Being Homeless at the "End" of Homelessness: Navigating the Symbolic and Social Boundaries of Housing First

BEING HOMELESS AT THE “END” OF HOMELESSNESS NAVIGATING THE SYMBOLIC AND SOCIAL BOUNDARIES OF HOUSING FIRST Chris Kohut, MA Independent Scholar, Toronto, ON Matt Patterson, PhD 1 Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB A revised version of this article is forthcoming in Canadian Review of Sociology. ABSTRACT Housing First (HF) has emerged as the dominant paradigm in homelessness policy and has been praised for bringing an “end” to the homelessness crisis. Others claim, however, that HF facilitates further sociospatial exclusion of people experiencing homelessness (PEH). To advance this debate and understand HF within its larger sociological context, this article examines how HF policies translate to the lived experiences of those who remain in shelters and on the streets. Through interviews with 22 PEH, we demonstrate how HF confronts PEH with a set of strategic dilemmas that we frame using the concept of “boundary-work”. First, PEH must negotiate the symbolic boundaries that HF establishes between “worthy” and “unworthy” for the purposes of distributing housing. Second, once housed, PEH face challenges in navigating the social boundaries that separate the private space of the dwelling, the transitional spaces of homelessness (e.g. streets, shelters), and the increasingly gentrified public spaces of the city. We end by discussing the implications of these findings for evaluating HF programs and demonstrating the value of a boundary-work perspective on homelessness. INTRODUCTION Within the last decade Housing First (HF) has emerged as the dominant paradigm in homelessness policies across North America. As the name suggests, HF recommends the provision of permanent housing as the first step in assistance or treatment of the “chronically” homeless, a population defined by prolonged periods of homelessness and often characterized by mental illness, addiction and frequent use of public services (Padgett, Henwood, and Tsemberis 2015:2–3). HF has spread rapidly across North America and Europe, showing success in 1 Corresponding Author: Matt Patterson, Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4. 403-220-5037. Matt.Patterson@ucalgary.ca 1 evaluation studies and being hailed in the press for “solving” or “ending” the homelessness crisis (e.g. McCoy 2015; Lawrynuik 2017). Its appeal lies not only in demonstrable success in housing the people experiencing homelessness (PEH) (Tsemberis 1999), but also the public cost savings derived from the fact that the newly housed place less demands on more expensive public services such as hospitals and shelters (Culhane, Metraux and Hadley 2002:115). The apparent success of this approach, and its growing popularity, make it an important issue for critical sociological analysis. This paper joins a growing literature that seeks to understand how the abstract principles set out in HF and related policies translate to the lived experiences of PEH (e.g. Speer 2017; Osborne 2019). In particular, we focus on the experiences of those who remain homeless despite talk of an “end” to homelessness among some policymakers and journalists. In pursuing this line of inquiry, we examine how HF-based policies create dilemmas in the daily lives of PEH and the strategies they adopt in response. The research draws on semi-structured interviews with twenty-two women and men recruited through a shelter in Calgary — one of the many North American cities to adopt a HF-based homelessness strategy. The participants for this research were, according to self-reports, all “chronically homeless” by Calgary’s official definition: “continuously homeless for a year of more, or [having] had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years” (CHF 2015:3). However, as we will see, not all of these participants were judged to be eligible for housing. Our findings are conceptualized around the notion of “boundary-work” (Gieryn 1983). In particular, we document how our participants negotiated an interrelated set of “symbolic” and “social” boundaries established by the HF-based policies (Lamont and Molnár 2002). First, we consider the novel economic logic by which HF draws symbolic boundaries between those eligible or not for housing, and the strategies adopted by PEH to present themselves as “serviceworthy” (Marvasti 2002) and to reconcile this economic logic with their own sense of self-worth. Second, we examine how those who do receive housing navigate the social boundaries between the private spaces of the domiciled, “marginal” spaces of homelessness (Snow and Mulcahy 2001:157), and public spaces of the city. In particular, we explore our participants’ experiences of social and physical isolation. Their struggles highlight the fact that securing a personal private space does protect their “claims to community citizenship or membership [from being] routinely 2 contested” (p.154), particularly in a rapidly gentrifying city where HF intersects with larger structures of socio-spatial exclusion. At the heart of this paper is a concern for understanding how disadvantaged people navigate the symbolic and social boundaries imposed on them by institutions over which they have little control. In our case, that means homelessness policies based on the HF paradigm, and the larger socio-spatial context within which those policies are implemented. While we cite evaluation studies of specific HF programs such as “Pathways to Housing”, this study is not itself a program evaluation of a representative sample of all HF users. Nonetheless, in understanding how our participants perceive their own position within this policy regime, identify dilemmas that confront them, and adopt strategies in response, this study offers valuable insights that can inform further evaluation studies and reforms of HF-based policies. BACKGROUND THE RISE OF HOUSING FIRST HF has replaced the previously-dominant “Continuum of Care” paradigm (CoC) which advocated addressing homelessness through a series of treatment and training programs aimed at making PEH “housing ready” by overcoming addiction, mental illness, and skill deficits (Dordick 2002). CoC was plagued by multiple problems that ranged from government disinterest in actually providing permanent housing (Gowan 2010:190), to the inconsistent and highly subjective ways that frontline service providers measured “housing readiness” (Dordick 2002). The result, according to Gowan (2010), was a “simultaneous narrowing and pathologizing of poverty” (p.221). Rather than a lack of affordable housing or living wages, homelessness was attributed to mental illness, addiction, and other pathologies in a small group of individuals (ibid; Sparks 2012). Under CoC, PEH found themselves in a “limbo” of transitional housing, treatment programs, and skill training sessions, all while waiting for permanent housing that did not exist (Gowan 2010:188). During this time, the Pathways to Housing program in New York developed an alternative approach that inverted the CoC formula: rapidly provide permanent housing first, and then offer “consumer choice” in terms of support and treatment programs (Tsemberis, Gulcur and Nakae 2004). Pathways also favoured rent subsidies that allow clients to live in existing, privately- 3 owned rental units scattered throughout the city. This “scattered-site” approach differs significantly from the purpose-built public housing developments popular in decades previous (Gaetz, Scott, and Gulliver 2013:3), and is intended to foster “community integration” (Anderson-Baron and Collins 2019:1288). Research has shown positive results for the Pathways program, particularly with regard to people dually diagnosed with mental illness and addiction, in terms of housing retention (Tsemberis 1999; Tsemberis et al. 2004; Mares and Rosenheck 2010), public service reductions (Culhane et al. 2002; Gaetz et al. 2013), and (less consistently) psychiatric wellbeing and substance abuse (Padgett 2007; Mares and Rosenheck 2010) 2. These successes have drawn a great deal of attention to Pathways and its founder Sam Tsemberis. The Washington Post, for example, hailed Tsemberis as “the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness” (McCoy 2015, italics added). The success of Pathways gave rise to a larger HF “paradigm” (Waegemakers Schiff and Schiff 2014) that has spread across North America, rapidly replacing the remnants of CoC (Gaetz et al. 2013:4; Padgett et al. 2015) 3. The 2000s saw a proliferation of “10-year plans to end homelessness” that were centred on HF principles, which were adopted by over 300 communities in the United States in Canada (Waegemakers Schiff and Schiff 2014:82-83; Evans and Masuda 2020). In a few cases, cities have declared themselves “homeless-free” after having implemented such plans (e.g. Lawrynuik 2017). The rise of the HF paradigm has also been supported by larger philosophical changes in academic and public policy circles, including a reconceptualization of housing from a “commodity” to “right” (Pattillo 2013), recognition of the effectiveness of “harm reduction” policies over abstinence (Tsemberis et al. 2004), and more nuanced definitions of homelessness that distinguish “chronic” homelessness from “transitional” or “episodic homelessness” (Kuhn and Culhane 1998). The “chronic homeless”, characterized by prolonged periods of homelessness and high service-use, became the ideal targets for HF-based policies. 2 Other studies have shown no significant difference between HF and CoC with regard to psychiatric wellbeing or substance use (e.g. Tsemberis et al. 2004; Mares and Rosenheck 2010). 3 See Anderson-Baron and Collins (2019) for an in-depth analysis of how the principles from Pathway have evolved and been incorporated into Canadian policy. In this article, “HF” will refer to the broader HF policy paradigm rather than the specific Pathways programs. 4 The move to distinguish and target a core group of “chronic homeless” occurred alongside increased recognition of what Glaldwell (2006) calls the “power-law distribution” problem: that a tiny fraction of chronically homeless people place the greatest pressure on public services and, in the end, it is cheaper to provide them with housing than leave them on the streets. Gladwell’s influential New Yorker article “Million Dollar Murray” popularized this cost-benefit analysis of homelessness, which has emerged as one of the core justifications of HF-based policies (Gaetz et al. 2013; Willse 2015; Evans and Masuda 2020). CRITICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS OF HOUSING FIRST With its apparent success and popularity, HF has also drawn the attention of more critical scholarship. The most common critique in the academic literature draws connections between this policy and a larger “neoliberal” agenda that promotes the expansion of the private market and consumerism into governance and social services (Sparks 2012; Speer 2017). This critique has many dimensions. Willse (2015) and Gowan (2010) argue that an exclusive focus on mental health and addiction among the “chronically” homelessness distracts from larger system problems and “mundane poverty” (Gowan 2010:272). Klodawsky (2009) and Hopper (2012) argue that HF policies seek to “warehouse” the poor and exclude them from public spaces. Others have criticized HF for managing PEH through highly professionalized and technocratic methods that prioritize quantitative cost-benefit analysis (Willse 2015; Evans et al. 2016; Evans and Masuda 2020) while excluding homeless voices (Sparks 2012:1512). Proponents of HF, however, have dismissed such criticisms as coming “from the lofty realm of academic criticism” (Padgett 2007:345) because they are based primarily on discourse analysis of policy documents as opposed to evaluating how HF works in practice. Indeed, sociological studies of homelessness have long demonstrated that public policies manifest themselves in unpredictable ways and confront PEH with dilemmas that require creative and strategic responses (e.g. Snow and Anderson 1993; Duneier 1999; Marvasti 2002; Gowan 2010). Following in this tradition of the sociology of homelessness, this study contributes to a growing literature that applies a human-based, interpretive approach to HF. While much of this research is on clients enrolled in HF programs (Padgett 2007; Hsu, Simon, Henwood, Wenzel and Couture 2016; Henwood, Lahey, Harris, Rhoades and Wenzel 2018), fewer studies have examined those who remain “chronically homeless” in the face of HF-based reforms (Murphy 2009; Osborne 5 2019:420-23). Focusing on this latter group, we examine how people currently experiencing chronic homelessness perceive their own exclusion from HF programs and the strategies they adopt in negotiating the larger policy environment in which they find themselves. THE BOUNDARY-WORK OF HOUSING FIRST In pursuing this goal, we adopt the sociological concept of “boundary-work” which refers generally to how people construct, maintain, navigate, and cross social and symbolic distinctions. First introduced by Gieryn (1983) to describe how professionals carve out areas of authority, the concept was subsequently adopted by Michèle Lamont in a study of class distinction (Lamont 1992) and then developed the into a broader, more abstract theoretical perspective that distinguishes between “symbolic” and “social” boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002). While boundary-work has not been widely adopted within studies of homelessness, as we will demonstrate, the concept is applicable to a wide range of core issues within the literature. In fact, symbolic and social boundaries are far more concrete and consequential for PEH than for the domiciled. In applying boundary-work to homelessness, we also draw on insights from pragmatist theory. In particular, we conceptualize boundary-work as strategic actions that are taken in response to dilemmas or “problem situations” that emerge it the course of everyday life (Gross 2009). As mentioned, this dilemma-centred approach is well established within sociological studies of homelessness. In our case, we focus specifically on the boundary-work that PEH adopt in navigating two sets of boundaries established by HF: symbolic boundaries separating those worthy and unworthy of housing and social boundaries separating the private spaces of the home and public spaces of the streets. SYMBOLIC BOUNDARIES: EVALUATING WORTHINESS Lamont and Molnár (2002) define “symbolic” boundaries as “conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space” which serve as “an essential medium through which people acquire status and monopolize resources” (p.168). Much homelessness research has examined how policymakers draw symbolic boundaries between those “worthy” and “unworthy” of various forms of support (e.g. Mohr and Duquenne 1997; Dordick 2002; Marvasti 2002; Murphy 2009; Osborne 2019). 6 Examining the history of American homelessness policy, Gowan (2010) has identified three distinct logics for distinguishing worth, which she terms “sin-talk”, “sick-talk”, and “systemtalk”. Each of these logics provides an explanation for the cause of homelessness (immorality, illness, and injustice), and suggests associated responses (punishment, therapy, and social reform). CoC, for example, exemplifies “sick-talk” since it is based on the idea that homelessness is caused by medical pathologies that require clinical solutions (Gowan 2010). While HF is based on the idea that everyone who needs a home should get one as soon as possible, in practice the supply of affordable housing is often limited (Anderson-Baron and Collins 2019) and policymakers must inevitably draw boundaries between those most “worthy” of housing (Osborne 2019). How exactly is “worthiness” evaluated in HF? Proponents of Pathways consistently adopt “sick-talk” in presenting this policy as a “clinical” strategy (Padgett et al. 2015:3), but there are significant differences between the “sick-talk” of CoC and the way the HF works in practice. First, “consumer choice” diminishes the authority of the clinician to categorize people and assign treatments. Second, evaluations of HF programs have prioritized non-medical criteria such as housing retention and cost savings. Finally, because HF policies are often justified by cost-benefit analysis, policymakers can be largely agnostic about why people are homeless. The costliest individuals are prioritized irrespective of whether that cost is driven by immorality, illness, or injustice (Evans and Masuda 2020:518). “Sickness” still matters in HF, but it is often recast from a pathology that needs treatment, to an economic cost that needs to be minimized (Willse 2015:159). Thus, worthiness takes on a “post-social” (ibid) economic logic that is arguably distinct from all three of Gowan’s categories. This economic logic has manifested itself in the form of quantifying technologies such as the Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool (SPDAT) developed by OrgCode Consulting (2015). The SPDAT is not designed for clinical diagnosis (p.11). Rather, it allows service providers to establish program eligibility and rank applicants based on 15 dimensions including mental and physical health, substance use, past use of EMS, and legal history (OrgCode 2015:14). It is just one of several quantifying tools that facilitates cost-benefit analysis (Evans and Masuda 2020). 7 Policymakers are not the only ones who engage in symbolic boundary-work, however. Research has demonstrated how PEH actively adopt strategies aimed at interpreting, navigating, and sometimes challenging notions of worthiness in order to influence how they are positioned (Marvasti 2002; Smith and Anderson 2018). To elevate their own sense of self-worth, PEH also engage in “associational distancing” by drawing rhetorical boundaries between themselves and other PEH they regard as worse-off (Snow and Anderson 1993: 215). Likewise, they often draw boundaries within their own biographies, as with the notion of “going straight” (e.g. Gowan 2010:94). Through such strategies, PEH attempt “to construct and maintain a sense of meaning and self-worth that helps them stay afloat” in the face of debilitating social exclusion and stigma (Snow and Anderson 1993: 229). The potential for conflicting notions of worthiness between policymakers and PEH leads to our first research question. How do those seeking housing understand and navigate HF’s logic of worth, and how does this logic intersect with their own understandings of self-worth? In answering this question, we examine PEH experiences seeking housing, including how they attempted to construct “service-worthy narratives” (Marvasti 2002) aimed at securing access to housing and their own normative assessment of the HF system (as they understand it). SOCIAL BOUNDARIES: SEPARATING PEOPLE, PRACTICES, AND PLACES For Lamont and Molnár (2002), symbolic boundaries are distinct from, but closely related to, social boundaries, defined as “objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social opportunities” (p.168). Homelessness creates a social boundary between those with and without access to housing and the private, personal space that it affords. Without access to private space, taken-for-granted activities such as sleeping or urinating become complex social dilemmas (Duneier 1999). Thus, Anderson and Snow (1993) argue that PEH are forced out of “prime space”, which is dominated by domiciled citizens who enforce norms of civility — norms which are based on the implicit assumption that one has access to private space. Instead, PEH are pushed into “marginal spaces” such as encampments or shelters where their presence is contained and tolerated (at least temporarily) (p.103). Social boundaries are also imposed by policy regimes. Symbolic boundaries around notions of worth become the basis for distributing resources (e.g. cash or therapy) and assigning people to 8 particular physical spaces such as shelters, jails, hospitals, or private housing (Mohr and Duquenne 1997). CoC policies established “transitional spaces” where PEH were (in theory) given the opportunity to become “housing ready” (Dordick 2002). By contrast, HF seeks to eliminate transitional spaces by moving PEH directly from the marginal spaces of homelessness to a private home. Moreover, HF seeks to further reduce social boundaries and facilitate community integration by placing PEH into “scattered-site” housing that is physically embedded within larger residential neighbourhoods (Gaetz et al. 2013:3). While HF attempts to eliminate social boundaries by rapidly relocating PEH from marginal spaces to private homes, “exiting homelessness” is a complex, multidimensional process that involves significant cognitive and behavioural reorientation (Marr 2015:13). For example, studies have shown that experiences of loneliness and social isolation are common barriers to recovery (Yanos et al. 2004; Patterson 2012:22; Gaetz 2014:31; Padgett et al. 2015:70-71; Speer 2017:530). These findings are supported by network analysis that shows a loss of social contacts among clients of HF programs (Golembiewski, Watson, Robison and Coberg 2017; Henwood et al. 2017). Furthermore, while housing retention is consistently better under HF than CoC, research has nonetheless found a significant minority of clients return to the streets 4. These struggles should, however, not be taken as evidence that PEH in general are “serviceresistant” (Murphy 2009:321). Rather, they point to the fact that transitioning from the street to the private home is potentially a problem situation that involves significant boundary-work on the part of PEH. This leads to our second question: among the minority of people who leave permanent housing, what challenges did they encounter while making the transition from unhoused to housed and how do they make sense of their subsequent transition back to the street? THE CASE: CALGARY’S 10-YEAR PLAN TO END HOMELESSNESS Our study takes place in Calgary, a city of 1.3 million residents. As the corporate center of Canada’s oil and gas industry, Calgary has a high median income, a rapidly growing population, and experiences frequent economic cycles of boom and bust. Homelessness in Calgary had been 4 Goering et al. (2014) found that only 62 percent of HF clients remained housed full-time (p.17). Other studies have found that HF clients spend about 70 to 80 percent of their nights stably housed by the 2-year mark (Tsemberis et al. 2004; Tsai et al. 2010:16; Goering et al. 2014:18). 9 increasing rapidly throughout the 1990s and 2000s at a rate of about 30 percent biennially (CHF 2015:20). Point-in-time counts reveal that homelessness peaked at 3601 people in 2008 and has remained consistently above 3000 since then (ibid). In 2008, the municipal and provincial governments partnered with the non-profit Calgary Homeless Foundation (CHF) to create a “10-Year Plan to End Homelessness”. The plan tasked the CHF with consolidating all existing services and resources into a single system based on the “principles” of the HF paradigm (CHF 2015), including identifying a core population of chronically homeless to permanently house in privately-owned, “scattered-site” units. Other principles included providing services “guided by consumer choices”, reducing “the economic cost of homelessness”, and “maximizing” the market and private sector involvement (p.1). The latter two principles are not part of Pathways or the Federal Government’s HF policy statement (see Anderson-Baron and Collins 2019:1289). At the 10-year endpoint, proponents of the plan have pointed to several measures of success, including stabilization in the city’s homeless population. There is also evidence of decreasing reliance on emergency shelters (Gres Wilkins and Kneebone 2017) and associated cost savings (CHF 2015: 8-9). However, as Anderson-Baron and Collins (2019) report, the program has been hampered by a shortage of affordable housing units and the City of Calgary (2018) reported that the wait list for subsidized housing has more than doubled since 2006 and now exceeds 4000 households (p.37). Moreover, the CHF estimates that almost 20,000 Calgarians continue to experience homelessness at some point annually with thousands living in shelters for months or even years at a time (pp.20-21). These findings have led to widespread media discourse over the “failure” of the 10-year plan to “end homelessness” (e.g. Markusoff 2018; Kaufmann 2018). Given Calgary’s 12-year experience with a HF-based plan to end homelessness, the shortages of housing which have forced service providers to prioritize applicants, and the large population of Calgarians who continue to live in shelters and encampments, the city is a valuable case study for examining our two central research questions. METHODOLOGY As mentioned, this study seeks to understand HF from the perspectives of people currently experiencing chronic homelessness. To this end, in 2016 and 2017, we conducted semi- 10 structured interviews with 22 individuals recruited from a shelter in Calgary’s inner-city (which we refer to as “The Shelter”). The Shelter is funded primarily through CHF and provides shortterm, emergency housing. It also serves as a gateway for the CHF’s larger HF-based system. Recruitment was conducted within The Shelter through information posters and the help of Shelter staff members. Interviews were limited to those who fit the definition of “chronic homelessness,” having experienced homelessness for at least a year. Participants received a $10 fast food gift card as an honorarium for their participation in the study. Among our participants were 17 men and five women. 15 were white, five were Indigenous, and two were people of colour. Years spent homeless ranged from three to over forty. Also, while most of the participants were born in Canada, most were born outside Calgary itself. All participants were given pseudonyms to ensure anonymity. Interviews focused first on our participants’ thoughts about housing and homelessness in general. Did they identify with the term “homeless”? Where did they prefer to sleep on a nightly basis? To what extent was finding permanent housing a priority for them? Second, we asked our participants about their experiences with housing programs and agencies. To dispel any notion that participation in our study would affect access to services, we decided not to conduct interviews within The Shelter. As a result, the interviews were all conducted in two cafes located a brief walk from The Shelter. Reflecting the gentrifying status of the area, both cafes cater primarily to professional-class customers. In some cases these locations provoked meaningful responses from our participants. We return to the significance of this issue in our findings section. The interviews were supplemented with a review of relevant policy documents related to homelessness in Calgary and a few informal conversations with policymakers and service providers to confirm interpretations of the policies. The research was approved by the Conjoint Faculties Research Ethics Board at the University of Calgary in September 2016 (REB16-0385). FINDINGS We present our findings in two sections corresponding to our two research questions concerning symbolic and social boundary-work respectively. 11 “YOU GOTTA BE REALLY, REALLY HOMELESS” As mentioned, shortages of affordable housing undermine the principle of a right to housing (Osborne 2019) and this is certainly true in Calgary as well (Anderson-Baron and Collins 2019). As a result, service providers are forced to rank applicants. Like more than 100 other communities across North America, Calgary has adopted OrgCode’s SPDAT (Evans and Masuda 2020:513). Those seeking housing must fill out a SPDAT survey at either a shelter or, increasingly, at a newly created central assessment centre. The results are then evaluated by the CHF in order to prioritize applicants and match them to any available housing. Our interviews revealed that, from the point of view of PEH, the SPDAT is one of the most salient aspects of the HF-based system and the primary window through which they come to explicitly understand its underlying logic. All 22 or our participants were aware of the SPDAT, 18 had completed the survey, and 12 had received housing in the past (though none were housed at the time they were interviewed). Most of our participants had fully-formed opinions on the survey, alerting us to its salience to them. In essence, the SPDAT confronts our participants as a problem situation that demands a strategic response. The challenge is to convince housing agencies of what our participants already know about themselves: that they were worthy and in real need of housing. Addressing this challenge typically requires constructing a “service-worthy narrative” (Marvasti 2002), an act of self-classification requiring two steps: (1) developing an understanding of HF’s institutional logic and its corresponding system of classification, (2) employing various “interpretive practices” in order to translate one’s own situation such that it can rationally and clearly be categorized as “service-worthy” (ibid). With regard to the first step, many of our participants reported using their social networks to learn about HF. Gabriel is a man in his mid-30s who reported being homeless since he was 15. Before deciding whether or not to fill out the SPDAT, he asked around in order to learn more about the system: I proceeded to go and ask people, ‘well, how do I get into that program?’ Oh, you gotta really qualify. You gotta be really, really homeless. Really, really sick. And they started to tell me what they went through to get their housing I could not 12 believe it! I could not believe my ears ’cause they said the sicker you are the more you score on these points, and the more you score on these points the more chances you get of getting a place. Upon learning this information, Gabriel decided that he was not sick enough to qualify and decided not to apply. “I’m not gonna brag… but I’m quite an intelligent individual,” he said before lamenting that this trait, along with his mental and physical health, would work against him. Darlene, a woman who reported being without permanent housing for the past 10 years, also decided not to apply. For her, this decision was based on the advice of shelter staff. As with Gabriel, Darlene expressed frustration that her positive traits disqualified her: “[these] agencies are set up more to help people that are more drug addicted or medically down than I am. They are not able to help the person who wants to work and get on their feet.” Some of our participants recounted entering into the application process without first grasping the logic of HF. Steve, for example, has been experiencing homelessness for over 40 years. After filling out a SPDAT, he claims that he never heard back from the CHF. Reflecting on why he was not offered housing, he admits to misreading the situation: I lied [on the SPDAT]. I said I was employable and that I worked and stuff like that ’cause I thought maybe it would benefit my [chances]. But I was wrong. I should have just told them the truth. I had mental health disorders and that I’ve been homeless basically my entire life... [But] I just thought that maybe if I brighten it up a little bit it would look better and maybe I would be qualified for housing. So, it was just my mistake. I mean, just ’cause you got $100 you might say you have $200, right? Unlike Steve, Denzel scored high enough on the SPDAT to be eligible for housing and was invited to an interview with a local housing agency. Before heading to the interview, he recalled, “[I] cleaned up myself; I shaved. I had a beard two hours before my meeting and longer hair and I just tried to look decent ’cause I was so excited.” However, in his own view, “looking decent backfired on me... I just should have went the way I looked but I was trying to have more hope. [I thought that] maybe if I look better they would help, but it backfired on me.” Thus, in 13 Denzel’s account, failing to look the part of the homeless man caused him to lose his chance at housing: “The people I was doing the interview with kinda were surprised what they seen on paper and what they seen in person. …I guess they were being stereotypical.” We cannot say whether Steve and Denzel are correct in their assessment of the SPDAT. Nor can we say how Darlene or Gabriel might have scored if they had completed the SPDAT. What these examples do show, however, is a perceived contradiction between the logic of HF and our participants own sense of self-worth: the qualities that made them better people also made them less worthy of housing. Frustration stemming from this moral contradiction was most evident when our participants raised the obvious implication that followed from their understanding of HF: that they should embellish or even lie about their problems in order to make themselves look worse off. In the words of Darlene, “everybody is telling me just lie, lie, lie, you will get ahead faster. And now I believe them, [but] it’s just not who I am.” While participants like Steve readily admitted to lying in order to make themselves look better, the idea of lying to make themselves look worse struck all of the participants who raised this possibility as unacceptable. For DJ, a man experiencing homelessness in his mid-30s who was formerly housed through HF, this perceived pressure to lie called the entire system into question. I’m not saying so much that it goes against my morals, but it doesn’t make sense to me. Like they are coming to us to help us with housing, why should we have to lie about our past in order for us to get housing? Like if you’re coming to us dangling… the keys in front of your face and you don’t score high or low enough and then it gets taken away? A similar view was expressed by Gabriel, who claimed that “having to lie would take a lot of courage… I want to go in there and be honest. Look I have drug problems I need help… I’ve been homeless my whole life. I need help. That should be simple enough!” Some of our participants spoke of the psychological tension between pushing back against these stereotypes or giving into them. This seemed to be particularly aggravating when these stereotypes were seen as coming from service providers themselves, because of the power relations at play. 14 Clarke, who was also formerly housed under HF, describes this frustration: When I’m placed in that box [i.e. stereotyped] it’s easier just to make people happier and just do whatever or give them what the fuck [they] want... I will just become whatever you want me to become. If you want me to say I’m just a drug addict and a crazy person then that’s what I’ll do. I’ll be a crazy drug addict person. You think I am so that’s what I will become. Life is just easier that way. Because of this perceived need to perform a stereotype, Clarke saw his relationship with service providers as a zero-sum battle with winners and losers: “I said fuck it, I will just become what they want cause you can’t, always, like when you’re beat down so much you just say I’m not gonna fucking win this one so I will just become whatever they want me to become.” Clark’s sense of frustration conforms to existing findings (e.g. Snow and Anderson 1993:198230; Gowan 2010:181-84). PEH frequently express a sense of tension between conforming to a label in order to become service-worthy (e.g. “sick”, “sinner”, etc.), or resisting and forfeiting services. Under HF, however, this tension takes on a new dynamic. Being sick or a sinner is an identity that PEH can and do adopt in order to make sense of their own situation. But these identities are not a core part of HF, where service is provided based on the economic logic of the “power-law distribution” problem. Services are not provided to those who “go straight” by overcoming their addictions or renouncing their sins. Rather it is provided, in the words of Gabriel, to the “really, really homeless” — those who tip the cost-benefit analysis in the right direction. Nonetheless, while quantitative tools like the SPDAT are designed to provide objective measures that facilitate cost-benefit analysis (Evans and Masuda 2020), to PEH they become strategic dilemmas to be resolved by playing up or down their problems and adopting or resisting stereotypes. This creative, performative boundary-work on the part of our participants likely helps to explain why SPDAT-like surveys have been shown to suffer from poor reliability (Brown, Cummings, Lyons, Carrión, and Watson 2018): PEH are making active decisions about how they will present themselves, and these decisions change as they learn more about the program from their experiences and social networks. 15 “WHEN YOU HAVE A HOUSE… YOU’RE ALL BY YOURSELF” Although previous experience with housing was not a criterion for recruitment in this study, over half of our participants (12 of 22) had previously received housing before returning to the streets. What leads some people to leave housing that is intended to be permanent? According to the service providers we spoke to, the immediate reasons people lose housing within HF include abandoning the home, inviting too many people over, damaging the home, or experiencing a severe decline in health or substance abuse within the home. These responses conform to Evans and Masuda’s (2020) research on HF in Alberta, which revealed that service providers struggle to keep their clients housed (p.516). While this study is not aimed at uncovering the underlying causal factors that determine housing retention and stability in general, we are able to draw on our participants’ experiences of being formerly housed to explore why some people struggle with the transition to a private home and the shifted social boundaries that this transition entails. To begin, almost all of our participants voiced a relatively strong desire to gain their own personal, private dwelling. In this sense, while many of our participants were critical of the logic behind HF, few questioned the underlying assumption that securing a private home was an important goal. Even Darlene, who decided not to apply for housing, spoke longingly about the idea of having her own home, emphasizing privacy and a perceived level of freedom: [Having a home would allow me] to open my own fridge and cook my own meals and shower in a shower that I don’t have to wear flip flops in. Have all my stuff in the bathroom so I don’t have to carry in, carry out. Having drawers to put my clothes away, and hangers. And to get up in the morning and go to work and come home and have supper and watch Coronation Street. I’m artsy, I do a lot of art and stuff like that. The home, for Darlene, is a place for self-care and leisure. In North America, access to a private home for these purposes is seen as a natural and necessary requirement for proper daily living. Conversely, these activities are not tolerated in the public sphere, which is why PEH are relegated to “marginal” or “transitional” spaces (Snow and Mulcahy 2001). Our participants who were previously housed presented a different picture than the idealized situation described by Darlene. First, many expressed a sense of being overwhelmed by the 16 transition involved in taking possession of a house and would often seek out familiarity on the street or in the shelters. Such was the case with Jorge, who told us, I wasn’t used to having a place of my own, you know? So, I didn’t know how to keep it, maintain it. So, I wouldn’t be home. I would be home maybe once a week because I wasn’t used to having a place of [my] own. So, I would go back to what is familiar for me, which is the streets. Notably, our participants often blamed themselves. Jorge told us, “How am I going to maintain this [house],because I self-sabotage. I don’t feel as if I deserve it, so I sabotage it.” This selfblame further reveals the power that the private home has in the minds of our participants: that they are more likely to blame their own deficiencies than question the appropriateness of the types of housing they received. One of the challenges of this transition was the physical isolation created by suburban sprawl, which is characteristic of most North American cities. Calgary is no exception. According to the 2016 city census, 70 percent of Calgarians commute in a private vehicle. While most of the shelters and other social services are located in Calgary’s denser, more walkable core, several of our participants had been housed further away due to the “scattered-site” approach adopted by the CHF. Sheldon, for example, describes the difficulty of commuting. The time I had I broke my ankle, I had a cast and I couldn’t really go anywhere. It was wintertime… I can’t go anywhere cause of my cast and the elevator wasn’t working there. I was up on the 3rd floor and I had to walk down the stairs... They would give me bus tickets and I had to walk down a hill, like 3 blocks down a hill [to the bus stop]. Even without injuries, when faced with long, inconvenient bus trips, several of our participants reported avoiding going home altogether. With physical isolation comes social isolation. While scattered-site housing is supposed to facilitate “community integration” (Anderson-Baron and Collins 2019:1288), social isolation was actually the most cited problem with private housing. Jasmine, a woman in her late-50s, described her experience of “loneliness [and] helpless… like nobody cares.” However, she added, “when you’re homeless you have more community then when you have a house ’cause 17 you’re all by yourself. But when you’re out here with everybody… people watch everyone’s back.” Participation in community was one of the reasons given by our participants for leaving home. Relatedly, the most positive accounts of housing we heard were from those who discussed using their home to host friends and family. Sheldon, for example, told us that his home allowed him to reconnect with his son. Prior to that, Sheldon explained, he was not living in the kinds of places that his son (who lives with foster parents) felt comfortable visiting. Elroy, on the other hand, talked about opening his home up as a kind of hang out for his circle of friends. His home, he said, was “just like a shelter, but a smaller version”, a place where “we can nurture [ourselves] and work together as a unit”. Nonetheless, Sheldon and Elroy’s accounts were rare and provide only a partial picture of their situation since both eventually lost their housing. It is worth noting that those like Elroy who treat their private homes as a communal space similar to a shelter or encampment often run into problems with landlords, neighbors, and housing agencies and, ultimately, risk eviction. Indeed, several of our participants mentioned getting into conflicts with their landlords over inviting friends over. Following the HF principle of “community integration” (Gaetz et al. 2013:6), agencies have introduced various programs designed to combat social isolation. However, none of our participants discussed a desire to participate in a formal social program. What they discussed was something more informal and spontaneous: hanging out with friends, camping together, being among equals as opposed to those in positions of authority and control. Challenges of maintaining a social life extend beyond the private home into the streets, which are becoming more hostile to PEH. The Shelter was once part of a landscape of “marginal space” surrounded exclusively by empty parking lots, fast food restaurants, and dilapidated pre-war houses. Today gentrification has brought high-rise condominiums, office buildings, and high-end amenities, to the point that The Shelter has become an island of marginality surrounded by “prime space” (Snow and Anderson 1993:103). As new businesses and residents have entered the neighborhood, “hanging out” around The Shelter has become difficult, disrupted by police, private security guards, and hostile urban 18 design. Currently, new residents in the area are campaigning to relocate The Shelter and the local city councillor has even suggested redirecting funding for housing programs to compensate property owners for costs attributed to vandalism and added security. A sense of alienation from the changing neighbourhood was evident in our interviews. Elroy articulated this feeling well, commenting on the location of his interview. Right now we’re in the posh part of town…. Ok? I’m at Starbucks, for fuck sakes! Like seriously, come on! I go to Timmy’s [Tim Hortons]. I used to work there. I know the order there: just a double-double [coffee with two creams and two sugars], not some fucking crazy name for a, you know, iced tea or whatever! In this sense, HF policies cannot be understood outside the context of neighbourhood- and citylevel spatial processes. As others have argued, adaptation to private housing is greatly influenced by what occurs outside the home (Hsu et al. 2016; Henwood et al. 2018). In particular, when it comes to social boundaries, feelings of social and physical isolation in the private sphere are exacerbated by physical and psychological exclusion in the public realm. We expand on this idea in our conclusion. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: THINKING OUTSIDE THE HOUSE The debate over HF often occurs at a high level of abstraction. Proponents point to seemingly objective, quantitative measures such as housing retention rates and cost-benefit analyses, while critics point to neoliberal ideology embedded within policy discourse. This study joins a growing literature that has sought to ground this debate in an interpretive sociological understanding of how HF-based policies are actually experienced by their target population: the chronically homeless. In particular, we sought to understand the conditions of exclusion among people who remain homeless at the end of 10-year plan to “end homelessness”. Our interviews reveal key reasons for exclusion. Some applied for housing and were denied. Others did not apply at all, anticipating that they would be unsuccessful. Finally, more than half of our participants received housing at some point but eventually returned to the streets. Seeking to make sociological sense of these experiences, we adopted the concept of boundarywork. We identified the distinct way that HF establishes symbolic and social boundaries and how 19 these boundaries create dilemmas in the daily lives of PEH which must be creatively managed through boundary-work. In doing so, this paper demonstrates the value of boundary-work as a unifying concept that can be applied to a wide variety of distinct issues within the sociology of homelessness. The way service providers establish program eligibility (Osborne 2019), the selfnarratives and daily routines of PEH (Snow and Anderson 1993), the transitions involved in exiting homelessness (Marr 2015), and the strategies of spatial “dislocation” and “exclusion” employed against PEH within gentrifying neighbourhoods (Snow and Mulcahy 2001:160) can all be understood as interrelated forms of boundary-work. As we demonstrated, boundary-work provides a valuable locus for comparative analysis, including comparing different policy regimes (CoC versus HF), comparing how symbolic boundaries are established discursively in policies versus how they become enacted in practice, and, finally, comparing the logic of boundaries from the perspective of policymakers to how those boundaries are experienced and negotiated by PEH. Indeed, this approach allows see how policymakers and PEH are engaged in the same enterprise of boundary-work, albeit with different goals, methods, and levels of power. Policymakers adopt technocratic methods in order to distribute limited resources in a way that can be justified to public authorities. PEH are more concerned with creating service-worthy narratives and bolstering their own sense of self-worth. Both groups, however, create narratives and discursive categories — sometimes congruent, sometimes contradictory — aimed at influencing the distribution of resources and access to different types of spaces. This comparative, boundary-work approach could be extended in future research to examine variations in how boundaries are established among different HF-based programs. As well, while this study focused specifically on people currently experiencing chronic homelessness, future research can examine how HF clients who remain in housing manage to accomplish the same boundary-work that proved challenging for our participants. Finally, our boundary-based analysis points to the importance of thinking “outside the house”, so to speak, when it comes to homelessness. Despite our participants’ tendency to self-blame, we argue that their struggles are not indicative of their personal failings, but rather the limitations of the housing they received. The scattered-site approach is designed to achieve community integration by placing PEH into “ordinary housing” (Tsemberis quoted in Gaetz et al. 2013:3). 20 However, “ordinary housing” typically assumes access to a private car and that one’s social life takes place mostly outside the home in consumer-oriented spaces like malls, restaurants, and cafes. As Speer (2017) argues, we need to “trouble the notion of home as a market-based and privatized structure rooted in the model of the isolated nuclear family or individual” (p.531) which is tied to a “vision of domesticity [based on] white, middle-class, and masculine norms” (p.519). Unfortunately, providing a greater diversity of unconventional housing options has been greatly undermined by a shortage of affordable housing in general (Anderson-Baron and Collins 2019). Furthermore, we must also “think outside the house” by understanding how housing fits into larger socio-spatial structures of exclusion (Hsu et al. 2016; Henwood et al. 2018). While the scattered-site approach physically integrates HF clients into middle-class neighbourhoods, our findings suggest that this same strategy can actually reinforce social boundaries by restricting mobility and creating situations where HF clients feel surveilled and discriminated against by landlords and neighbours. Community integration is further undermined when PEH find that their access to public spaces are curtailed through anti-homeless practices that have implemented concurrently with HF in Calgary and cities across North America (Murphy 2009). It is therefore essential that providing “housing first” must go hand-in-hand with making urban public spaces more accessible to the poor, housed or unhoused. 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