The Value of Homelessness

In The Value of Homelessness Craig Willse sets out to reframe our understanding of homelessness and poverty. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Émile Durkheim, government documents, professional and secondary literature, and his own ethnographic observations, Willse argues that homeless service programs are not designed to end homelessness but are “competitive neoliberal industries of population management” (p. 51). Willse's introduction usefully offers a trenchant analysis of the Doe Fund, an agency serving the interests of its administrators rather than those of its clients. The nonprofit agency paid clients less than nine dollars per hour to clean the streets of New York City while paying the family running the agency over $1.2 million in 2011. This structure powerfully embodies Willse's argument that managing the homeless has become an industry that does not address the structural problems responsible for housing insecurity and deprivation. In advancing these arguments about the complex function of homelessness in American society, Willse adds to Todd DePastino's pioneering Citizen Hobo (2003), which contrasted the migrant homeless population with those enjoying the American dream. More recently, Daniel R. Kerr's Derelict Paradise (2011) drew heavily on the perspectives of homeless individuals in arguing that managing homelessness had become a profit-generating industry

Agency (philosophy · Cognitive reframing · Political science · Population · Poverty · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Homelessness and Social Issues · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Public Administration