The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States by Craig Willse

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States by Craig Willse Ashley Mog THE VALUE OF HOMELESSNESS: Managing Surplus Life in the United States. By Craig Willse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2015. In The Value of Homelessness, Craig Willse brings together interviews with people who work in homeless services organizations in urban centers alongside careful historical tracing and his own experiences in homelessness activism. Through this study, he critically implores researchers in the social sciences to ask different questions about homelessness. Rather than using individuals as endemic of the problem of the unsheltered, he challenges us throughout this book to denaturalize the construction of the housing system and the racial capitalism that undergirds our current neoliberal milieu. He moves through a historicization of homelessness from 1930s New Deal programs to the current moment and argues that there are specific apparatuses that "produce and distribute housing insecurity and deprivation" (22): social science; social service programs; public policy at local, state, and federal levels, and federal governmental arms that are concerned with homelessness, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Social services and social sciences shape the conversations about and resources allocated for the phenomenon of homelessness—both have been actively involved in creating the definitions that led to current governance around unsheltered populations. This governance directs what he calls "surplus life" through a proliferation of required expertise and economic imperatives. Surplus life is partially managed through a portion of the nonprofit industrial complex specifically focused on homeless services. Willse argues that these organizations work by gaining "financial backing through [a] promise to reduce the negative impact of those neoliberal surplus lives on social and economic order" (49-50). HUD additionally manages surplus life through "the databasing of homelessness" that requires programs to meet very specific requirements to receive funding (109), which then actually prevents the kinds of assistance that would alleviate the conditions of poverty that lead to homelessness. What masquerades as "helping" and "good" for unsheltered people is largely funded by organizations and governments that want the administration and obscurity of the social inequality created as a byproduct of reaping the benefits of racial capitalism. Through his careful critiques of the ways sociology has specifically theorized and methodologically conceptualized "homelessness," he asks anyone invested in social science to question the "limits of doing good" (177) through research. For example, he talks about the ways that Institutional Review Boards consider "ethical" research—as researchers we are asked to take special consideration of vulnerable populations. Doing this, while undoubtedly important, also has a universalizing effect on principles of protection: people in positions of power have a disproportionate access to shape their own narratives because "mechanisms developed to measure the ethics of research are embedded in the very institutional and governmental complexes we are trying to study" (178). How does one conduct research within an institution when that research's potential is to question the production of inequality by that very institution? Ultimately, he asks academics to think through our complicity in systems that lead to governing marginalized and vulnerable [End Page 89] populations. Questioning the "accepted configurations" (55) that we have of housing and homelessness crises, will enable us to move beyond accepting homelessness and housing insecurity as given, for example. As Willse argues, this could "undermine" rather than "underwrite" (182) the knowledge production that sustains surplus life. Ashley Mog Independent Scholar Copyright © 2019 Mid-America American Studies Association