1st Edition
Homelessness and Housing Advocacy The Role of Red-Tape Warriors
Through compelling ethnography, Homelessness and Housing Advocacy: The Role of Red-Tape Warriors reveals the creative and ambitious methods that social service providers use to house their clients despite the conflictual conditions posed by the policies and institutions that govern the housing process.
Combining in-depth interviews, extensive fieldwork, and the author’s own professional experience, this book considers the perspective of social service providers who work with people experiencing homelessness and chronicles the steps they take to navigate the housing process. With assertive methods of worker-client advocacy at the center of its focus, this book beckons attention to the many variables that affect professional attempts to house homeless populations. It conveys the challenges that social service providers encounter while fitting their clients into the criteria for housing eligibility, the opposition they receive, and the innovative approaches they ultimately take to optimize housing placements for their clients who are, or were formerly, experiencing homelessness.
Weaving as it does between issues of poverty, social inequality, and social policy, Homelessness and Housing Advocacy will appeal to courses in social work, sociology, and public policy and fill a void for early-career professionals in housing and community services.
Acknowledgments Preface 1. Introduction 2. Methods and Context 3. Relationship Building: Gaining Trust and Attaining Useful Information 4. Dealing with Complicated and Restrictive Policies 5. Establishing Professional Legitimacy: Fast-Track Meetings, Workers across Agencies, and Dealing with the Police 6. Fitting Stories 7. Referral Management: Establishing Working Agreements with Landlords 8. Managing Housing with Clients 9. Conclusion
Biography
Curtis Smith is faculty in the Sociology Department at Bentley University in Waltham, MA. His research focuses on issues of poverty, social inequality, and social justice with a specific concentration on homelessness and social policy research. His interest in the topic of homelessness emerges from his past work as a case worker for various homeless populations in three different regions of the United States.
Drawing on his in-depth, ethnographic fieldwork and his own professional experiences as an advocate for the down-but-not-out, Curtis Smith illuminates the perspective and street-level grind of social service workers to negotiate the maze of bureaucratic red-tape and polices to house their homeless clients. In doing so, Smith’s Homelessness and Housing Advocacy: The Role of Red-Tape Warriors is a most welcome and compelling addition to the social science research and literature on homelessness, particularly on the dogged and resourceful efforts of those "street-level bureaucrats" advocating on behalf of the homeless. – David A. Snow, University of California, Irvine
In Homelessness and Housing Advocacy, Curtis Smith covers a wide variety of topics centered on social service provision to those who are homeless. Readers learn about the characteristics of housing policy, how specific social services for homeless people are organized, and the diverse characteristics and experiences of people who request housing services. Discussions of such topics offer context for the primary interest in the work of front-line service workers in these agencies where Smith goes inside the messy world of social science provision and demonstrates how workers are creative practical actors. Rich ethnographic detail coupled with Smith’s personal experience combine to artfully demonstrate how front-line social service workers develop practical understandings and skills to deliver services within environments posing multiple challenges. – Donileen R. Loseke, University of South Florida
With precision and care, Curtis Smith documents the everyday tyranny of government bureaucracy in its attempts to regulate both unhoused populations and the social service providers charged with "ending homelessness." But Smith also reminds us that even in overwhelming conditions of austerity, constantly changing funding criteria, and the ever-present threat of police violence, the state's efforts to control are always incomplete. Together, the social workers and clients of Smith's study persistently navigate current service systems to secure health, safety, and survival. Paying particular attention to the creativity of social workers as they interpret, bend, and even break the rules, Homelessness and Housing Advocacy points toward a re-politicization of service provision in service of a better world in which no one is deprived of housing. – Craig Willse, Prescott College
