Thesis On Homeless Subjectivity

I met a couple of cool new people today, and got ten new friends on Facebook. This, I suppose, qualifies as a good day. My friend Trevor turned me on to a talk at UW today on "The Invention of Chronic Homelessness," sponsored by Queer World and UW Women's Studies. Wild horses couldn't have kept me away. Dean Spade, who is new to Seattle University and teaches Poverty Law, brought his PhD candidate friend Craig Willse out from CUNY to talk about his dissertation, From Social Problems to Governance Problems: Health and Housing After the Welfare State.

I parked in the UW Bookstore lot and did my usual thing under those circumstances, which is to buy a remainder or two and save six bucks on parking, thereby convincing myself that the books are somehow free. I selected Granta 96 and On Beauty by Zadie Smith for a total of eleven bucks and change. When I went to pay, I discovered my bank card was missing from my visit to the ATM a few minutes before. As I raced out, thumbing through my wallet, all the plastic and cardboard from the pocket spilled out onto the floor. "Fuck!," I said. The woman standing there between the remainder tables was unphased as she helped me scoop the contents of my wallet from the floor. I got out to the ATM and someone else was there.

"You didn't see a card did you," I asked pathetically. "No," she said. "This machine sucks them back in. I've lost a few here. You won't get it from Bank of America either. A different company services these machines. You'll have to get a new one."

"Fuck!," I thought. As I walked back inside to pay for the books with cash, still thumbing through the cards, I spilled them again in the doorway of the bookstore. Fuck! Back at the cash register, I told the sympathetic bookstore clerk I'd lost the card.

"Well, that happens," she said.

"Yeah," I replied, "but this is the second time I've walked away from my card in an ATM this week.

"Oh dear," she murmured.

"Exactly," I said. As I put the change and receipt into my wallet, the gravitationally challenged contents of my billfold spilled once again across her counter, which set me off on a short hysterical laughing jag that I imagine she found unnerving. I had become the unwilling protagonist in a slapstick comedy about myself.

Happily, I was able to hold it together during Willse's presentation in the packed Women's Studies Conference Room. Here's how he describes his dissertation on his website:

Scholars have demonstrated that under neoliberalism, economic logics drive social welfare policy. They have also shown how national and subnational governments increasingly outsource welfare state functions to private nonprofit organizations. My research suggests that in this context, social problems are transformed into what I term “governance problems.” In other words, the focus of policy and administration increasingly centers on managing social programs, rather than addressing social problems. Thus, in housing and shelter provision, current federal initiatives concentrate on (1) developing quantitative measures for assessing service provision outcomes and (2) establishing “performance-based contracting” protocols for allocating federal, state, and private funds to non-profit organizations. In this move to organizational management, the individual subject (or client) of welfare services is not erased, but increasingly is understood and addressed through statistical population models of risk, recidivism, and cost. I hope my research will offer substantive knowledge about this important area of social welfare policy and administration as well as contribute to theorizing how governance works in “post-welfare state” neoliberalism.

Much of what he said, once you got past the Foucouldian framework and all the grad-student speak that flew about the room, wasn't new to me. Academic lit on homelessness, he said, is a tug of war between the qualitatively oriented ethnographers and the quantitative data-heads over in public health, and these perspectives are both at odds with and informative of eachother. Both have focused on the problem of fucked up people at the expense of examining the fucked up system that produces said people, and this is a problem for those of us interested in system change. Sociology, he said, has turned increasingly from the work of identifying social problems toward being of service in managing them.

True enough. I guess it's important to have realistic expectations.

It was interesting to hear him date the dawn of federal intervention in homelessness to the passage of Mckinney-Vento in 1987, and to describe this in terms of assertion of federal authority by means of funding. Willse has written an interesting paper I haven't read yet on HMIS data collection called The Biopolitical Life of Homeless Populations. Data collection systems like Seattle's Safe Harbors, he said, are not about the control of homeless people, as advocates once feared. Homeless people as individuals are way beneath their radar. These data collection systems are about the control of the non-profit agencies that serve these people. Technology, he said, has become a "method of governance." This is about "population management in the neoliberal state." This was something that hadn't fully dawned on me, and made the whole unseemly trek more than worthwhile.

Perhaps it was the brevity of the presentation or the emphasis on the academic framework, or maybe it's just that this is a thesis in progress and Willse's ideas are still less than clear, but the promise of a critique on the invention of chronic homelessness was left largely unfulfilled. He described the evolution from the notion of "housing readiness" through "continuum of care" to Housing First, but none of this was news to anyone who's been in this work for more than ten minutes.

He also spoke of the increasing trend toward cost-benefit arguments for resource allocation, and the contradiction of government focusing on those who, in a more foucauldian universe, we'd properly expect to be left out to die. It's complicated, said Willse: "economic investment and social abandonment run parallel."

Indeed. Here's the thing. There's a whole lot more abandonment than investment going on out there. It's the investment — and the heartwarming success stories of lives and dollars saved — that make the abandonment so much more palatable to the misguided middle-class conscience. We all want so badly to believe.

Here's the other thing. People are left out to die. Now that we've decided that housing with services is the answer to homelesness, no matter how theoretical and underfunded that housing may, in reality, be, we've drawn the line against new emergency shelter and even become a little trigger happy in reducing what we have, regardless of actual demand.

Cities clear homeless campsites and hold up their ten year plans as an excuse. You can't have your tent tonight, we say, because noone should have to live like that, but sometime in the next ten years, we're going to get you the housing with services you really need, because we know what you need better than you do.

So what happens when there isn't enough housing, and when cities across America consider trashing people's survival gear and issuing citations for camping some form of enlightened public policy? People are abandoned, and sometimes they die. They're surplus, they're a problem, and government defines them as trash and treats them like shit. They just want to look good in the process.

When I spoke to Spade and Willse afterwards, I said I was happy that this work was being done. "The radical academic literature on homelessness is very thin," I observed. "Paltry," Willse agreed. Spade had been to the Critical Resistance conference in Oakland last weekend and seen our own Danina Garcia present on a WRAP panel about the convergence of homelessness and civil rights issues of criminalization and incarceration. This was one of the conferences more popular sessions. I'm sure we'll all be talking more. We radicals need to stick together, because soon the fuckers will be coming after us.

The Definition of Insanity

On Tuesday, I went to a press conference at the Lora Lake Apartments in Burien, where, for once, the news was good. Representatives from King County, the Committee to End Homelessness, and the Church Council of Greater Seattle stood behind Port Commissioner Bob Edwards and offered a united front on the question of preserving affordable housing.

If Edwards can bring the other Port commissioners and the City of Burien around, there will be 162 fewer units of affordable family housing lost to market forces this year.

This region now has less rental housing available than two years ago. Over that time, 4,000 rental units were lost to condo conversion. Add another 3,000 for this year, and you have a market where vacancy rates are at a 20-year low, and rents are up by 10 percent or more.

One may visualize the housing market as a huge ladder, where more and more people are struggling to hold onto fewer rungs. When housing gets more expensive, those who have more resources but can’t afford to move higher begin to occupy the lower rungs. Those with the weakest grip fall off. Some landings are harder than others.

Market forces do not stand still for the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness. As the years go ticking toward the number 10, it is plain that the King County goal of 950 new and upgraded housing units each year, without any real assist from the federal government, is somewhat beyond our reach.

This is a symptom of a larger problem.

For more than a decade, homeless advocacy has suffered from a pathetic absence of vision. The 20th anniversary of the McKinney-Vento Act, the landmark legislation that provides nearly all federal funding for homeless services, offers the perfect occasion to revisit basic assumptions.

While federal funding for housing has been cut by $52 billion since its 1979 peak, McKinney-Vento funding to mitigate homelessness has never been more than $1.5 billion annually. We win minor battles while we ignore the larger war.

But the war doesn’t ignore us.

The consensus statement released last week by national homeless advocates is a welcome breath of fresh air. There is explicit recognition that McKinney-Vento is necessary but not sufficient. There is a call for the feds to dramatically expand their role in providing housing. There is recognition that the attack on poor people's programs must be halted and reversed. The civil rights crisis that exists for homeless people is named for what it is, and there is a call for a wage-led strategy to reduce poverty.

At one time, advocates approached homelessness as an extreme symptom of the broader issue of poverty. We all instinctively know that extreme poverty and ridiculous excess do not mix. Homelessness in America is a sweeping indictment of the federal priorities that privilege the rich over the poor.

But one rarely hears homelessness discussed in these terms. Federal funding priorities place our focus on the chronic homeless: the mentally ill, addicted, and alcoholic homeless who, in less enlightened times, were known as “bums.” In other words, it’s not the system that’s seen as screwed up. It’s the people.

Advocates need to stop playing into the federally-driven strategy of divide and conquer. We must instead look more to our natural allies: kids, single parents, the elderly, the uninsured, and the disabled. Homelessness is mostly about low wages and high rents. It was true three decades ago, and it’s true now.

Our movement has little commitment to addressing race and poverty. We act as though the prison-industrial complex, which is also about structural unemployment, doesn’t even exist. The selective blindness of most white people in this regard is nearly unforgivable.

Meanwhile, the growth in family homelessness is accelerating. The answer to this is already starting to emerge from Washington. That would be, of course, the Ten Year Plan to address family homelessness.

I wish that were a joke.

Philip Mangano, President Bush’s point man on homelessness, likes to defend the narrowly focused 10-year plan strategies to end homelessness by saying the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing year after year when we know it doesn’t work.

That’s rich.

Federal policy on homelessness is designed to distract, stigmatize, and divide. McKinney-Vento in the absence of a broader federal anti-poverty and pro-housing strategy just sets us up to fail, and 10-year plans that narrowly focus on chronic homelessness while ignoring the structural realities of poverty and inequality are cut from the same cloth.

Fighting the Good Fight in DC

Maybe there's hope after all.

Tony Lee thinks so. Tony is the lobbyist for Poverty Action and is one of the distinguished old men of our movement. When he says something, it's usually a good idea to listen.

A few weeks ago we found ourselves at the same event, and as Speaker of the House Frank Chopp went on about something or another in the next room, we retreated to the food table and went to work on those little fruit tart pies that always show up at these things. I tried to sell Tony on my Phil Mangano bounty offer, and described how the homeless ten year plans were misleading our movement, ignoring poverty, and providing cover for the federally led slaughter of the poor. I admitted to having gone a little bit insane recently.

Tony said I should relax, because the national poverty agenda had new momentum and unity and would basically outflank the "advocacy" whores who have sold out poor people in the name of growing the poverty industry.

He didn't actually say "advocacy whores." But I'm sure that's what he meant.

There's some encouraging evidence that he's right. This Thursday, a beltway press conference will be held to mark the twentieth anniversary of the McKinney-Vento Act. While an earlier post here compared national homeless advocates to yappy little dogs, that now seems unfair. It has been pointed out that yappy dogs have done little to deserve such a comparison.

But more to the point, a consensus statement of national level homeless advocates has been drafted, and the ten year plan strategy is nowhere to be found. In fact, the statement addresses the deficiencies of the federally driven policy alternative quite explicitly.

There is none of the rah-rah "we're winning against homelessness" crap that Mangano and company seem to live for. There is explicit recognition that McKinney-Vento is necessary but not sufficient. There is a call for the feds to dramatically expand their role in providing housing. There is recognition that the attack on poor people's programs must be halted and reversed. The civil rights crisis that exists for homeless people is named, and there is a call for a wage-led strategy to reduce poverty.

This is very good news. While the US Interagency Council on Homelessness and the National Alliance, by virtue of superior resources and political clout, have made the Ten Year Plan paradigm seem like the only game in town, a quiet revolution has bubbled underground.

I got a hint of this last week when a homeless advocate from a southeastern state called to talk. He found my blog when he Googled "philip mangano is the devil." Myself and the staff at WRAP helped him with material for a presentation at the NAEH conference.

Also revealing is the fact that an NAEH conference workshop on McKinney-Vento turned into a minor revolution. NAEH organizers had set up the workshop to only promote CPEHA (the version they favor), and dismissed alternative legislation with the following sentence: "There are two other proposals, the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act of 2007 (HEARTH) (HR 840) and the Administration's Homeless Assistance Consolidation Act of 2007, which has not yet been introduced."

Workshop attendees revolted, and shared their own comparisons of the competing versions of legislation. As one person relayed, "The folks that I talked to were disgusted. That is sloppy, misleading, and irresponsible. That is pretty much how they felt and I know first hand that they complained about it."

This week's press conference is more evidence still. The Ten Things to End Homelessness list is basically a big fuck you to Phil "I love Project Connect and Ten Year Plans" Mangano. Take a look:

1. Assist currently homeless people by reauthorizing and doubling funds for HUD McKinney-Vento programs.

2. Create housing for low-income households by enacting a National Housing Trust Fund.

3. Protect, preserve, and expand existing federal housing programs that serve the lowest-income people.

4. Appropriate funds for at least 5,000 Section 8 housing vouchers forhomeless veterans through the HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing Program.

5. Expand access to addiction and mental health services for people experiencing homelessness through reauthorization of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

6. Increase homeless and low-income persons’ access to healthcare by reauthorizing and expanding the Consolidated Health Centers program.

7. Increase homeless persons’ access to mainstream disability income, temporary assistance, and workforce investment services.

8. Provide homeless children and youth with increased services and support by reauthorizing the Education for Homeless Children and Youth program in the No Child Left Behind Act and the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act.

9. Require the Administration to develop and publish a coordinated federal plan to end homelessness.

10. Require jurisdictions receiving federal housing funds to protect the civil rights of homeless persons.

This is a major step in the right direction. I like number nine in particular, which calls USICH on its strategy to devolve all responsibility for homelessness to the localities.

Here's the thing though. Better positions only take us part way there. To get these ideas off paper and into legislation, we need to broaden our political base and vision, build for power, and make poverty into the kind of issue that political leaders have to address or else.

Gimmicky press conferences alone won't make much of a difference, but if the signers of this statement can figure out how to back these words up with the kind of action that makes people listen, then we'll be getting somewhere.

Collaborating With The Enemy

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the McKinney-Vento Act, the landmark 1987 legislation that set the template for the federal response to homelessness. Twenty years ago, this legislation was the movement against homelessness’ biggest victory ever, but what should have been a beginning became an end in itself. McKinney-Vento has become a deal with the devil, and not an especially good one.

The past thirty years has seen a relentless assault upon the poor. Name a program that serves low-income people — Social Security Insurance, Medicaid, Community Development Block Grants — and you’ll see a history of steady attrition.

While the centerpiece of the Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness is “Housing First,” federal funding for housing has been cut by $52 billion since 1979. Between 1996 and 2005, 100,000 public housing units have been lost. There has been no new funding for public housing since 1996. The federal strategy of devolving the responsibility for housing to the localities is seldom questioned.

For all our talk of "ending homelessness," advocates have grown appallingly complacent. We have settled for McKinney-Vento, an insider’s game designed to divide and conquer that has never exceeded $1.5 billion in annual funding. We win a battle here and there while the war on the poor rages on unchecked.

One routinely hears our "political realists" lament that the feds are simply out of the housing game and it's up to us locally to solve homelessness. Homeless and poor people deserve better than a self-defeating advocacy that decides the limits of the possible before even trying.

Our own Patty Murray chairs the Senate Housing committee, and is in a tremendously powerful position to influence federal policy. Murray should be the target of a grassroots national campaign to up the federal ante. And yet, she is not.

Homeless advocates (and I am tempted to put the phrase in quotation marks) have allowed the terms of the debate to be set by the representatives of the Bush administration. Does anyone really believe that the US Interagency Council on Homelessness is some sort of fifth column burrowing from within? That their agenda is somehow at odds with everything else that Bush does?

The struggle to end homelessness and poverty should be housing and wage led, and should link to the struggles of kids, the elderly, immigrants, people of color, working people, and prisoners. Homelessness is about economic insecurity, and almost everyone can relate to that.

But that's not what we're talking about, is it?

An end to homelessness will not be found in better data, more specialization, and an obsession with the personal dysfunctions of the poor. These priorities might be where the federal funding is, but they do not lead to economic justice or greater equality.

$52 billion lost in public housing funding. Steady cuts to other programs that serve the poor. And $1.5 billion gained in McKinney-Vento. This is the definition of winning the battle but losing the war.

Let's take that analogy a little further.

In war, collaboration with the enemy is a capital offense. But this, apparently, isn't a war at all. It's a cozy little Hyatt-Regency tea party of the well-paid and comfortable. And we don't just collaborate with the enemy. We invite him to keynote our conferences.