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

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.