J Verdouw

Housing First programs in congregate-site facilities: can one size fit all?

Abstract The ‘Pathways to Housing’ Program (PHP) is an internationally recognized reference point for solutions to chronic homelessness espousing principles of ‘Housing First’. In Australian capital cities, the introduction of Housing First has mostly taken the form of congregate-site housing, unlike the scatter-site housing that has been closely associated with PHP in the United States. This has raised questions about whether the translation of the PHP model to Australia has resulted in a loss of fidelity to the ‘active ingredients’ that explain its success. Drawing on an evaluation of two congregate-site facilities in Tasmania, we show how tensions between program fidelity and local factors shaping the program assemblage, have compromised program success in relation to flexibility of service response and client agency and choice. Our findings challenge policy-makers and service providers to attend carefully to how successful overseas programs are adapted to different policy and service contexts to ensure that features critical to their success are not lost in translation.

The subject who thinks economically? Comparative money subjectivities in neoliberal context

Theoretically, neoliberalism is acknowledged as a powerful, discursive mode of governmentality, whose key tenets widely influence sociological discourses around the role of money in attaining quality of life and happiness. However, few studies qualitatively reflect in any detail on how neoliberalism is implicated in the making of particular subjectivities. In this comparative study, participants from different income contexts (middle and low income, and downshifters) are interviewed about money meanings with attention to the particular ways of living they narrate. The findings attest to participant adoption of, and/or resistance to, lay forms of neoliberalism in the ordering of their subjectivities around key themes: life values, life goals, monetary boundaries and future understandings. Their stories show the prevalence of the neoliberal subject and clarify the practical limits of neoliberal discourses, as well as demonstrating how moral alternatives to neoliberalism can transform self-understanding and practice.

The invisible houses: re-thinking and designing low-cost housing in developing countries

Not willing to limit the problem of low-cost, slum housing in developing countries to the shortage of their number or inadequacy of their form in The Invisible Houses, author Gonzalo Lizaralde draws on Calvino’s (1972) poetic invocations of the social and moral potential of the city to give form and shape to household needs and desires. Beyond the well-trodden policy lines of secure tenure and appropriate dwelling sizes, he argues for the need for the development of housing settlements for the poor that ‘create conditions in which people can live lives they have reason to value’ (p. 1).