Social housing after neo-liberalism: new forms of state-driven welfare intervention toward social renters

Abstract

Allocation policies to provide social housing to people with the highest needs means that a significant portion of tenants have complex, and often unmet, physical and mental healthcare requirements. Consequently, some tenants require health and psychosocial services integrated with housing. Drawing on a mixed-method design including administrative data from an Australian public health and social housing authority, and tenant qualitative interviews, this article demonstrates how integration assists tenants to improve their psychological health, reduce their use of emergency health services, and receive fewer tenancy problems. In addition to the health and psychosocial resources provided, tenants with high needs benefited from integration through housing providers having greater knowledge of the problems and solutions salient to their tenancies. The article’s theoretical contribution is to demonstrate how neoliberalism drives residualization, which in turn creates the need for a well-resourced integrated model. The integrated model constitutes a form of social housing provision after neoliberalism with a discernible but incomplete rupture with neoliberal logics.