Craig Willse's book, The Value of Homelessness, confronts the everyday, taken-for-granted, and accepted wisdoms surrounding housing insecurity and deprivation in the United States. It confronts us too, as well as forcing us to confront those from whom we frequently turn away. From the stark book title and cover image to the powerful prose and theory, The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States inspires us to ask different questions about housing deprivation. The term “surplus life”—a darker, Foucauldian variation of the Marxist notion of surplus labor—directs our attention to the parallels between those intentionally kept out of the labor market to drive up competition for low-wage jobs under capitalism and those assigned to the category “homeless,” who are made into economically and socially productive matter. For Willse, housing deprivation is not an unintended consequence of but a way to make room for the “urban consumer economies of neoliberal capital” (page 11).
In Willse’s account, the questions posed by social scientists thus far about housing deprivation have been the wrong ones. It is not just the more obvious “revanchist” city administrations and their punitive urban regimes that are, at best, controlling, and at worst, criminalizing homeless and other vulnerable people. Rather, night shelters, hostels, day centers, and the vast array of services that make up the homelessness services industry and that often appear to be offering refuge and “care” also function as forms of containment. Willse provides examples of traditional case management systems in which people have to "earn" their way to housing. Homeless people become subjects to be reformed and fixed. Although Willse observes a shift to a Housing First approach, in which people are housed prior to receiving support for other issues, he still views this with caution, as a way of facilitating economic growth and tourist economies rather than tackling housing insecurity. Indeed, the focus on homelessness “management”—funding programs and services that provide a temporary exit from the streets—is a distraction from the real issue of significantly increasing the supply of affordable housing so as to provide a more permanent solution to homelessness.
Successive attempts to answer the question of who the homeless are have resulted in an obsession with how to count, define, and, by extension, manage those with no fixed abode. This question conveniently masks the political problem, the elephant in the room that is the defunct housing system (or “the housing monster” [page 1], as Willse terms it). “What to do with the homeless?” rather than “what to do about housing?” has long been the central preoccupation of government policy, social service practice, and social scientific inquiry. As such, everything we think we know about homelessness and “the homeless” is skewed, a product of competing discourses created and maintained by governmental and non-governmental institutions. Willse traces the history of contemporary ideas about housing and homelessness over the course of five chapters, all of which contribute to a process of “disassembling homelessness from housing insecurity” (page 19). The intention is to shift the focus away from "the homeless" towards the apparatuses that produce and distribute housing insecurity and deprivation in the first place. This book thus brackets the question of who the homeless are and instead asks, “How does homelessness become something to be known and managed?” (page 22).
Willse draws on his experiences from years of working within homeless advocacy and activism, as well as interviews with program managers, counselors, and staff at homeless services organizations to inform his critique. The opening chapters construct and elucidate a conceptual and methodological framework to better think through how homelessness has become an object of knowledge and governance. This framework draws heavily on the concept of biopower, Foucault's term for the form power takes in modern society, which he sees as being operationalized through populations rather than individuals. Biopolitical technologies intervene in biological life processes such as birth rates and policies, public health initiatives, resource needs, and statistical predictions of longevity and death; as Willse puts it, “technologies of biopower aim to know life in order to optimize it and foster its growth” (page 27). As shown throughout the book, the concept works (albeit in modified form to account for modern-day differences) when applied to the context of homelessness governance. With the accelerated dismantling of the social welfare state across Western countries, biopower now shifts responsibility from the shoulders of the state onto those individuals who must figure out for themselves how to survive deepening poverty.
Chapter Two, “Homelessness as Method,” is a denunciation of social scientific practices that serve as part of homelessness governance. While narrow definitions of homelessness obscure the extensive nature of housing insecurity, they work in the interest of the state, which has to regulate access to limited support and resources. Willse goes further than this to suggest that narrow definitions work in favor of social science, which then has a manageable concept to work with and measure. The chapter (perhaps overly) focuses on recent studies of homeless populations to demonstrate how they embed white values, turn homeless people into a population to be managed, and support the need for homeless people’s governance. Ethically, social scientists have a responsibility to carefully consider the definitions they employ in research, given that their usage has real and political consequences for those they purport to include (and exclude). While Willse’s indictment of the more extreme examples of positivist studies is justified, the chapter is perhaps too quick to tar all social scientific studies on homelessness with the same brush. Reference to more politically and ethically informed, participatory, feminist, and principled research within the social sciences is absent.
The Value of Homelessness nevertheless contains detailed and provocative claims that move beyond current paradigms on the governance of homeless populations to suggest that these paradigms themselves are perpetuating housing insecurity. While it cannot be said that Willse's book is breaking new ground completely—the debate around homeless services' role in the revanchist agenda has been on-going for some time (Johnsen et al., 2005)—past debates have often failed to address structural considerations. This book grounds those debates in wider systems and bigger shifts, all of which account for a reorganization of homelessness today. For all of its comprehensiveness and advanced theoretical contributions, however, I cannot help but wonder how the book might be received by its subjects—voluntary sector organizations, hostel managers, and homeless people themselves. Previous research has focused on homelessness services as "spaces of care" (Conradson, 2003), offering shelter, resource and refuge for those excluded from hostile urban environments (Parr, 2003). Although it is important to think in terms of metanarratives, if we focused more narrowly on the day-to-day, I wonder if things might look more hopeful. Might we not see day center staff and volunteers with the political agency to resist revanchist discourse on behalf of homeless people and who are able to champion their needs?
Willse himself acknowledges the book's limitations. In the final chapter he admits that the book has not considered agency and resistance within the landscape of housing insecurity. Writing outside the boundaries of policy, as this book does, leaves the question of what can be done unanswered for the time being. While this frustrates—after all, we want to see tangible change; evictions stopped; people housed—it is also important not to rush into an inadequate response. Critical inquiry, such as that made by Willse, does not bring immediate change. As he reminds us, however, “urgency” also does not “get us out of contradiction” (page 180). In the meantime, however, we must somehow work out how to deal with immediate, on-the-ground needs within the current system. Whatever the answer to this complex question, Willse's text undoubtedly makes an important contribution towards a necessary rethinking of homelessness. It is a book which will likely be of interest to all those passionate about matters of social justice for years to come.
References
Conradson D (2003) Spaces of care in the city: the place of a community drop-in centre. Social & Cultural Geography 4(4): 507-525.
Johnsen S, Cloke P, and May J (2005) Day centres for homeless people: Spaces of care or fear? Social & Cultural Geography 6(6): 787-811.
Parr H (2003) Medical geography: care and caring. Progress in Human Geography 27(2): 212-221.
