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References
Stern, M.J., & Axinn, J. (2018). Social welfare: A history of American response to need (9th ed.). Pearson Education. Chapter 3, “The Pre-Civil War Period: 1776-1860” (pp. 34-38)
Urban Geography
ISSN: 0272-3638 (Print) 1938-2847 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rurb20
Homelessness, American Style
Don Mitchell
To cite this article: Don Mitchell (2011) Homelessness, American Style, Urban Geography, 32:7,
933-956, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.32.7.933
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HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE1
Don Mitchell2
Department of Geography
Syracuse University
Abstract: This study traces the historical geography of homelessness in America. It provides
a synoptic overview of the production of homelessness in the United States and the varying urban
and national responses to homelessness that have resulted (both cultural responses generally and
policy and legal responses more particularly). Surveying changing policies and practices from
the colonial period to the present, the author explains how homelessness in the United States has
developed and changed, and why it has taken the specific social form that it has. Focusing not on
homeless people themselves, and not on the experience of homelessness by those people who are
un-housed, but rather on how the societal condition of homelessness—the discourses, practices,
laws, and events that shape the nature of homelessness as a social fact—has evolved in the United
States, this article suggests that there is a specifically American “style” to homelessness. It concludes by raising the question of whether, with the globalization of neoliberal modes of economy
and regulation, such a style is now beginning to appear in other national contexts.
INTRODUCTION
To call homelessness in the United States a “crisis” is to abuse language. Homelessness is a permanent and necessary part of the U.S. political economy (Marcuse, 1988),
even if its specific form, its intensity, and the way it is managed has been historically and
geographically variable.
“Homelessness” is not the experience of being homeless. Nor is it a word that specifically refers to the qualities of people who are un-housed. Rather it names a social condition, a set of social relations that are as much about the structures of housed society as
they are about how society understands those who lack shelter. In other words, to speak of
“homelessness” is to speak of how social relations are organized. The goal of this article,
therefore, is to examine those sets of social relations—the discourses, acts of charity and
other practices, modes of regulation, laws, and so forth—that shape the societal condition we call “homelessness.” In these terms, the constitution of the societal condition of
homelessness must be understood as an evolving, contested “project,” not a once-and-forall thing. To define “homelessness” in the abstract, then, is a fool’s errand. Rather, what
Thanks to Jürgen von Mahs for his patience and good ideas—the entire special issue has been a great collaboration through and through. Innumerable conversations with Katie Wells have improved my thinking about the social
condition of homelessness. Thanks especially to three groups of ace undergraduate students in my Geography
of Homelessness class who have helped me to figure out how best to describe the long arc of homelessness—as
condition and ideology—in American history. Elvin Wyly has been humorously tolerant of my quirks, and for
that especially has earned my appreciation.
2
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Don Mitchell, Department of Geography,
Maxwell School, Syracuse University, 144 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13210; telephone: 315-443-3353; fax:
315-443-4227; email: dmmitc01@maxwell.syr.edu
1
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Urban Geography, 2011, 32, 7, pp. 933–956. DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.32.7.933
Copyright © 2011 by Bellwether Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved.
934
DON MITCHELL
constitutes “homelessness” (and thus how those people labeled “homeless” are understood
by larger society) changes as the social conditions that produce homelessness change.3
The recent evolution of “homelessness” in the U.S. can be quickly surveyed: Beginning
in the late 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s, the nature of homelessness in the U.S.
altered significantly, leading to a more diverse, and much larger, street population than in
the previous decades. The seemingly sudden explosion of street populations in the early
years of the Reagan era led to a great deal of activism, often in the face of a hostile national
government, a rapid expansion of emergency shelters, experiments in what became the
“continuum-of-care” approach to housing the homeless, and eventually the McKinneyVento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987. With the deepening of neoliberal reforms in the
1990s, however, the U.S. witnessed what many commentators referred to as “compassion
fatigue.” The expansion of the shelter system and the various programs of the McKinney
Act seemed to do little to lessen the presence of visible homeless people in cities. As cities
were struggling to remake themselves as more “competitive” in the markets for footloose
capital, tourists, suburban visitors, and gentrifiers, homeless people, and the facilities that
served them (shelters, drop-in centers, halfway houses, etc.), were seen more and more as
liabilities.
The response was a criminalization of homeless people in many cities. Laws were
passed that outlawed everything from sleeping outdoors, to sitting on sidewalks, to free
food giveaways. A traditional division between “deserving poor” (women, children, and
those who behaved themselves in ways dominant society deemed sufficiently grateful to
charity) and “undeserving poor” (men of working age, those who lived on the streets or
in encampment and refused to enter shelters or rehabilitation programs) was reasserted—
with a vengeance.
While anti-homeless laws were somewhat successful in pushing the most visible street
people out of the most prominent public spaces, and while the boom-times of the Clinton
era encouraged the sense that those who remained homeless were somehow themselves
at fault, thus turning attention away from structural analyses of homelessness, the current
economic crisis has led once again to a rapid increase in the population of the new homeless, increased strain on the always-inadequate emergency shelter and food systems, and
a return of visible street homeless populations in most cities. Despite the development in
recent years of a new ideology of “housing first” for homeless people, the public housing sector and broader low-income housing markets have been eviscerated by 40 years
of underinvestment, gentrification, and outright destruction, suggesting that possibilities
for quickly addressing the latest manifestation of homelessness in the United States are
extremely limited.
In what follows, I will fill out this all-too-brief survey of the changing nature of homelessness and responses to it, both extending that history back in time and placing it in its
political context. In doing so I will introduce an argument about the how the co-evolutionary
relationship between political economy and its social regulation—especially in the realm
As will become evident, the approach taken in this paper runs contrary to the dominant discourses of contemporary homelessness, which are largely concerned with the question of who the homeless are, and what it is about
their personal characteristics that has led them to the condition or status of homelessness. Critics call this focus
on characteristics the “medicalization” of homelessness and show that one of its primary effects—and often a
primary goal—has been to depoliticize the discourse of homelessness (Lyon-Callo, 2000; Snow et al., 1994).
3
HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE
935
of law—must be carefully parsed if we want to understand the evolution of an Americanstyle societal condition of homelessness. Such an analysis will provide something of a
historical and geographical point of comparison for the other papers in this issue, which
seek to understand if there is something of an Americanization of the “style” of homelessness in other national settings.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOMELESSNESS IN THE UNITED STATES
It is customary, in both academic and policy circles in the U.S., to base analyses of
homelessness on the question, “Who are the homeless?” (e.g., Blau 1993; Erickson and
Wilhelm, 1986, Part IV). This question is answered at the aggregate level by seeking to
determine the percentage of homeless people who are mentally or physically ill, addicted
to drugs or alcohol, have criminal records, or suffer from some other moral impairment
or form of deviancy; such analyses typically parse the homeless by race, gender, age,
and other characteristics. Homelessness is understood in this discourse as a problem of
“impaired capacity,” and those who suffer from this malady are themselves often seen not
so much as symptoms, but as causes of “structural problems in the economy” (Hopper et
al., 1985, p. 189; cf. Tier, 1998). Homelessness is argued to be a characteristic of persons
rather than a condition of society.
The Deserving and Undeserving Poor
Such an argument reinforces a traditional divide in American society (and the West
more broadly) between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. In Colonial America, this
distinction was subsumed under a broader one differentiating between “neighbor” and
“stranger,” a distinction that “weakened but never disappeared” as it was supplemented in
the “early nineteenth century with the distinction between the “‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’
poor” (Rothman, 1987, pp. 11–12).4 The characteristics of the poor—are they neighbors
or strangers, Americans or immigrants, able-bodied or infirm, young or old?—determined
their moral standing, and thus both the cause of their poverty and the appropriate response
(the provision of shelter, incarceration in jail or workhouse, or being driven out of town).
As Hopper et al. (1985, p. 189) summarize, “Despite stubborn implications to the contrary,
homelessness has traditionally been viewed as a problem of troubled—and troublesome—
individuals. The terms of accusation may change, but the logic does not.”
The logic is an ideological one that hides an economic one. The process of what Marx
called “primitive” or “original” accumulation in England, involving the engrossment of
land, enclosure of commons, together with the breaking down of feudal and guild bonds,
violently uprooted whole armies of “masterless men”: “beggars, robbers, vagabonds”
(Marx, 1987 [ed.], p. 686). To control these new classes of dispossessed there developed
“a bloody legislation against vagabondage” that sought to control movement, compel
labor, and punish those who resisted (Ribton-Turner, 1887; Hill, 1972; Beier, 1986). Both
the problem of “masterless men” and the solution were imported to America with the
colonies—for example, poor laws that prescribed “pillorying, branding, flogging, or ear
There is now an excellent literature on the history of homelessness in relation to poor law in the U.S.; among
others, see Cresswell (2001), DePastino (2003), Hopper (2003), Kusmer (2002), and Piven and Cloward (1971).
4
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DON MITCHELL
cropping … those migrants who could not give ‘a good and satisfactory accounting of their
wandering up and down’” (DePastino, 2003, p. 6, quoting Jones, 1984, p. 39), enforced
labor in the workhouse, on the rock pile, or in the harvest for those who could, or the
simple expedient of “warning out” (that is, forcing back on the road) those who showed
up in town with no visible means of support, and were undeserving of local sympathy
(Rothman, 1987, p. 12).
Vagrancy laws were a key means of controlling both the “wandering poor” and freed or
escaped slaves, and they reinforced a sharp divide between insiders in society (including
those who might be deserving of some charity) and outcasts who threatened the stability of
society (Monkkonen, 1984; Cresswell, 2001; Schweick, 2009). Yet, “the poor of the nineteenth century city were everywhere apparent. Begging was commonplace. Rag-pickers
foraged through garbage for discarded and scrap food. ‘Wild children’ roamed the streets”
(Hopper, 2003, p. 30). Behind this visible façade of poverty lay “a huge reservoir of sickly,
poorly paid, badly housed, and frequently unemployed people,” a “disreputable poor” that
“charity did little to ease … preferring instead to pioneer new disciplinary techniques for
their edification” (Hopper, 2003, pp. 30–31).
Tramping and the Rise of Skid Row
Nonetheless such outcasts were, many of them, an economic necessity. Not just Marx’s
lumpenproletariat, “tramps” were a vital source of flexible and seasonal labor in both anteand postbellum America, harvesting bonanza wheat crops, building canals and railroads,
felling trees in the forests, and so forth (Monkkonen, 1984; DePastino, 2003; Higbie,
2003). The rapid industrialization of the U.S. after the Civil War, and the rapid engrossment of land that accompanied it (complicated, but by no means eliminated by, the various
homestead policies), created a massive demand for mobile labor. As Kusmer (1987, p. 23)
writes, “The increasing number of homeless men during the very period when the United
States was emerging as an industrial nation was no coincidence. The new vagrancy was
an indigenous aspect of a country in rapid transition from an agricultural and small-town
society to one centered on great cities.”
Three crucial results of the rise of this massive “reserve army” of migratory and often
homeless men (and some women) are particularly important for understanding contemporary homelessness in America. First, it generated a serious moral panic among the emerging
bourgeoisie, especially in times of economic crisis (e.g., 1873–1878; 1893; 1912–1913)
when the bourgeoisie’s own precarious social stability was at risk (Cresswell, 2001).5
As a result, vagrancy laws were reinforced and new policing methods—sometimes quite
violent—were introduced to contain and corral the wandering poor while separating the
worthy from the unworthy (who were not infrequently labeled “agitators”) (Monkkonen,
2004). These “tramp scares” expressed themselves as “struggles between the propertied
and unpropertied over the use of public space, fears about the growth of a propertyless proletariat, and anxieties about the loss of traditional social controls in America” (DePastino,
2003, p. 8)—all struggles, fears, and anxieties strongly revived in the current era of
homelessness.
At times of economic crisis, the number of homeless women among the tramping poor increased greatly, though
vagrancy remained largely a male preserve (Weiner, 1984; Cresswell, 2001).
5
HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE
937
The second, not unrelated, result was the development of a specific geography of homelessness in the United States. On the road, this geography took the form of hobo jungles
or encampments at the edge of cities, in disused spaces along rail lines, and so forth. For
workers between jobs, jungles often served as spaces of community (not without hierarchy and internal forms of exploitation and domination among hobos),6 places where
the sting of the police baton was less frequent, and zones of safety from a deeply hostile
settled society. In cities, skid rows—entire districts of single-room occupancy hotels
(SROs), flophouses, municipal lodging houses, labor agencies, cheap bars and cafes,
missions, whorehouses, and other businesses and services geared toward poor and migratory workers—developed at the edges of downtowns. Migratory workers “wintered over”
in skid row, and returned to it between short-term jobs in the harvests, mines, and woods.
A “home-guard” class of relatively immobile, frequently unemployable (because of age,
infirmity, or addiction) “bums” found cheap housing—or at least a bed in a mission—
and a relatively benign police presence in skid row (Bahr, 1970, 1973; McSheehy, 1979;
Schneider, 1984; Kasinitz, 1986; Hoch and Slayton, 1989; Groth, 1994).7 “Unfit mothers,”
prostitutes, and other poor women also found shelter on skid row, though boarding houses
in working class neighborhoods housed many working women, while settlement houses
in various districts provided a home for the most “deserving” of the others. Skid rows thus
developed in most American cities as specialized districts for housing, maintaining, and
managing the massive reserve army of labor, an army that expanded and contracted with
the economic fortunes of the nation.
The third result, concomitant in part of the “discovery” of this emerging geography, was
the development of an extensive social science literature on the phenomenon of vagrancy,
tramping—and homelessness. Economic crisis always brought with it a significant rise in
the number of those (including large numbers of women and children) seeking shelter in
the lodging houses, police station basements, or shantytowns erected in parks or on wasteland, but the phenomenon of wandering men, and the perceived disaffiliation from society
that marked them, never disappeared. Skid row was, by the beginning of the 20th century,
apparently becoming home to a permanent class of the unemployed and semi-employed.
Researchers in the emerging social sciences sought to parse out just who it was that habituated skid row (see, e.g. Solenberger, 1911), and to explain their disaffiliation from family
and the comforts of a settled home as a sort of perversity or personal defect (Parker, 1919),
or even as a way of life chosen by men divorced from the norms of society (Anderson,
1923). Homelessness—a condition now defined not so much by a lack of shelter, but rather
by a lack of tight ties to bourgeois family and society—was increasingly seen as a function
of individuals’ characters (Hopper et al., 1985; Cresswell, 2001; Hopper, 2003), as political economic analyses of the role of hobos and other marginalized workers in society were
downplayed. The effect was to classify homeless people as external to society, rather than
as integral to its functioning.8 The preferred intervention, therefore, was typically charity
There was a quite specific language of male homelessness at this time: hobos wandered in search of work;
tramps wandered but did not work; bums neither wandered nor worked (Cresswell, 2001, pp. 48–49), though in
practice these terms were frequently used interchangeably.
7
“Relative” is the important word. Policing on skid row could at times be impressively violent (Bittner, 1967;
McSheehy, 1979).
8
Such a positioning was obviously a hallmark of the Chicago School of urban sociology. But work associated with
that school should not be so easily homogenized. Significant exceptions to this overarching way of understanding
6
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DON MITCHELL
and moral instruction (as with the Salvation Army and the thickets of Christian “rescue”
missions that sprouted in skid rows across the country) that sought to reintegrate those who
could be saved.
Whatever the theories of the social scientists, and whatever the interventions of the
charities, both were overwhelmed by the explosion of need that marked the Depression.
Charity collapsed under the weight of both numbers and the contradictions of its own
ideology as millions lost their houses and sought shelter wherever they could. On the basis
of surveys, the hobo-sociologist Nels Anderson estimated in the spring of 1933 that 1.5
million people slept in public shelters or outdoors, and additional millions filled the flophouses and commercial lodging houses; more still, no doubt, were doubled up with relatives. The term “homeless” was newly reserved “for those unable to pay for shelter of any
sort” (DePastino, 2003, pp. 200–201). Other research exposed the appalling conditions—
the dilapidated and overcrowded houses, the airless, firetrap tenements, the neighborhoods
still without plumbing or safe water—within which much of the working class lived. And
unprecedented migrations of new “tramps,” new migratory workers—the masses, often
whole extended families, fleeing drought and economic collapse in the Dustbowl states—
created housing and political crises in rural and urban areas alike (Stein, 1974; Gregory,
1989). Economic explanations of the new homeless and poorly housed were unavoidable,
as were solutions targeted at the conditions that produced homelessness, rather than at the
characteristics of homeless people themselves.9
Welfare, American Style
Keynesian interventions in the U.S. economy beginning in the 1930s and 1940s were
halting, discontinuous, and frequently contradictory. Nothing like the Beveridge Plan
for post-war Britain, and certainly nothing like the social welfarism of Europe, was ever
developed. But the effect of what interventions there were on the nature of homelessness,
and its geography, was profound. The Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937 created a
national program of public housing for the first time. Imagined in the first instance as
workers’ housing, the housing built under the act expanded the pool of low-cost housing
and relieved pressure on overcrowded tenement districts. The major 1949 amendment to
the act promoted slum clearance and urban development as well as rehousing in massive projects (Hackworth, 2007, pp. 44–53). These acts, and others that followed, together
with the heavy subsidization of suburban housing (through tax breaks as well as through
the creation of the federal interstate highway system), had profound effects on skid rows
in many cities, beginning a long decline of SROs and rooming houses (Jackson, 1985;
Fishman, 1987; Groth, 1994, chapter 9).
Make-work programs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress
Administration, provided immediate relief to the un- and underemployed, especially
young and single men, eating into the traditional pool of recruits for the migratory labor
forces. The military draft, war-oriented production, and thus the full employment of World
homeless people can be found in Anderson (1923) and Thrasher (1927); for an excellent discussion of the latter,
see Tonnelat (2008).
9
Analyses and policy interventions aimed at the characteristics of homeless people never disappeared, of course
(cf. Southerland and Locke, 1936; Crouse, 1986).
HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE
939
War II had an even more profound effect (as did the heavy subsidization of college and
university education for veterans under the postwar G.I. Bill). State planning of industry,
some support for unionizing, the invention of Social Security, the development of state and
corporate pensions, a modicum of health insurance, and what eventually became known as
the “Great Compromise” between capital and labor after the war (a compromise that traded
high wages and job security for labor peace), all radically transformed the labor market,
cementing into place a “fordist” regime of accumulation and social regulation. While some
transient labor was still required in the economy in seasonal industries like agriculture, the
bracero guest-worker program (1942–1964) helped assure that such work would be conducted largely by a nonwhite, immigrant labor force, one often excluded from the fruits of
the postwar boom (Galarza, 1964, 1977). “The Great Depression, which began by sending
millions to lodging houses, jungle camps, and public shelters,” DePastino (2003, p. 219)
concluded, “ended by confirming hobohemia’s [skid row’s] demise and recommitting the
nation to the suburban domestic ideal.”
As a result, the structure of homelessness—and most especially its representation—
changed. Women and children were never absent from the ranks of the homeless, nor
were people of color, but neither were they now typically counted as part of the new,
postwar homeless. Those labeled homeless in the postwar years were the residents of the
remaining SROs, missions, and lodging houses, and they tended to be white, elderly, and
rarely transient. They were frequently alcoholic. They were either minimally employed or
unemployable. They were modern society’s outcasts (Cayo Sexton, 1986).10 They were
disaffiliated men—disaffiliated from the nuclear family (both the ideal and the reality)
and disaffiliated from society. Urban sociologists “characterized skid row as a world apart,
an isolated enclave of damaged white men who had failed to take up their proper roles
as family breadwinners” (DePastino, 2003, p. 231; cf. Hopper, 2003, p. 45; Bahr, 1970;
Bahr and Caplow, 1973). They were truly the undeserving poor, because they had failed to
avail themselves of the benefits of the new postwar era. In this way, despite the construction, at least in part, of what Jessop (2002) termed the Keynesian welfare national state,
homelessness could be made to fit a traditionally liberal ideology, in which opportunities
for individual success were everywhere available, and thus lack of success was a function
of either a character fault, a (bad) choice, or some combination of the two. But one salient
fact remained the same: homeless people were people “whose presence represent[ed]
unneeded labor,” and as such they remained “a drain on households [and] an affront to the
peaceful enjoyment of civic space” (Hopper, 2003, p. 45).
THE GREAT U-TURN11
“So long as the appearance of unusual numbers of homeless men (in addition to the
accepted residuum of ‘unemployables’) can be framed as a temporary aberration,” writes
urban anthropologist Kim Hopper (2003, p. 46), “the fiction can be maintained that homelessness signifies nothing other than deranged mentalities, bad habits, or faulty coping
The first wave of deinstitutionalization in the 1960s, which moved the mentally ill out of the total institution of
the asylum and into unprepared and underfunded neighborhoods for care, reinforced the notion that street and
homeless people were “not like us” (Lamb, 1984; Dear and Wolch, 1987).
11
The title is borrowed from Harrison and Bluestone (1988).
10
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DON MITCHELL
skills of those whom it affects.” By the early 1980s, this fiction was, in fact, quite difficult
to maintain. Uneven recovery from the deep recession of the 1970s; the rapid slide into
a new recession in 1981; the massive deindustrialization that had begun in some areas as
early as the 1960s, but really gathered force after the oil shocks of 1973–1974; the steady
erosion of union rights and benefits; changes in housing markets; and the defunding of
public housing: all these combined to produce a massive wave of new homelessness as
Ronald Reagan took office as president.12
Dedicated to dismantling what was left of the welfare state, the Reagan administration
helped usher in what Jessop (2002) awkwardly calls the Schumpterian workfare post
national regime, but which has more generally come to be known first as “post-fordism”
and now by the shorthand “neoliberalism” (Harvey, 2005). Marked by a market fundamentalism (in ideology if not practice), a new flexibilism in labor markets was pushed at
the expense of employment guarantees, and wages for working people were forced downward. The pace of deindustrialization in core countries, and especially America, increased
(Bluestone and Harrison, 1982; Harrison and Bluestone, 1988). Whole towns and cities
were wiped out as footloose factions of capital scoured the globe looking for cheap labor,
lax environmental regulation, or large subsidies and tax breaks (see, e.g. Linkon and
Russo, 2003). Factions of capital that were locally rooted, to say nothing of local people,
struggled to find ways to survive in an environment where places were now in competition
with each other (Harvey, 1989, 2001, chapter 16). A new regime of accumulation and new
modes of social regulation were in the making. Homelessness both resulted from these
processes and, many thought, exacerbated them—and, as we shall see, created a particular
challenge for both accumulation and regulation.
The Reassertion of Structure
Between 1979 and 1985, 10 million jobs were lost in the U.S. economy (Wolch and Dear,
1993, p. 4). Those that remained were radically restructured in the years that followed, as
the assault on unions, wage guarantees, basic welfare entitlements, and the public housing sector continued unabated. At the same time a generation of deinstitutionalization and
the subsequent non-funding of community care for mentally ill people began to make its
effects felt on the streets (and in the jails) of major cities (Barr, 2001). The result was a
“new” homelessness that could not so easily be ascribed merely to personal character faults.
Estimates of the number of people who were homeless, either chronically or at some point
during a year ranged as high as 3 million, though most estimates were lower (Kondratas,
1986). What marked this new homelessness was its sudden visibility. Streets, especially
the streets of the Central Business District, were full of homeless people. They were young
and old men, women, children, teens, whole families. They were now disproportionately
Black. No longer confined to the old skid row, the homeless littered the sidewalks and
parks on the everyday paths of urban residents and suburban commuters alike. In some
places—parks like San Francisco’s Golden Gate or New York’s Tompkins Square (Smith,
1989), empty lots and sidewalks at the edge of Los Angeles’s historic skid row (Rowe
The public housing sector was never robust. In the mid-1990s, only 1.2 million of 112.3 million housing units
could be considered “public”—a far cry from the 25% of units that remained public in the UK and the 44% that
were public in the Netherlands (Hackworth, 2007, p. 41).
12
HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE
941
and Wolch, 1990), dry river beds (Wright, 1997; Takahashi, 1998; Brinegar, 2003)—large
shanty towns and encampments developed, a sight not seen since the Depression. Shelters
were overwhelmed. Homelessness looked like a crisis.
It was a crisis that clearly reflected massive transformations in the economy designed to
restock the ranks of the reserve army. By 1983, to take just one indicator, 15% of the U.S.
population lived below the official poverty line (Wolch and Dear, 1993, p. 7). By 1985, one
million fewer households were receiving federal housing assistance than before Reagan
was elected (Wolch and Akita, 1989). Arguments that individualized homelessness at the
expense of structural accounts seemed to do a poor job of explaining this new homelessness. So too did the traditional division between deserving and undeserving poor blur,
though it did not disappear altogether (e.g., Main, 1986).
As a result, due to the work of a growing cadre of “homeless advocates” (e.g. the
then-new Coalition for the Homeless, as well as innumerable shelter operators and other
activists), as well as movements of homeless people themselves (such as the Center of
Creative Non-Violence in Washington, DC), the crisis was addressed, to some degree,
through a massive and rapid expansion of the shelter system made possible in part by
the McKinney-Vento Act of 1987 (passed over strong resistance from the Reagan
Administration).13 The $800 million that McKinney-Vento provided annually led to a
patchwork of shelters, some government-operated, and many private charities in all major
cities to address immediate needs for shelter, but in the end did little to address root causes
of homelessness (Foscarinis, 1996b).14
The 1980s crisis that so rapidly swelled the ranks of the homeless was a crisis for people
made homeless, of course, but it was also a crisis of capital. The massive deindustrialization
of the 1970s and 1980s was accelerated, if not launched, by the multiple crises of 1973–
1975: the oil embago-induced recession, the breaking down of the postwar Bretton Woods
monetary agreements, and most of all the increased falling rates of profit in the key industries of the “fordist” era such as coal, steel, automobiles, etc. These crises expressed themselves in the U.S. as “a deliberate structural adjustment” (Davis, 1986; Gilmore, 2007, p.
40) that freed some capital to seek new places for investment.
In some cases these were literally places, as capital sought safe havens in the built environment (Harvey, 1982, 1989; N. Smith, 1990, 1996). Redevelopment zones bulldozed
into existence as a result of the housing acts, and older neighborhoods ripe for gentrification, both served as magnets for footloose capital. There was, in Smith’s (1979) memorable phrase, a “back to the city movement by capital.” His full line is that it was “a back
to the city movement by capital not people,” but it is more accurate to say it was a back to
the city movement by capital at the expense of poor people. Not only were redevelopment
zones targeted, but so were skid rows and other inner-city neighborhoods. In San Diego,
as many as half of the 5000 SRO rooms existing in 1976 were gone by 1988 (Staeheli
After his administration’s strong lobbying against the bill proved unavailing, and expecting his veto would be
overridden, President Reagan took the unusual step of signing the bill in the middle of the night when he could
be assured that there would be no press present and thus less coverage (Fuerbringer, 1987; Pear, 1987; Sullivan,
1987).
14
The landscape of shelters—Gowan (2010) calls it an archipelago—was highly uneven. Some cities such as
Phoenix strongly resisted opening new shelters, whereas others like New York City were required by court order
to provide shelter for anyone who asked for it (Alter et al., 1986; Hopper and Cox, 1986; Main, 1986; Brinegar,
2003).
13
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DON MITCHELL
and Mitchell, 2008, p. 54); in San Francisco they dropped almost 18% between 1975 and
1979—before the heavy wave of gentrification rolled in (Kasinitz, 1986, p. 247); between
1969 and 1986, some 2000 SRO units were destroyed in LA (Rowe and Wolch, 1990, p.
187); even little Northampton, Massachusetts saw half its SRO stock disappear between
1970 and 2000 (Lyon-Callo, 2001, p. 189). Many SROs were transformed into boutique
hotels, and for SRO rooms that remained, rents skyrocketed. In San Diego, for example,
SRO rents increased 80% between 1980 and 1985 (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008, p. 54).
Simultaneously, new high-end apartment towers rose where services for San Diego’s
“down-and-outs” used to exist, spurred by the development of a festival marketplace, and
a fully gentrified Gaslamp District. The longstanding Rescue Mission and other shelters
were pushed to the fringes of downtown (an area itself now under pressure as development
associated with the new baseball stadium encroaches). The street homeless population
exploded, even as services for them were eliminated (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008, pp.
49–58). The back to the city movement of capital—gentrification—in other words, both
produced homelessness, and exacerbated the difficulty of life for those made homeless.15
Simultaneously, and whatever the structural causes of homelessness, the continued (and
growing) presence of homeless people in cities was seen as a threat to localized capital
accumulation under these new conditions of footlooseness (Mitchell, 1997). Homeless
people—and their services—in CBDs and nearby areas targeted for gentrification were
said to deter inward investment as well as the willingness of tourists and suburban shoppers, two central pillars of the new, post-industrialized, urban economy. In an era of heightened competition between places, many cities found it a structural necessity to remove
homeless people and their services (Mair, 1986). Despite the blurring of the distinction
between deserving and undeserving poor in the early 1980s, and despite a great deal of
public support for the expansion of the shelter system, pressure mounted in many cities
to move shelters out of downtown. As a result, “service dependent ghettos” sprang up in
disinvested districts (Dear and Wolch, 1987).
As importantly, it quickly became apparent that much of the public support for homeless people was abstract, in that neighborhoods quickly organized to keep shelters and
other services out. Sometimes this Not-in-My-Backyard (NIMBY) mentality was an overt
circling of the class wagons, or a raw expression of fear of the scary others (Takahashi,
1998; Brinegar, 2003; Amster, 2004). At other times it was expressed in highly sophisticated arguments about spatial equity, structural solutions to homelessness (which shelters
do little to address), and the availability of better sites elsewhere (Lyon-Callo, 2001). The
location of services in poor and working class neighborhoods (Wolch and Dear, 1993, p.
169) or their outright banishment from whole jurisdictions (Brinegar, 2003; Amster, 2004)
thus reflected the geography of power in contemporary cities. It was, and is, a geography of power that often works through a scrim of compassion. Appeals to volunteer at
soup kitchens rarely go unheeded, and holiday fundraising appeals are an annual success.
But this is a distanced compassion. As one shelter operator in San Diego comments, her
agency received “great donations from businesses that are located blocks away,” while
The survival strategies of homeless people in 1980s America and later are well-documented and are impressive
in their creativity (Hopper et al., 1985; Coleman, 1986; Rowe and Wolch, 1990; Wolch et al., 1993; Ruddick,
1996; Wright, 1997; Gowan 2010).
15
HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE
943
those nearby did not support the shelter and on many occasions actively fought its right to
be there at all (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008, 64–65).
The Great Ideological U-Turn
Even distanced compassion began to break down within a few short years of the explosion of the “new homeless” in the early 1980s. Even before the end of the decade commentators were beginning to speak of “compassion fatigue” among the populace (Millich,
1994), as the massive explosion of the shelter system and the invention of various “continuum of care” models (eventually codified by the Clinton Administration in the 1990s) for
addressing homeless problem proved to be of no avail. From a structural perspective, it is
hardly surprising that the streets of American cities remained packed with homeless men,
women, and children at the end of the Reagan era (which was also the highpoint of the first
wave of gentrification: see Smith, 1996). It is also hardly surprising that the early success
of homeless advocates—the winning of the right to shelter in New York and Washington,
the passing of the McKinney act, and various local, rearguard actions that defended the
rights of homeless people to be on the streets—were met with a strong, coordinated ideological campaign designed to reassert homelessness as a personal characteristic, and even
more as a personal choice. Conservative newspaper columnists (George Will, John Leo),
conservative think tanks (American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Manhattan
Institute), and public-interest law scholars worked assiduously to re-demonize the homeless, reframing homelessness not as a result of economic restructuring, and certainly not
as a concomitant and necessary part of capitalism, but rather as a problem of public order
(Tier, 1993, 1998; MacDonald, 1995, 2010).
If the singular achievement of the New Deal of the 1930s and the development of a rudimentary welfare state in the 1950s was to admit that some dysfunctionality in society was
structural and an inevitable part of the normal workings of capitalism, it took a generation
for the courts to catch up. Vagrancy and other laws that punished the poor for a condition
beyond their control remained on the books, and enforced, until the 1960s when courts
engaged in what conservative law scholars called a “constitutional revolution” (Ellickson,
1996). Among other things (such as finding new protections against police abuse and for
the rights of suspects), this revolution struck down what are known as “status crimes.” In
the early 1960s, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court found that jailing someone for being
an addict was a violation of protections against cruel and unusual punishment (J. Smith,
1996). By 1973, after a number of lower courts had similarly struck down vagrancy laws
for punishing the status of being poor (and for violating the right to travel by imposing an
unfair means test on that right), the Supreme Court declared vagrancy laws to be overly
vague and unenforceable. Such laws handed too much discretion to the police to “move
along” those they did not like. Miscreants now had to be punished for what they did, not
for who they were. In a sense, in other words, this “constitutional revolution” sought to
fashion a legal regime that better matched the postwar welfare state’s regime of accumulation and system of social regulation.
As the guarantees of the welfare state were wiped out in the 1980s and 1990s, and as
ever-larger numbers of people ended up on the streets, conservative critics called for a
reassertion of order. What was at stake, for them, was not status, but misbehavior. The
new, revolutionized legal regime was inadequate to the problems of public order that
944
DON MITCHELL
faced cities (Tier, 1993, 1998; Ellickson, 1996). Particularly influential was Baum and
Burnes’s (1993) A Nation in Denial, which argued forcefully that homelessness indeed
was a problem of individuals who were addicted or mentally ill. Structural explanations
of homelessness, they argued, did more harm than good to homeless people because they
led toward inappropriate solutions (such as shelter, housing, and various other forms of
welfare), rather than address the actual needs of addicted and ill people. While the intent
of Baum and Burnes (1993) was not to recriminalize homelessness, their analysis was
latched onto by those—from pundits to policymakers—who wanted to do exactly that.
Given that homelessness was a function of disordered individuals, some even suggested
rounding them up and “quarantining” them on decommissioned military bases (Hamill,
1993, cited in Mitchell, 2003, p. 179). Others, not going quite so far, sought new laws that
outlawed many of the things homeless people do (sleeping in public, sitting on sidewalks,
begging for change, collecting recyclables) in the name of restoring order in the wake of
the constitutional revolution. For them, the “freedom” hailed by the revolutionized legal
regime of the 1960s had brought little more than “chaos” on the streets of American cities
(MacDonald, 1995).
A dual ideological move was at work. In the first place, homelessness was (re)defined
down to a set of individual characteristics and, especially, choices. Whether or not Baum
and Burnes (1993) supported criminalizing homelessness, they provided its ideological
justification:
By perpetuating the myth that the homeless are merely poor people in need of
housing, … advocates reinforce and promote the most pernicious stereotypes about
poverty in America. The vast majority of poor people in America are not homeless.
Poor people do not live on the streets, under bridges, or in parks; do not carry all
their belongings in shopping carts or plastic bags; do not wear layers of tattered
clothing and pass out or sleep in doorways; do not urinate or defecate in public
places; do not sleep in their cars or encampments; do not harass or intimidate others;
do not ask for money on streets; do not physically attack city workers and residents
and do not wander in the streets shouting at visions and voices (as quoted in Kelling
and Coles, 1996, p. 65; cf. Mitchell, 2003, pp. 202–203).
Homelessness in other words, was a choice, and not a good one for either the individuals
or society. That it was a choice, according to Heather MacDonald (1995) of the Manhattan
Institute, was shown irrefutably by an experiment in San Francisco where few streethomeless people given vouchers for a stay in a church shelter actually took them; fewer
used them. In another experiment, of the 3000 general assistance recipients who claimed
homelessness in the mid-1990s, only 700 availed themselves of a program where they gave
their $345 general assistance checks over to an advocacy organization that would arrange
a voucher for a stay in an SRO, returning $65 (that is, just over $2 a day) allowance to the
recipient for all other expenses. In other words, homeless general assistance recipients
were choosing homelessness when there were other options available.16
When the experiment MacDonald describes failed, San Francisco citizens made receiving general assistance
contingent upon proof of housing. If a rent receipt was not produced, recipients were struck from the rolls. In
other worlds, the homeless were made ineligible for general assistance.
16
HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE
945
The second move undergirded the ideology of choice and freedom with a discourse—
and eventually set of rules—demanding “responsibility.” If one was to make choices,
then it was important that the freedom to do so was exercised responsibly. As MacDonald
(1995, p. 181) put it, “liberty consists not in overturning social rules but in mutual adherence to them.” For those incapable of exercising responsibility, society had an obligation
to impose order, both for their own sake, and for the sake of the public at large. Just as
the rise of a (minimal) welfare state demanded an eventual change in the legal order—the
upending of status crimes—now the rise of neoliberalism seemed to be demanding a new,
more commensurate legal order: new rules on welfare recipients (time limits, enforced
job-searching, etc.), laws governing the behavior of homeless people (enforced sobriety
as a condition of shelter, laws against sitting on the sidewalk) (cf. Peck and Tickell, 2002).
The effect was a fairly thorough ideological u-turn that reinvigorated the classical divide
between worthy and unworthy poor. The deserving were those willing to accept responsibility for their condition, accept charity or other interventions with a proper degree of
humility, begin the hard work of getting clean and grasping hold of the lowest rungs of the
labor market, and never backsliding. The undeserving poor were all the others.
The rolling-out of new disciplinary measures for the homeless—to push the deserving
onto the path of individual responsibility, and to discipline the undeserving—garnered a
great deal of popular support, even among putative liberals tired of stepping over or around
“the problem lying on our sidewalk” as one prescription for restoring order in the city put it
(Paisner, 1994).17 The main question, then, was what sort of policing ought to be rolled out
to encourage the deserving and punish those who chose not to properly govern themselves.
Experiments in Regulation
In this political and economic climate, there was little interest in facing the growing
low-income housing crisis, including the years- and decades-long waiting lists for a place
in public housing that faced many cities. Nor, at least in mainstream circles, was there
much interest in addressing the inequalities and abuses inherent in a thoroughly transformed labor market: temporary labor agencies, which often opened offices right next to
homeless shelters (recapitulating the morphology of the old skid row), became America’s
largest employers and were notorious for skimming wages, charging usurious fees for
cashing paychecks, and, by their rules, making it almost impossible to make enough in a
day to pay for all one’s needs (Van Arsdale, 2003; Purser, 2009). Certainly, in the wake of
the rollback of the state in the 1980s, the “end of welfare as we know it” in the 1990s, and
the concerted class project to turn the state into an engine for the upward redistribution of
wealth across both decades (Harvey, 2005), there was little stomach for collective, stateled responses to homelessness.
Instead, as a first response, there was a more full-fledged turn to charity, to the “shadow
state” (Wolch, 1990), as the first line of defense against the vagaries and violences of
“the market.” This “proliferation of private, quasi-private, quasi-public voluntary and commercial agencies providing services heretofore supplied by the government … effectively
extended the penetration of government oversight into the lives of service operators and
It is likely important for understanding the depth of the u-turn and the hostility against the homeless it engendered that the face of this “problem lying on our sidewalks” was increasingly black.
17
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DON MITCHELL
consumers” (Wolch and Dear, 1993, p. 14), masking direct state disciplinary powers, but
making them no less real for those subject to them. Those subject to them were also, often,
once again required to endure religious proselytizing and other forms of indoctrination as
the price of a bed or a meal. No longer was the language of rights associated with housing
and shelters, even if New York’s shelter requirement remained in effect: housing was a
privilege or a gift. In order to receive food stamps, a right, for example, claimants often had
to work through agencies like the Salvation Army or food banks, one of which is rooted in a
religion to which one may not subscribe, the other of which is a creature of large corporate
donations, government largesse, and laws regulating political activities (Heynen, 2010).
Discipline worked in two directions here: on the charitable organization which relies on the
good will of political elites for its very survival (cf. Poppendieck, 1999); and on the individual seeking shelter or food, who is subject to the disciplinary logic of the neoliberal state
and the rejuvenated paternalism of the charitable agencies (Fraser and Gordon, 1992).18
Even with the massive expansion of the shadow state, even with this first step toward
a new regulatory regime after the end of welfare, even with the long, though decidedly
uneven, economic boom of the 1990s, cities continued to be confronted by large numbers of
homeless people filling shelters, sleeping in doorways, hanging out in parks, and otherwise
threatening the precarious economic success of newly gentrified downtowns. Responding
to the necessity of removing homeless people from redeveloping downtowns (Mair, 1986),
cities experimented with a range of environmental and legal interventions that are better
described as anti-homeless than anti-homelessness (Mitchell, 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 2003).
San Diego is typical in that regard (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008, chapter 3). To jumpstart its redevelopment, the city heavily subsidized the building of a massive festival
marketplace mall adjacent to the historic center of the city, Horton Plaza—a square deeded
to the city for public use in 1894. Horton Plaza Shopping Center, though built with a
significant amount of public money, was private property, and explicitly so. One of its main
selling points, to tourists and suburban shoppers, was that homeless people could be fully
excluded from the precincts of the mall. Indeed, drivers could enter the enclosed parking
decks that surrounded the mall on three sides and spend the day without ever once setting
foot on a public street. Before Horton Plaza Shopping Center was built, one manager of the
facility remarked, “there was no reason to come downtown … it was all sailors, homeless
people.” Horton Plaza Shopping Center “created the first public space in downtown for
people from the suburbs … to begin the process of coming back into the neighborhood,”
said a merchant (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008, pp. 49, 52). The historic square that fronted
the shopping center was seen, however, as a “homeless haven” and so the city paid the mall
developer to redevelop the park. The only public toilets in downtown were removed, the
bus stop was moved down the street, the park was re-landscaped, and fences around the
central lawns and historic-style benches—benches with the added benefit of wrought-iron
armrests that made it impossible to lie down—were installed. When these modifications
did not discourage the homeless (and elderly poor) from hanging out in the park, the city
first removed the benches closest to the department stores, and eventually removed all
the benches and tore up the lawns and replaced them with prickly plants, a change that
city council thought would drive out the homeless and “save the park” as liberal council
18
All of which makes even more impressive the truly good work that many of these agencies nonetheless do.
HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE
947
ember Bob Filner put it (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008, p. 60). Such anti-homeless envim
ronmental designs are now commonplace in American cities, as is the removal of public
space to the precincts of private property (Davis, 1990; Flusty, 2001; Miller, 2007).
Typical as they may be, such design interventions do little more than move homeless
people from one place to another. To further manage the presence of homeless people,
therefore, new laws are invented. These laws make it illegal to sleep or camp in public, to
beg or beg aggressively (or in particular places), to cut across or loiter in parking lots, to
wash motorists’ windshields or provide other services, to hand out free food or sometimes
even eat in public places, to drink alcohol or be drunk in public, to sit or lie on sidewalks
(Mitchell, 1998a, 1998b). Such laws are supported by “quality of life” police campaigns,
which focus on penalizing small infractions (such as jaywalking or urinating in public)
on the theory that small acts of disorder inevitably lead to more major crime (Wilson and
Kelling, 1982; Kelling and Coles, 1996). They are further supported by the creation of
Business Improvement Districts that levy businesses and property owners a special (and
private) tax to provide “enhanced” levels of street cleaning, and specialized police forces
empowered to “move along” homeless people in a way public police are often legally
prevented from doing—a program called “Clean and Safe” in San Diego (Staeheli and
Mitchell, 2008). To their defenders such laws and policing practices combat the growing
“disorder” of the streets and enforce commonly accepted rules of “civility,” thereby making urban public spaces attractive to everyone (Ellickson, 1996; Kelling and Coles, 1996;
Tier, 1998). To their critics, they are designed at best to make the “homeless invisible” as
one San Diego shelter operator put it (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008, p. 62); at worst they
are designed to eliminate any place in the city for the homeless to “be”—to live (Waldron,
1991). Such laws and policing practices legally “annihilate” the very spaces that homeless people must rely on for everyday life in the post-welfare world (Mitchell, 1997).
For homeless advocates such policies produce “mean streets” without doing anything to
address the causes of homelessness.
Whatever the criticism, by the dawn of the 21st century such policies of “zero tolerance”
of the homeless in many cities seemed to be working. New York, especially Manhattan,
once the poster-city for homelessness out of control, was heralded by the end of the 1990s
for the miracle of its transformation and the near-invisibility of its street homeless population. That this population had mostly been pushed— and bused—to the outer boroughs
was rarely commented on. Instead Manhattan was seen as just the kind of place the new
mandarins of the global economy, the masses of European and Asian tourists, and even
suburban New Jersyites wanted to be—even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. If relatively
large numbers of homeless people remained visible on the streets and in the parks of San
Francisco and Los Angeles, it was because their mayors and city councils had not shown
the sort of resolve in the face of homeless advocates as had New York’s Mayor Giuliani
(MacDonald, 1995).
Such resolve was necessary. In the mid 1990s, the most conservative estimates held that
there was a nightly “bed shortage” of at least 425,000.19 That is, there were nearly a half
These are indeed the most conservative estimates. Foscarinis (1996a) derived them by taking the low estimate of
the number of nightly homeless people, and the high estimate of the number of nightly shelter spaces (including
chairs, mats in hallways, etc.) as reported by the federal Interagency Council on Homelessness in 1994, and
subtracting the latter from the former.
19
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DON MITCHELL
million people who had no place to sleep except in streets and parks—no access to a shelter bed, no access to transitional housing, no possibility of permanently doubling up with
relatives, and certainly no hope of permanent subsidized housing. During the day, when
many shelters are closed, there were a minimum of 700,000 people who had no choice
but to wander about (or maybe spend the day in the library, if they could get away with
it) (Foscarinis, 1996a). A decade later in 2006—even before the current, deep economic
crisis took hold—the demand for emergency shelter increased nationwide by 9% over the
previous year (which itself had seen a large increase over the year before). Twenty-three
percent of all requests for emergency shelter went unmet; 29% of requests by families for
emergency shelter could not be met (U.S. Conference of Mayors, 2006). By the most reliable estimates, some 3.5 million Americans experienced homelessness over the course of
the year; there were at minimum 800,000 people who were literally homeless each night;
countless more were illegally doubled up, living in substandard housing, or otherwise at
risk of homelessness (NCH, 2007).
In other words, whatever the claims for their efficacy in “restoring order” to American
cities, and whatever the claims made on behalf of the greater efficacy of the shadow state in
addressing homelessness, homeless policies in the United States over the past two decades
have done nothing to lessen the problem, nothing to address the chronic shortage of lowincome housing in the nation, and probably much to make the lives of homeless people
more difficult. They have certainly exacerbated the “struggles between the propertied and
unpropertied over the use of public space, fears about the growth of a propertyless proletariat, and anxieties about the loss of traditional social controls in America” that DePastino
(2003, p. 8) identified as indicative of homelessness’s formative years.
Housing First
Against this rising tide of hoemlessness, against the seeming intractability of the homeless “crisis,” a new ideology and new policy for addressing homelessness has arisen.
Called “Housing First,” the policy is, despite its name and whatever the intentions of some
of its architects, not a housing policy; it is a treatment program (Tsemberis et al., 2004).20
Housing First is aimed at the 10–20% of the homeless who are “hard core:” addicted or
mentally ill people who “spend years cycling between streets, shelters, jail cells, and emergency rooms (Graves and Sayfan, 2007). Studies have shown that this population uses a
disproportionate amount of services and costs cities a disproportionate amount of money.
Studies have shown that it is not unusual for 10% of the homeless population in a city of
use 50% of shelter resources (Culhane, 2008; Culhane et al., 2008). Housing First operates
on the quite reasonable assumption that the addicted or the mentally or physically ill might
have a better chance of managing their conditions if they are in a stable, safe, comfortable
home, a home over which they have some degree of control and within which they have
some degree of sovereignty. Housing First turns its back on the ideology that governed
much policy concerning the “hard core” homeless: that in order to be “rewarded” with a
home, hard core homeless people had to show they were clean or sober, following their
It is also a repudiation of the arguments made in Baum and Burne’s (1993) A Nation in Denial. An excellent
appraisal of Housing First as it has been adopted in Canada (which also lays out much of the foundation of the
American version) is Klodawsky (2009).
20
HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE
949
regimen of medication, or otherwise worthy and deserving. Instead it argues that by first
having a home, the hard core can become worthy and deserving.
Strongly supported by the Bush Administration (and continued under President Obama),
Housing First has spread through a series of pilot programs across the U.S. and seems
largely successful in its primary aims. But even though it is generally less expensive than
the total cost of emergency shelter, emergency room care, and other services for the hard
core, it is inadequately funded, and indeed, in some jurisdictions it drains services from that
other (and growing) 80–90% of the homeless (Law, 2007). It is also fundamentally misguided, if its propagandists are to be believed. For them, homelessness of this sort is “not
an inevitable price of capitalism” (Graves and Sayfan, 2007). But, it must be countered,
homelessness of the other sort—the homelessness that confronts the supermajority of
80–90%—is an inevitable price of capitalism. And precious little is being down for them.
Housing policy for the past 40 years in the United States has consisted of underfunding and eliminating public housing,21 subsidizing middle- and upper-class homeownership
through tax policy, and encouraging staggering debt, both credit card and mortgage, for
lower-income families so that home ownership could “filter down” to them. Changes in
banking laws, coupled with sloshing surpluses of finance capital looking for investment
outlets in the built environment, led to a historic housing boom and bubble, a classic crisis
of overaccumulation, leading to the rapid, indeed, uncontrollably spiraling, devaluation
that marked 2007–2008 (Harvey, 1982, Chapter 7; Harvey, 2010). This “destruction of
value” not only threw workers out of their homes as foreclosure rates hit historic highs
(and especially as speculative investors in rental housing lost their shirts and their evicted
tenants paid the costs), it is also, and inevitably, restocking the reserve army. The real
unemployment rate (measuring those “actively looking for work,” as well as the under
employed, the “discouraged,” and those “marginally attached” to the labor market, but
excluding all those warehoused in prisons as well as those who have “dropped out” of the
labor market in the U.S.) exceeded 17% by the end of 2009. And as Harvey (1982, p. 202)
argues, “by throwing workers out of work capitalists discard variable capital and thereby
transform the endemic problem of crisis for the industrial reserve army into a condition of
chronic maladjustment and social breakdown.” Housing First might address some of this
chronic maladjustment—like the prison system (though much more progressively so) it is
designed to contain the inevitable social maladies that attend capitalism’s contradictions—
but, like laws banning giving out free food in public parks or increasing police power to
enforce trespassing laws (Mitchell and Heynen, 2009), it does nothing to address the structural problem of homelessness in America.
HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE
Contemporary homelessness in America has been shaped by its historical geography.
It has a particular structure, a particular form. Its current features are easy to identify.
There is a large, visible street population in most American cities, and while its size has
Under the Clinton Administration, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development eliminated a requirement that every unit of public housing destroyed had to be replaced. Local housing and redevelopment
authorities could now rip down public housing projects without worrying about building new ones (Hackworth,
2007, p. 50).
21
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DON MITCHELL
fluctuated since its massive explosion at the end of the 1970s, and while any number of
efforts to push it into invisibility have been tried (see, e.g., Takahashi, 1998, chapter 8),
it has not gone away. Like the poorly housed that Engels famously wrote about, it has
just been shifted from place to place by a bourgeoisie with no other solution. This visible
homelessness is a chronic, not a crisis or emergency, condition; it is an inevitable feature
of American-style capitalism, even if it might grow during times of economic downturn.
Both the population of visible, street homeless, and the population of people residing in
public and private shelters, transitional housing, sleeping in cars, or doubling up with
friends and relatives—sometimes “couch surfing” their way through their whole social
network—are structurally determined by changes in labor markets, the minimal rise and
thorough evisceration of the welfare state, and the destruction of low-cost and public housing through disinvestment, gentrification, and the neoliberal shift towards market “solutions” to low-income housing.
Across its history, though occasionally waning as activists and advocates have struggled to change the dominant discourse, homelessness American style has been marked
by a strong and consistent distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. In
the immediate wake of a natural disaster, the homeless are often considered deserving; as
are many children and occasionally women; under “normal” conditions men and people
of color are rarely so. This distinction continues to drive policy, even as Housing First has
reworked it to some extent (largely because, as one of its gurus Phil Mangano says, “cost
benefit analysis may be the new compassion”; Graves and Sayfan, 2007). For the “deserving” poor, charity-based aid, now especially faith-based charity aid, and the shadow state
more generally, provide beds, addiction and job counseling, and not a little “tough love”
(see Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008, p. 66). Such makeshift charity has replaced the aid-asright that marked the welfare state (even the U.S.’s minimal one). For the “undeserving”
homeless, there is an increasingly punitive legal regime marked by anti-homeless laws,
enhanced trespassing laws, limits on general assistance cash payments to homeless people,
and other measures targeted at homeless peoples’ ability to be in a particular locale.
Simultaneously, cities have used zoning laws, use-permit systems, and negotiations
with NIMBY activists to confine the warehousing and containment of homeless people
in specific areas of the city (often away from downtown), creating “service-dependent
ghettos” (Dear and Wolch, 1987; Wolch and Dear, 1993). They have further encouraged
the creation of Business Improvement Districts and “Clean and Safe” programs to clean
out the homeless and clean up after them when they have gone. Cityscapes have been
remade with “bum-proof benches,” spiky landscaping, randomized sprinklers, CCTV networks, and other environmental interventions designed to make it impossible for homeless
people to linger (Davis, 1990; Flusty, 2001; Sparks, 2010).
Some, and perhaps all, of these traits (or ones like them) can be found in other national
settings.22 But these characteristics are most prominent in the United States, which, after
all, hosted the weakest post–World War II welfare state among industrialized countries,
and has gone far in dismantling what little of it there was. With the neoliberalization of
economies and states around the world, with the diffusion of what used to be called the
“Washington consensus” of free market fundamentalism, with the “fast policy transfer”
For a critical analysis of the degree to which such American-style geographies and practices have developed in
Britain, see Cloke et al. (2010).
22
HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE
951
and sharing of so-called “best practices” on a global scale, to what degree has Americanstyle homelessness globalized? Does the specific historical and geographical trajectory
of homelessness in the U.S. make it unique? Are other nation-states now recapitulating
homelessness, American style, in whole or in part? The following papers address just these
questions.
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I N T E R NAT I O NA L
J O U R NA L O F
SOCIAL WELFARE
DOI: 10.1111/ijsw.12091
Int J Soc Welfare 2014: 23: 431–442
ISSN 1369-6866
Viewpoints
Social work and social problems:
A contribution from systems theory
and constructionism
Michailakis D., Schirmer W. Social work and social problems:
A contribution from systems theory and constructionism
Social work builds its identity on social problems. The goal is
to generate knowledge about causes, consequences and solutions. However, there is a lack of theory of social problems.
We suggest that research on social problems can benefit
by ‘bringing the observer in’: Loseke’s constructionist framework and Luhmann’s systems theory. According to Loseke,
social problems appear differently when constructed by different observers. Constructions vary in terms of morality,
conditions, victims/villains and solutions. From Luhmann we
learn that modern society consists of a multitude of social
systems (e.g. politics, science, economy etc.), each operating
with their own communicative codes. Combining both
approaches, we hypothesise that any social system constructs
its own (version of) social problems. Illustrating with
the empirical case ‘suicide among mentally ill people’, we
examine how a phenomenon is constructed differently as a
social problem by four different social systems: the disability
movement, politics, medicine and social work.
Introduction
The academic discipline social work builds its identity
on the study of social problems. The goal is to generate
knowledge about causes, consequences and potential
solutions for social problems. This knowledge is
expected to be useful to practitioners working with
clients affected by different adverse conditions. In
empirical social work research on poverty, discrimination, social exclusion, homelessness, juvenile delinquency, domestic violence and human trafficking, it is
usually taken for granted what the ‘social problem’ is.
The social problem is treated as a deplorable circumstance about which something must be done (Holstein
& Miller, 1993a). It is therefore considered to be a
deviation from a desirable condition (how society ought
to be), how exposed groups suffer from these conditions (Gould & Baldwin, 2004; Healy, 2001; Korpi,
Nelson, & Stenberg, 2007; Payne, 2005b; Trevithick,
2007) and what social work practitioners need to take
into consideration when dealing with those bearing the
symptoms of such conditions.
What this kind of research has in common is that it
addresses ‘what’ questions (What is a social problem?;
Dimitris Michailakis1, Werner Schirmer1,2
1
TEFSA – Platform for Theory-driven Research in Social
Work, University of Linköping, Norrköping, Sweden
2
Center for Social Theory, Department of Sociology, Ghent
University, Ghent, Belgium
Key words: constructionism, Luhmann, social problems, social
work theory, systems theory, suicide
Werner Schirmer, TEFSA – Platform for Theory-driven
Research in Social Work, Department of Social and Welfare
Studies, University of Linköping, SE 60174 Norrköping,
Sweden
E-mail: werner.schirmer@liu.se
Accepted for publication 8 January 2014
What solutions are there for social problem Y?), which
makes it basically essentialist in that it looks for the
‘essence’ of social problems or the objective conditions that cause, trigger or sustain them. Social problems appear to be natural incidents which seem to
exist independently of social relations, context, time or
observer (Fuchs, 2001), In our view, the essentialist
stance is an obstacle to theory development (see
Spector & Kitsuse, 1987 [1977]). We suggest that
there is considerable potential for the development of a
theory of social problems in social work once a
re-orientation is made from ‘what’ questions to nonessentialist ‘how’ questions. ‘How’ questions do not
ask about the nature of social problems but about how
the very problems are shaped and applied differently
by different observers. Hence, the move we suggest is
from the level of essentialist observations to constructionist observations, that is, the observation of observations made by different observers (Fuchs, 2001;
Luhmann, 1990).
We argue that social problems are what communication theorist Paul Watzlawick (1984) called secondorder realities. The distinction between first- and
second-order reality is helpful in clarifying a common
Int J Soc Welfare 2014: 23: 431–442
© 2014 The Author(s). International Journal of Social Welfare © 2014 International Journal of Social Welfare and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
431
Michailakis & Schirmer
mistake by separating essences and constructions.1
First-order reality refers to physical characteristics
and qualities of a thing, event or situation. First-order
reality consists of uninterpreted facts that are accessible
(i.e., in the world), measurable and empirically verifiable. This is the world of facts. Examples are temperatures, sounds, cities, buildings or the number of human
beings in a social situation. Second-order reality
includes any descriptions (and thus interpretations) of
the first-order reality. This is the world of meaning.
Second-order realities are created whenever we attribute meaning to a first-order reality. Meaning is not to
be found ‘in’ the facts. Whether certain temperatures
are considered just and reasonable, sounds noisy or
musical, cities car-friendly or aesthetic, buildings used
as schools, hospitals or barracks, or human beings in a
social situation considered as agentive interlocutors or
bodies is always a matter of interpretation, and thus a
second-order reality on the basis of the first-order
reality. These interpretations as they appear in descriptions include observers’ opinions, judgments, assessments, evaluations and accounts. Different observers
interpret the same first-order reality in various ways.
When something – an adverse condition, a gap
between expectations and how things are, and so forth
– is described as a social problem, we must therefore
look not only at the facts of the problem described, but
also at the description itself, and that leads us to the
observer behind the description: From what perspective
is he/she observing, what positions and what interests
are involved? As we will show in the course of this
article, these are not simply considerations for the
philosophical ivory tower, but have considerable relevance, both empirically for social work researchers
and practically for social work practitioners. As Fuchs
noted, the ‘important conflicts in modern societies . . .
concern who is an observer, what this observer can and
cannot see, and how significant or binding his observations are for other observers’ (Fuchs, 2001, p. 20).
Approaches to social problems that fail to account for
the observers can be instrumentalised by welfare
bureaucracies by defining people as deviant and as a
target for interventions, thereby turning social work
into an issue of power (Mik-Meyer & Villadsen, 2013).
Modern societies are characterised by high levels of
pluralisation and differentiation of classes, milieus,
subcultures and minority cultures, and other groups.
For this reason, one cannot simply assume that all
agents involved in a certain social problem have the
same understanding of it in terms of definition, conditions, remedies and so forth. Even if they agree that,
for instance, social inequality poses a social problem,
1
This distinction is not to be confused with the distinction
between first- and second-order observation as developed by
von Foerster (1984) and Luhmann (1990).
432
there is no consensus on what exactly determines the
problem and even less on its causes and solutions. Is it
an unfair distribution of wealth and access to resources.
Is it the result of a lack of incentives or individual
initiative? Are those in powerful positions responsible,
or is it the collective or the individual? Depending on
who observes the problem, their moralities, interests
and many other factors, the answers will look different.
The plurality of observers implies a potential plurality
of observations and accompanying descriptions.
Hence, assessments of something as a ‘social problem’
do not necessarily reveal objective conditions. Problems are problems always and without exception from a
particular point of view; they become part of society
always as observations and descriptions from a particular observer.
The empirical question is to what extent and in what
dimensions/parameters the definitions of problem constructions vary. The overarching research agenda we
want to suggest in this article is: How do different
agents construct the (same) social problem differently?
Our article aims to present a theoretical synthesis of
two approaches which, in their combination, offer a
useful theoretical as well as methodological tool to
study social problems in a non-essentialist manner, that
is, as second-order realities. The combination allows us
to focus on the very observers who construct something
as a social problem and to pinpoint the societal locus
from which these observers make their claims. The
two approaches are constructionism in social problems research and Luhmann’s theory of functionally
differentiated society. The article is structured as
follows. The second section presents the constructionist
approach to social problems with regard to four parameters along which constructions of social problems may
vary: moral values, causal explanations, victims and
responsible actors, and solutions. The third section discusses the Luhmannian theory of social systems, in
particular protest movements, the function systems of
politics, science and medicine. In the fourth section, we
argue for a theory combination of the approaches presented in the second and third sections. The fifth section
offers an outline of the synthesised approach to studying social problems with the help of an illustrative
empirical case: suicide among mentally ill people as a
social problem. The final section (sixth) offers some
implications for research in social work dealing with
social problems.
Constructionist approaches to social problems
Constructionism is not an uncommon approach in
social work research (see Payne, 1999). It plays a
prominent role in studying the labelling and social categorisation of client groups with so-called problematic
identities (criminals, substance abusers, refugees,
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Social work and social problems
immigrants, victims etc.). Other typical cases of constructionism in social work are the analysis of discursive power orders (between ethnic majorities and
minorities, insiders and outsiders, social workers and
clients) and gender norms. What this kind of research
has in common is that the very portrayal of a group as
problematic, afflicted or troublesome is deemed the
root of the social problem, while the problem (e.g.
inequality, drug abuse, domestic violence) itself is
taken as a given. In this regard, the social problem is the
blind spot of social work observers.
By contrast, constructionist approaches in social
problems research focus on the construction of the
social problem itself. Their points of departure are
the questions of how and why some (but not other)
conditions have received the status of social problem
(Holstein & Miller, 1993b; Loseke, 2003; Loseke &
Best, 2011; Spector & Kitsuse, 1987 [1977]). A
follow-up question is why a particular condition is
sometimes seen as a problem and sometimes as a solution. Constructionists argue that essentialist approaches
cannot understand and explain why some (seemingly)
harmful social conditions are given the status of social
problems while others are not. Constructionists go even
further and question the very basis of objectivist
approaches, that is, the assumption that social problems
can be studied as measurable deviances from desired
normative standards. The theoretical and methodological problem is how to define those standards,
whose standards they are, when and why are they
desired, by how many and so forth. (Spector & Kitsuse,
1987 [1977]).
According to constructionism, a problem does not
exist socially before it has been defined by some agent
as a social problem. While social conditions unfavourable to some groups might exist, these do not pose a
social problem before they have been defined as problematic and needing solutions (Loseke, 2003). Hence,
social problems are considered the result of an activity
undertaken by so-called ‘claims-makers’ (Spector &
Kitsuse, 1987 [1977]), for example, social movements,
politicians or concerned scientists. Claims-makers raise
the claim that some, in their view, adverse condition
receive the status of a social problem, thus as an undesirable but existent social condition that violates ethical
standards or other widely shared values, afflicts certain
groups and requires countermeasures.
According to Donileen Loseke (2003), the constructions of a given condition as a social problem can vary
in the following parameters:
Conditions and causal relations
Claims-makers construct the conditions of the projected problem, thus what is wrong (and needs to be
corrected), what is part of the problem (and what is
not), what is the cause of the problem and who is
responsible. This parameter of social problems
construction corresponds in part to what Snow and
Benford (1988) meant by ‘diagnostic framing’ (see also
Jönson, 2010).
Cultural themes
Constructions make use of an underlying morality; the
problem is constructed as a condition that violates/
breaks with generally accepted (culturally and historically specific) values and provokes indignation.
Variation in cultural themes corresponds to what Snow
and Benford (1988) meant by ‘motivational framing’.
People
On the one hand, there are victims of the putative condition who deserve sympathy,…
