coffee and books, but that’s mostly at night. During the day, there’s nothing. It’s really hard for people to get any financial support. The meals you get during the day cost four dollars at Kings Cross, near the chapel. It’s good that they’re non-profit, but you still have to pay at some places like the Salvos on Hope Street, which makes sense because they’re profit-based. At Kings Cross, it’s four dollars for a meal, fifty cents for coffee, one or two dollars for cereal. Most days, we don’t even come to the city because we live in the outer suburb, but when we do, we use the services. Sometimes, we don’t even have four dollars or five cents. (Interview, February 28, 2023)

This remark illustrates the vulnerability of the services. Like Peter, Hana understood the mechanisms underlying these systems—the distinction between profit-based and nonprofit services—and accepted the nonnegotiable need to pay for profit-based services. As Tually et al. (2013) noted, such nongovernmental support services are inherently vulnerable because they rely heavily on volunteers’ commitment and circumstances, and their continuity is never guaranteed. During fieldwork, several volunteer groups scaled back or ceased their activities owing to limited resources or organizational shifts.

For example, one community support group composed largely of members from a political party reduced its service provision after its focus gradually shifted from homelessness to labor union issues in eight years. Such uncertainty about the continuity of services under austerity generated paranoia (Hitchen 2019), whereby individuals cautiously anticipated disruption and avoided relying heavily on services or expecting consistency from providers. Hence, austerity is often lived through individual emotions, collective feelings, and mutual practices. The continued reemergence of the unknown produces an affective blurring between reality and imagined possibilities.

By suppressing expectations and a sense of dependency and differentiating themselves from service providers, the recipients adapted to the logic of the market economy. They made themselves aware that, under the guise of generosity, charity services are embedded in the market economy. These organizations are made to fail and are subject to closure at any time.

Bounded Sociality as Survival Practice

This section turns to the limits of solidarity and the calibration of distance among homeless visitors themselves. While some visitors cultivated mutual care and sharing practices, these solidarities were fragile and coexisted with a broader emotional regime that prioritized autonomy, risk management, and limited attachment. A common practice among some older visitors was to share their food and clothes with other visitors, which led to the emergence of an alternative morality that valued caring, sharing, and equality among visitors. At the same time, relationships within the “homeless community” were frequently shaped by evaluative frameworks that privileged self-sufficiency, economic rationality, and risk awareness—traits that resonate with ideals of entrepreneurial selfhood. Rather than fully determining social relations, these logics interacted with everyday survival strategies, producing a bounded form of sociality in which intimacy and distance were continually negotiated.

The idea of an autonomous individual is pursued, where the individual, as a self-realizing subject, is expected to play an active role by being responsible for assessing their emotions and acting accordingly (Illouz 2007). Referring to these criteria, social problems, including homelessness, are increasingly perceived in terms of psychological dispositions as personal inadequacies, with impoverished individuals being perceived as lacking abilities, including the ability to make self-effort and manage risks. Moreover, welfare beneficiaries are believed to lack individual autonomy and are dependent upon not achieving the neoliberal ideal of individual independence (Peel 2003; Wilcock 2014).

While the impoverished are portrayed in mainstream society, those who visit the site have internalized this logic, which invokes a feeling of shame in their situations. For instance, Tim, a migrant from the Pacific Island and a regular visitor to the service site, was ashamed of his situation. After getting a divorce and leaving the house where his ex-partner and son resided, he temporarily stayed in the “camp” until it was demolished in 2017. He reported that he was later placed in permanent social housing “by the council,” referring to the state-administered social housing system in New South Wales (Homes NSW). Too ashamed to tell his son and other family members about his situation, he concealed the fact that he had become homeless:

At first, when I moved out [from public housing], I felt ashamed, and I didn’t want my son and my ex-partner to know. I didn’t say I’m sleeping outside, but I told him [my son] that I don’t have a place at the moment. (Interview, February 28, 2023)

Tim compared himself with his ex-partner, who is of Australian Indigenous descent, as follows:

She is one of the senior education officers in New South Wales. She runs a program for mums and babies in Bankstown. She travels around Australia and goes to meet people. She is a business person. I’m a nobody.

As Tim felt somewhat comfortable living outside the library, he refused an offer from his cousin in Australia to stay with his family until he found a place. Considering that people experiencing homelessness are likely to experience rejection from their family network (Bower et al. 2018), Tim could choose to accept the offer from his relatives. However, his refusal appeared rooted in a sense of stigma associated with not achieving self-realization, reflected in his remark, “I’m a nobody.” This remark can be read as resonating with neoliberal ideals of self-management and risk minimization. While Tim maintained a strong connection with his relatives, this sense of stigmatization suppressed his emotions and attachment toward them. Tim’s reluctance to rely on family members was not unique. Reluctance to seek assistance from family emerged as a recurring theme in conversations with visitors, many of whom had either severed ties with relatives or lacked stable family support networks. Such distancing from familial support reflects not only structural rupture but also moral negotiations around autonomy and dignity.

Simultaneously, Tim deliberately restrained his closeness to the “homeless community.” Although he stayed with a group of people experiencing homelessness, who were in a similar situation, for six months, he had his own policy of whom to include or exclude. He never accepted people with drug and/or alcohol problems, as he stated “All of us, most of us, everyone has got different problems, but if people have drug or alcohol problems, they don’t do it there” (Interview, February 28, 2023). Avoiding these problems was his strategy for surviving in the city without becoming involved in trouble. He was aware that the potential cost of associating with visitors with serious drug or alcohol problems outweighed the possible benefits, such as the daily exchange of food, cigarettes, clothing, and service information. While strategic calculation in social relationships is not unique to neoliberal contexts (Snow and Anderson 1993), its heightened salience in contemporary precarious welfare environments shapes how such decisions are framed, interpreted, and morally justified.

He struck a balance between investing his time and energy in social relationships for everyday survival and addressing his problems. When asked if he experienced some degree of sense of belonging to the “homeless community,” he answered:

I do to some extent. I belong to my son, my cousin, and my family. Here, I come and share to some extent because everyone comes and goes. They’ve got their own problems. You can’t fully invest yourself. You’ve got to be careful. I don’t mix with people who do drugs. I don’t hang around with people like that. (Interview, February 28, 2023)

Such cost–benefit reasoning in social relationships recalls Snow and Anderson’s (1993) analysis of identity work among homeless individuals, who actively managed stigma and moral positioning in everyday interactions. While their study did not frame these practices in terms of neoliberal governance, it similarly demonstrated that people experiencing homelessness exercise agency in crafting moral selves under structural constraints. Such emotional restraint has been described as “affective austerity” (Hitchen 2019; Jupp 2021), though in this context it also reflects personal experiences of instability and relational fragility. In contexts where policy frameworks emphasize individual responsibility, intimate and emotional ties may be experienced as risky or burdensome rather than sustaining. Within this environment, individuals may adopt a form of emotional minimization as a pragmatic strategy.

Sally, a French woman of African descent in her 20s and the newest member of the group, shared her tentative relationship with the group: “I’m with them until I find a job” (Interview, March 1, 2023). Placing a time limit on her social relationships highlights the temporality of relational commitments in conditions of precarity. Such conditional attachment may be understood as a form of “affective austerity,” in which emotional investment is minimized amid uncertainty and expectations of self-reliance. Thus, even when sharing similar vulnerabilities, individuals often perceive their problems as ultimately their own to resolve. The moderation of deep relational investment can be read as an effort to preserve autonomy and manage emotional risk rather than a simple rejection of solidarity.

Across these cases—ranging from relational care to strategic emotional restraint—, the boundaries between care and control, intimacy and distance are not fixed but continually recalibrated through everyday interaction. Rather than representing isolated anecdotes, these encounters illuminate how moral selfhood is negotiated within contemporary welfare contexts marked by conditionality and precarity.

Similarly, in certain cases, expectations of companionship or friendship with other people experiencing homelessness were abandoned, at least on the surface. Peter denied experiencing any sense of belonging to the “homeless community,” stating that “This is not like a family table” (Interview, February 26, 2024). In the service place, he had meals and enjoyed regular chats with a person named Allan, but Peter did not regard Allan as a friend. Peter asked Allan, who was sitting next to him during the interview, “Would you come and visit me if I was in jail?” Allan shook his head, and Peter said, “Same with me.” He continued, “Technically, I’ve got zero friends. I’ve always had zero friends” (Interview, February 26, 2024).

Peter suppressed his expectations of his fellow visitors with the assumption that individuals, including himself, choose to maximize their benefits instead of committing themselves to helping others. This minimized the emotional risk of building deep relationships. This attitude is likely a survival tactic in the city, with people engaging in their own risk management, as promoted by neoliberal logic. Peter’s refusal to consider Allan a “friend,” despite sharing meals and conversations, is likely a strategy of affective self-limitation. Rather than signaling an absence of sociality, such emotional restraint again aligns with “affective life of austerity,” where individuals preemptively lower expectations to manage risk, protect themselves from disappointment, and navigate chronic insecurity.

These narratives suggest how intimacy may become shaped by logics of risk management and self-governance in precarious welfare environments. By converting relationships into more calculated exchanges and moderating emotional attachment, individuals appear to engage in what might be described as affective austerity. Such emotional restraint can function as a survival strategy under conditions of chronic insecurity, even as it may inadvertently sustain forms of isolation and competition.

Indigenous Homelessness, Mobility, and Moral Differentiation

The patterns of restrained closeness were not limited to non-Indigenous visitors. While Peter’s case illustrated how affective austerity functioned as an individualized survival strategy in conditions of precarity, forms of emotional distancing were also evident among Indigenous visitors. However, Indigenous homelessness cannot be understood solely through the lens of neoliberal welfare reform. In these cases, withdrawal and guarded sociality intersected not only with broader expectations of self-reliance but also with the enduring effects of dispossession, colonialism, and state interventions (Anderson and Collins 2014; Memmott and Nash 2014). In addition to the structural impacts of colonial governance, family violence and other forms of interpersonal violence are widely documented as significant factors contributing to Indigenous homelessness, particularly among Indigenous women in Australia (Memmott et al. 2003). Furthermore, location must also be considered when examining Indigenous homelessness and service provision. While Indigenous homelessness is often examined in an urban context, in remote Australia “top-down” housing interventions have frequently proceeded without meaningful community consultation, fragmenting service delivery and limiting locally relevant responses. Such findings underscore the colonial and epistemological limits embedded in dominant housing frameworks (Zufferey and Chung 2015).

Notably, the concepts of “home” and “homelessness” have different meanings for Indigenous people. Homelessness for Indigenous Australians encompasses “houselessness,” along with disconnection from kin, being away from one’s country or community, and living in dwellings that lack cultural legitimacy (Memmott and Nash 2014; Morphy 2007). Habibis (2011, 409–12) identifies seven categories of Indigenous mobility, ranging from temporary visits and boarding to “between place” dwelling and chronic homelessness. This typology demonstrates that movement across spaces does not necessarily indicate social disintegration or individual failure, but may reflect culturally embedded patterns of kinship, autonomy, and obligation. Such distinctions challenge standardized housing frameworks that collapse diverse forms of mobility into a singular category of homelessness. Indigenous individuals often navigate homelessness under conditions intensified by racism and discrimination, rendering their experiences structurally distinct from those of non-Indigenous visitors (Browne-Yung et al. 2016).

Furthermore, pathways into homelessness differ. Culturally specific drivers, such as temporary mobility, often motivated by kinship obligations, frequently shape Indigenous housing precarity (Memmott et al. 2012). For instance, Amanda, an Indigenous woman in her 30s from a South Coast Aboriginal community, came to Sydney for a family reunion. Following an assault by a relative struggling with alcohol and substance misuse, she chose not to return to her community and began relying on the service site for support. Although she stayed with a small group of men and women from diverse backgrounds, with whom she felt physically safe—particularly at night—she maintained an emotional distance from them.

Amanda repeatedly emphasized that she was neither “connected at all” to her Aboriginal family nor connected to the homeless group. She described herself as “really upset” and “very depressed,” stressing that her primary goal was to secure an accommodation (Interview, September 3, 2024). Her guarded stance reflected personal distrust and the structural reality that her stay with the group was temporary in a city where public housing is severely limited and waiting lists stretch for years.

Amanda’s trajectory can be understood through Habibis’s (2011) category of “involuntary mobility.” Although she initially traveled voluntarily to visit relatives in Sydney, the assault she experienced transformed her movement into forced displacement and led to her homelessness in the city. Her case demonstrates that Indigenous homelessness emerges at the intersection of mobility, kinship rupture, gendered violence, and urban housing scarcity—conditions that cannot be reduced to either neoliberal governance or individual moral failure.

A similar pattern of distance-making, although shaped by a different moral logic, was witnessed in the case of David, a Māori man, who became a central figure in Amanda’s group. David regularly slept alongside the group, assisted charities in setting up services, guided newcomers through the city’s complex service landscape, and intervened in disputes. However, these supportive actions did not translate into unconditional solidarity. Instead, he carefully managed the boundaries of his relationships, distinguishing between those he felt were reliable and those he viewed as potentially burdensome. While he empathized with Amanda’s suffering as a fellow Indigenous person who shares the experience of racism and social exclusion, he distanced himself as a Māori from Aboriginal Australians. Drawing on his everyday interactions with Aboriginal people at the service site, he critiqued:

Australian Aboriginals, they have opportunities, but they don’t take it. They don’t learn computer, secretarial work, or business. When Captain Cook went to New Zealand, English people told us to go to school and learn like a white man. So, eventually, from 1810 to now, we have learnt. But, like everywhere in the world, they’ve got to understand that you have to change. We don’t walk around in little grass skirts, and we don’t hunt. If you don’t stay in the bush, you have to learn like the white man. Otherwise, you can’t beat them. (Interview, September 3, 2024)

He further emphasized the economic success of his relatives in Australia:

We do help each other but only back home. It’s different in Australia. They can help for a little while, but here, I have to work, or I have to depend only on my family to feed me and give me a room. But they have their own children and jobs, so I don’t want to be a burden. Aboriginal families do the same, but some of them, I see, don’t have the same lifestyle. Like Kiwis who come here, my family here are electricians or work in childcare, so they earn good money and have nice private houses, not like Aboriginals. (Interview, September 3, 2024)

David’s narrative can be read as reflecting broader discourses of self-management, individual responsibility, and moral deservingness that circulate within contemporary urban contexts. By positioning Māori as more disciplined, adaptable, and economically successful, he appeared to draw upon evaluative frameworks that resonate with settler-colonial expectations of the “good Indigenous citizen.” In this framing, Indigeneity becomes internally differentiated through assessments of productivity and effort, complicating the possibility of collective solidarity.

This differentiation served an affective function for David. Despite experiencing homelessness, he appeared to reclaim dignity and agency by aligning himself with ideals of hard work and autonomy, situating himself on what he perceived as the morally superior side of a hierarchy. His stance suggests how broader discourses of responsibility and productivity circulate within marginalized communities, intersecting with colonial histories and contemporary welfare expectations, and contributing to internal differentiation that complicates assumptions of pan-Indigenous unity.

Fragile Solidarity, Social Solitude, and Ontological Security

Despite the voluntary restriction of intimacy among visitors and between visitors and service providers, the service site was always populated at night. In some cases, people experiencing homelessness engaged in reciprocal care. For instance, a woman from Southeast Asia, in her 80s, emphasized the significance of sharing what she got with other people experiencing homelessness:

My life is outside on the street because I help my homeless friends. I have a homeless friend living in the Pitt street. I’ve been looking after him for the last six years. I have a couple of good friends, but the rest are just normal. They understand me. I got to know them because they took care of me. If they get something that they don’t want, they give it to me. If they don’t want clothes, they give it to me. All these clothes are given to me by the people here. And the thing is that when I have money, I share it with people. I do not keep it to myself. Because I have a goal: what I wanted to do was help homeless people. I want to build an orphanage for all the orphans in Australia. That’s my dream. (Interview, September 5, 2024)

In such cases, an alternative moral economy of mutual care, rather than self-effort and individualism, reemerged among people experiencing homelessness. These loose yet meaningful connections were not limited to everyday acts of sharing and occasionally developed into collective action. The site became a collaborative space for service providers and homeless residents, particularly during external intervention, such as when the police intervened in the service site to stop civil groups from providing services following complaints from the city council. Police intervention also occurred when a state law was enacted in 2017 that granted officers the authority to remove people experiencing homelessness from certain urban spaces on the grounds of “unauthorized activity” deemed to compromise public safety. During one such eviction, members of the “homeless community,” including their now-deceased leader, opposed the plan.

After the 2017 eviction, although the frequency of police visits decreased, the police and local council continued to view service providers and visitors as harmful to mainstream citizens, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. They regularly checked whether the service providers were charity groups registered with the city council, which approved the service provisions. If they found an unregistered group, the group was asked to evacuate. Charls was frequently requested by the police to evacuate the service site, along with other civil groups. According to Charls, these interventions were prompted by complaints lodged by nearby tenants about the “undesirable appearance” of the service area (Group’s Facebook Page, April 19, 2022). This observation resonates with Herring’s (2019) findings in the United States, which show that regulatory interventions are frequently driven not directly by the presence of people experiencing homelessness, but by complaints from residents, workers, and business associations, thereby contributing to the criminalization and pathologization of homelessness.

When the police issued these orders, several regular visitors supported Charls and the volunteers, openly resisting the officers’ demands (Charls’s TikTok, April 22, 2022). Some visitors recorded the interactions on their smartphones and posted the footage on TikTok, using the platform to question the legitimacy of the authorities’ actions. Hana recalled that she had sided with Charls and resisted the police, saying, “If the police come again, the homeless are going to bond together and kick them out” (Interview, February 28, 2023).

Hence, although visitors usually maintain distant relationships with one another, when they face a common enemy who threatens their ontological security, ad hoc loose solidarity is forged, with homeless individuals coexisting and acting in coordination. Despite the eviction order, Charls continued his service by relocating the service site and informing visitors of the new location through their social media channels (Group’s Facebook page, April 19, 2022). The continuance of the service routines under such circumstances provided the visitors and service providers with a sense of “we-ness” or “being there together,” even though temporarily, which enhanced their collective agency of navigating the neoliberal regime. Giddens (1991, 39) posited that maintaining habits and routines was a crucial defense against threatening anxieties. Although spontaneous collaboration between service providers and visitors did not culminate in collective activism against social injustice, the co-presence of people experiencing homelessness and service providers in the central urban space created a new sense of community. For instance, a regular visitor of Anglo-Australian descent explained why she continued visiting the site:

We’re just marginalized, at the very bottom, in terms of payments. Life is very hard. I feel lonely at home. We all do. That’s why we come here. Everybody is really nice because everybody is the same. No one is better than anyone else. We’re all in the same boat. Whether you have a house, live on the street, or are paying rent, we are all the same. (Interview, September 6, 2024)

Tim noted people experiencing homelessness’s need to have a place for socially interacting with others:

Most of them got housing [after eviction from the camp]. When I left, I think a few others left as well but not for the same reason. Some people are just a . . . They need more than housing. They need more support in other areas, such as mental health. Being alone in the house every day, they are not doing anything. They need more than that. One guy is here now; he is sleeping up here. We got the same house at the same time in the same area. He is here, I’m here. There are a few guys. (Interview, February 28, 2024)

Furthermore, earlier studies noted that some homeless individuals were reluctant to leave the “homeless community” in search of camaraderie, even after their circumstances improved (Glasser and Bridgman 1999). Sally exhibited a similar pattern. Although she stated that she would remain connected to the “homeless community” until she secured employment, she continued to return even after obtaining casual work to maintain the social networks she had built while living on the street.

While these people experiencing homelessness chose not to invest time and emotion in the “homeless community,” this way of being together provided them with a loose sense of belonging to the community, where a form of “social solitude” was prominent. These moments of spontaneous solidarity did not negate the broader logic of affective austerity but emerged within it. Even as individuals limited emotional commitments for self-protection, brief episodes of mutual care surfaced, revealing how austerity-conditioned emotional restraint coexisted with fragile, situational connections. Here, solitude was not necessarily a social failure, which is often perceived as negative or pathological. As Coleman (2013) argued, by “being alone together,” impersonality and isolation are experienced as co-presence, rather than interpreting urban life in terms of anomie or fragmentation.

This loose connectedness and forms of togetherness made visible tensions within contemporary urban political economies. By bringing people experiencing homelessness—who are often rendered invisible—into the symbolic and financial center of the city, these gatherings unsettled dominant spatial and moral orders. In this context, solitude emerges not simply as isolation but as a relational stance with distinct social consequences. It produces particular urban spaces in which communicative silence can be understood as a form of sociality rather than a failure of solidarity.

Emotional capitalism, often associated with neoliberal governance, shapes the conditions under which homeless visitors interact with service providers and their peers. Visitors frequently refrained from cultivating deep intimacy or attachment with those who assisted them, even while expressing gratitude. Aware of the instability and conditional nature of civil society services, they maintained boundaries between themselves and service providers, regardless of how friendly or supportive these groups appeared. Such distancing can be understood as a strategy for mitigating disappointment should services suddenly cease.

This emotional restraint extended to relationships with other people experiencing homelessness. Even when staying together, visitors recognized the fragility and fluidity of the “homeless community.” They understood from experience that relationships were often temporary and contingent: some individuals moved on after resolving their difficulties, while others were perceived as instrumentalizing social ties. In this context, limiting emotional investment functioned as a pragmatic response to uncertainty and precarity, aligning with what may be described as a neoliberal emotional regime, though not reducible to it.

Conclusion

While affective austerity and selective emotional investment shaped much of the everyday sociality at the service site, this ethnography revealed moments of reciprocal care and fragile solidarities. These encounters demonstrated that emotional restraint, although pervasive under precarity, did not entirely foreclose the possibility of connection. Instead, they highlighted how civic communities were formed, sustained, and negotiated within contemporary welfare regimes shaped by neoliberal reforms, where care and distance were intertwined modalities of survival rather than mutually exclusive alternatives.

Building on Illouz’s notion of emotional capitalism, this study showed that care is not positioned outside neoliberal governance but frequently operates in ways that intersect with its moral logics. The exchanges between service providers and homeless visitors—through the circulation of clothing, assistance with setting up service routines, or practices of verbal recognition—were structured by moral languages that emphasized self-responsibility, empowerment, and personal development. This revealed how compassion and self-governance operate simultaneously, producing an ambivalent moral economy in which care practices may simultaneously resonate with neoliberal ideals of responsibility while also alleviating immediate suffering. Visitors were encouraged to participate as “responsible subjects,” and many internalized these expectations, contributing labor or managing their emotions in ways that echoed broader discourses of productivity and responsibility.

These dynamics partly resonated with what De Wilde and Duyvendak (2016) described as the prefigurative politics of affective citizenship. In their analysis, policy practitioners cultivated affective citizenship through specific emotional techniques, such as caring, appreciating, and branding, which encouraged citizens to adopt emotional repertoires that aligned with neoliberal welfare regimes’ moral expectations. Although the Sydney service site is not a formal policy arena, similar “affective” techniques informally circulated there. Visitors were subtly encouraged to present themselves as caring, appreciative, and emotionally calibrated, and these affective repertoires became part of the everyday moral landscape of service provision.

However, even when such affective expectations were internalized, they did not result in unrestrained intimacy or deep relational bonding. Instead, they coexisted with patterned forms of distance and emotional self-protection. Coleman’s concept of social solitude enriched this analysis by clarifying why visitors routinely limited emotional intimacy with service providers and homeless peers. Their strategic withdrawal from deep relational engagement was not indicative of social deficit but reflected a mode of being-together in which distance served as a protective and productive form of sociality. This calibrated co-presence allowed individuals to share space, information, and risk while avoiding obligations that might overextend their emotional or material capacities. Thus, social solitude described a form of relationality grounded not in detachment but in a deliberate calibration of nearness and distance, making sense in the heightened volatility and unpredictability of life at the margins.

Giddens’s notion of ontological security deepened this insight by showing why such low-intensity, routinized interactions carried existential significance for the participants. Even when visitors deliberately avoided intimacy, the repeated act of returning to the service site, inhabiting familiar spaces, and encountering recognizable faces produced a stabilizing sense of continuity. Under homelessness, marked by displacement, institutional flux, and the continual negotiation of one’s moral worth, these routine encounters served as anchors against existential anxiety. Hence, ontological security was sustained by patterned, nonhostile forms of everyday co-presence, not deep relational ties. Thus, the service site operated as a precarious yet vital “affective infrastructure,” enabling individuals to maintain a sense of coherence in the face of social and spatial disruption.

These findings complicate the often-assumed binary between solidarity and individualism. While many participants engaged in strategic emotional minimization, driven by cynicism about service fragility, the burden of self-responsibility, or the fear of exploitation, they forged situational and ephemeral forms of belonging grounded in shared vulnerability and exposure. While fragile and temporary, these micro-collectivities fulfilled essential psychological and social needs. They offered predictability, recognition, and safety, which sustained participants’ capacity to navigate conditions of precarity shaped by contemporary welfare regimes. Rather than representing the breakdown of community, these fleeting solidarities highlight the emergence of new relational forms shaped by austerity, precarity, and the need for emotional risk management.