Waiting for Homeless Services and the Manufacture of Noncompliance

Background: In many cities across the United States, homelessness rates far exceed the number of available housing placements. As demand for housing services outstrips supply, people experiencing homelessness wait increasingly long times to obtain permanent housing. Scholarship concurs that waiting is an inevitable part of the journey from homelessness to permanent housing, or, in many cases, of the churning cycle from street to shelter. Social science literature finds that waiting for state services engenders compliance and subordination, and that this compliance aids the management of the poor. In this study, I explore the various ways that waiting produces noncompliance amongst unhoused service users, and how this too can serve as a tool in the management of unhoused individuals.

Methods: To answer these questions, I draw on ethnographic data collected over an 18-month period at a homeless access centre that provides housing navigation services to people experiencing homelessness. Distinct from studies that focus only on the street homeless, where resistance is understood as non-participation, I use data from an ethnographic study of a homeless service site that caters to those already service-enrolled, and representing a range of residential experiences while homeless. Data included participant observation of and interviews with staff and participants, and analysis of participant data through client files.

Results: Findings show that noncompliance emerges as a response to waiting amongst homeless service users, and can be deliberate or accidental. Within responses to waiting, I outline performative compliance, at the nexus of compliance and resistance, undertaken by those who view waiting as something to proactively hasten, rather than submit to. I find that while scholarship has previously suggested that compliance is a productive tool in the management of unhoused people, that noncompliance equally serves the aims of poverty governance and that consequently, participant noncompliance is at times manufactured by homeless service staff, in part through the conflation of waiting with inaction in certain instances.

Implications: The presentation contributes new concepts such as performative compliance and manufactured noncompliance. Moreover, I draw on these findings to outline abandonment, a theoretical extension of displacement and banishment, previously understood in the spatial management of the unhoused outdoors, into the domain of homeless service provision. Collectively, these findings complicate understandings of resistance and noncompliance amongst those waiting for state services, and explore how logics that justify spatial displacement of the street homeless are extended into the service provision that typically justifies these policies of displacement.