Combating Homelessness in Welfare State Regimes: A New Paradigm Shift in Local Social Policy?

Although the right to housing is established as a human right, the phenomena of rough sleeping and homelessness persist around the world. Social inequality in housing provision, in its extreme form of housing loss, still leads to the exclusion of people from the housing market, as they do not meet society’s expectations of ideal tenants with economic creditworthiness who are fit for the housing market, as well as the notions of normality regarding orderly living conditions (regular income, registered address, etc.). At the same time, however, they are exoticized in social processes of othering as dangerous others and excluded from social life. Previous welfare state policies have failed to stop homelessness regarding the reintegration of homeless people into the housing market, enabling their social participation, and providing structures of affordable housing for all. Even though many welfare state regimes articulate to eliminate and decriminalise homelessness and end exclusion in the housing market, it remains unclear through which concrete measures of local social policy this can be achieved. This session brings together empirical and theoretical, interdisciplinary, or country-comparative contributions displaying different ways of combating homelessness. We look forward to sociological perspectives that focus on the organisational patterns of interpretation of the local actor networks, on contradictions and tensions in the forms of implementation as well as on successful practices of reintegration that are becoming established.