‘Housing First’ and the Changing Terrains of Homeless Governance

Over the last fifteen years, programs based on ‘housing first’ models have swept to prominence as solutions to homelessness. Such programs serve a small subset of the overall homeless population, namely the ‘chronically’ homeless, offering direct access to permanent housing with comprehensive and flexible support services attached. Hailed as socially progressive responses to homelessness—based on their opposition to traditional emphases on client passivity, sobriety and moralised deservingness—the popularity of housing first models has often depended on congruence with wider projects of welfare retrenchment and fiscal austerity. Despite the rapid globalisation and high public profile of housing first ideas, they have been largely overlooked in geographical accounts of homeless governance. In response, this article discusses the growing importance and influence of housing first ideas, before looking to contemporary debates on homeless governance for interpretive insights. Informed by these debates, we sketch conceptual areas to which future research on housing first models and programs might attend: first, to their ambivalent politics and, second, to the processes and practices of translation that are central to their implementation and political consequence. Moving beyond questions of operational efficacy, efficiency and fidelity, we call for critical but constructive accounts focused on the constitutive relations between housing first ideas and governance transformations at and across a range of scales and sites.