The Business of Homelessness

Abstract

Rather than the streets, the focus of this article will be upon other spaces in the city that homeless individuals occupy. Within a context of the purported punitive or revanchist city, the paper examines a seemingly more accommodating, social welfare response to homelessness—“spaces of care”—enacted by frontline workers who interact with homeless individuals in one mostly volunteer-run day center in Brighton, United Kingdom (Cloke et al, 2010: 10). The research focused on how the organization is financed because of a shift in model of funding—from a reliance on smaller donations to relationships with larger corporate organizations—and how this affected service provision. I surmise that funding from larger corporate organizations does not usually come with conditions, but what was found at the day center was that the presence of the funders created limitations on what the service could and could not do with its service-users. Drawing on the research carried out from an ethnographic study of a mostly volunteer-run homeless day center based in central Brighton. The focus of this article is on these funding relationships in order to assess the tensions organizations like the day center in Brighton face between, on the one hand, organizational growth and restructuring in order to provide good quality services, and the freedom for its frontline workers to outwardly contest the punitive measures that their service-users experience on the other.