It is an easy assumption that social service programs and social scientific studies respond to homelessness after the fact, attempting to understand and prevent it. This book, however, argues that homelessness is an effect of social services and sciences, which shape not only what counts as homelessness, but also what will be done about it. Drawing from many years of work experience in homeless advocacy and activist settings, as well as interviews conducted with program managers, counselors, and staff at homeless services organizations in New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, and Sea ... More

It is an easy assumption that social service programs and social scientific studies respond to homelessness after the fact, attempting to understand and prevent it. This book, however, argues that homelessness is an effect of social services and sciences, which shape not only what counts as homelessness, but also what will be done about it. Drawing from many years of work experience in homeless advocacy and activist settings, as well as interviews conducted with program managers, counselors, and staff at homeless services organizations in New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, and Seattle, this book offers the first analysis of how housing insecurity becomes organized as a legible, governable social problem. The past twenty-five years have witnessed a significant conceptual shift; whereas earlier social science and service discourse focused on individual pathologies as the locus for intervention, today a homeless population has replaced the individual as the primary object of knowledge and governance. In the realm of population management, how to most efficiently allocate resources to manage ongoing insecurity becomes the goal, rather than the eradication of the social, economic, and political bases of housing needs. Putting the work of Michel Foucault on biopower in dialogue with Marxist accounts of neoliberalism and critical race and ethnic studies analyses of the racial state and racial capitalism, the book argues that homelessness today constitutes a form of “surplus life,” populations made redundant as labor but valuable as a problem to be known and managed.