Abstract
Family anxieties are never fully decoupled from the discourse on homelessness, but the homeless figure is no longer a primary carrier of these social fears. The culturalization of politics processes enable the family anxieties to become relatively freestanding as part of the family values movement. But in this separation from the discourse on homelessness, the family also loses its role as the last remnant of Gemeinschaft. The idea of home—which the discourse on homelessness has legitimated through the process of negation—also decouples from the discourse on homelessness. “Home” becomes significantly reinforced in public discourses, as threats to homeland security emerge as a substantial concern. Relatively emptied of its signification, the category of homelessness transforms from the mid-1990s to the present to become primarily a material condition of where one stays at night. Though mostly shorn of the century-plus discourse, the transformation of homelessness into a housing problem is not without some difficulties to which we shall turn.
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Notes
See Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992); or Marvin Olasky, “Giving That Worked,” World Magazine, 2009, accessed March 2009, http://www.worldmag.com/articles/15070.
John Dilulio, “John Dilulio’s Letter,” Esquire, October 24, 2002, accessed July 16, 2013, http://www.esquire.com/features/dilulio. David Kuo, who also worked in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, also recounts the waning interest in compassionate conservatism in the Bush White House following the 9/11 attacks. David Kuo, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction (New York: Free Press, 2006), chapter 12.
J. Patrick Dobel, “The Rhetorical Possibilities of ‘Home’ in Homeland Security,” Administration & Society 42, no. 4 (2010): 6.
Philip Mangano, “Abolishing Homelessness in Ten Years,” interview by David Neff, Christianity Today 53, no. 5 (May 2009): 52, accessed July 19, 2013, http://www.christianirytoday.com/ct/2009/may/30.52.htm1.
Often the linear model is called by its original name: the continuum of care model. However, the Continuum of Care has evolved to become a local planning council, which also serves as a funding vehicle for HUD to channel money to local nonprofits. Because of the dual role of funding and planning in the present moment and the historical role of a service arrangement, I follow after Stefan G. Kertesz, et al., and use the term linear model to avoid confusion between the historical and present uses of “continuum of care.” Stefan G. Kertesz, et al., “Housing First for Homeless Persons with Active Addiction: Are We Overreaching?” Milbank Quarterly 87, no. 2 (June 2009): 495–534.
Sam Tsemberis, Leyla Gulcur, and Maria Nakae, “Housing First Consumer Choice, and Harm Reduction for Homeless Individuals with a Dual Diagnosis,” American Journal of Public Health 94, no. 4 (April 2004): 651–56.
Alan Gilbert, “Power, Ideology and the Washington Consensus: The Development and Spread of Chilean Housing Policy,” Housing Studies 17, no. 2 (2002): 305–24.
Stuart Hodkinson, Paul Watt, and Gerry Mooney, “Introduction: Neoliberal Housing Policy—Time for a Critical Re-appraisal,” Critical Social Policy 33, no. 3 (2013): 6.
David Clapham and Susan J. Smith, “Housing Policy and ‘Special Needs,’” Policy and Politics 18, no. 3 (1990): 195.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 245.
Mary Ellen Hombs and Mitch Snyder, “Homelessness and the Hundredth Monkey: A Preface,” in Homelessness in America: A Forced March to Nowhere, ed. Mary Ellen Hombs and Mitch Snyder (Washington, DC: Community for Creative Non-Violence, 1986), viii.
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© 2014 Philip Webb
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Webb, P. (2014). A Decoupled Homelessness. In: Homeless Lives in American Cities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137405647_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137405647_10
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