Past Event

Pathologizing Homelessness: Neoliberal Social Policy and Prescriptive Rehabilitation 

Housing First is both a policy and an ideology that has become dominant at all levels of government. Housing First programs house homeless people without requiring demonstrations of “housing readiness” such as participation in drug or mental health treatment. Housing First programs have had positive impacts on many individuals’ lives. However, these programs focus on street/shelter homelessness while women and migrants, who experience disproportionate levels of “hidden homelessness,” are largely excluded. Housing First also targets a subset of the homeless population, those called “chronically homeless” people. Withers examines the way in which the category of “chronically homeless” is pathologizing: the cause of peoples’ homelessness is constructed as an individual failing rather than a social problem. One of the constructed characteristics of the “chronically homeless,” like disabled people in general, is that they are excessively needy. Supportive housing, therefore, becomes an appropriate solution for this population because it is less expensive than the “services” they voluntarily and involuntarily use. These “services” do not only include shelter beds but also include forced psychiatric confinement and incarceration. Finally, one of the key tenets of Housing First is harm reduction. However, as it is practiced through Housing First, it is what Withers calls prescriptive harm reduction. Unlike harm reduction as it was originally conceived, prescriptive harm reduction is a rehabilitative project directing people toward decreased drug and alcohol consumption and participation in the capitalist economy. Based on field research with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, policy documents and interviews with Toronto City Councillors and their staff, members of OCAP and journalists, this research challenges Housing First as exclusionary, neoliberal, pathologizing and rehabilitative.

Bio:

Dr. A.J. Withers holds a PhD from the School of Social Work (York University) and an MA in Critical Disability Studies (York University) and is a long-time anti-poverty and disability justice organizer in Toronto. They are the co-author of A Violent History of Benevolence: Interlocking Oppression in the Moral Economies of Social Working (with Chris Chapman, UofT Press, 2019) and author of Disability Politics and Theory (Fernwood, 2012). Their doctoral research examines how governments work from the standpoint of homelessness activists in the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.