It is commonly argued that, in the neoliberal era, homelessness policy and programmes emphasise individual deficiencies, like mental illness and substance abuse, at the expense of structural causes, like housing system and labour market transformations.
Drawing on a recent Australian study, we identify a new modality of homelessness governance that breaks with these individualising tendencies. It instead involves the cohortisation of homelessness: policies and interventions that break homelessness down into a set of priority cohorts defined, not by individual deficiencies, but rather the distinct social circumstances that precipitate their homelessness and shape their needs and experiences. We show how cohortisation engenders a new problematisation of homelessness, replacing the neoliberal tendency to blame the individual with a focus on the failure of service systems to recognise and respond to cohort differences.
We argue that the shift from individualisation to cohortisation has important progressive affordances in terms of challenging stigma and expanding the scope of policy responses to previously overlooked or misrecognised groups. However, it also largely reproduces the neoliberal tendency to obscure the structural drivers of homelessness, albeit in more subtle ways.
[Note that this journal article is behind a paywall]
