The Homelessness Industry: A Critique of US Social Policy

Homelessness once was considered an aberration. Today it is a normalized feature of US society. It is also, argue Elizabeth Beck and Pamela Twiss, an industry: the embrace of neoliberal policies and piecemeal efforts to address the problem have ensured a steady production of homeless people, as well as a plethora of disjointed social services that often pathologize individuals instead of housing them. Tracing the transformation of homelessness from being a social-justice issue to one with solutions based on medical models and zero-sum-games analyses, Beck and Twiss explore how government policies and practices have served to shape our limited response to the problem. Equally important, they consider how a more just, human-rights-based approach might be effected.