The Contrasting Moral Economies of Homelessness in England and Finland

Daniel Wainwright

Countries understand and respond to the issue of homelessness in different ways. In England, the last decade has seen a significant increase in homelessness, whereas in Finland it has seen a dramatic decline. This essay investigates the difference in homelessness services in England and Finland through the lens of moral economies. Contrasting norms and expectations of what social rights homeless people have a legitimate claim on, and the conditionality of those rights, have led to very different service provision models - the ‘staircase model’ in England, and the ‘Housing First’ model in Finland. Following Koch (2018) I argue that the former is grounded in a moral economy of blame, whereas the latter I call a moral economy of dignity. This essay explores how those differences manifest in both everyday practices of staff and residents and the material reality of accommodation for the homeless. Finally, it considers whether and how COVID-19 shifted the moral economy of homelessness in the UK.

There are myriad reasons why people become homeless. Richard’s story is somewhat unusual - a single moment of crisis that led to his life unravelling. For many, traumatic childhoods, mental health problems, or substance abuse play an important role in their route into homelessness (Ravenhill, 2014). But homelessness has structural explanations too. Greater Manchester, where Richard lives, has a growing population and rapidly rising property prices; at the same time deindustrialisation, low wages and a shrinking welfare state have contributed to an increasingly precarious life for many.

Framing the problem of homelessness in individual or structural terms leads to different policy responses. But it also leads to a different understanding of homeless people’s rights - the “social norms and obligations” that society owes them, (Thompson, 1971: 80) or the “entitlements and expectations” (Scott, quoted in Palomera and Vetta, 2016: 5) they can legitimately claim. Different frames lead to different moral economies of homelessness. Using this lens of moral economy is “precisely the anthropological way to study the political economy” (Palmer and Vetta, 2016: 16) and enables us to see how the political economy is grounded in our practices, buildings, and institutions.

This essay argues that the difference in homelessness services in England and Finland are emblematic of two different moral economies. England, which uses the ‘staircase model’ focuses on supporting homeless people to improve themselves in order to be able to access housing. Framed from an individualist perspective, it locates the problem of homelessness in the homeless themselves, grounded in a moral economy of blame. By contrast Finland, which has mainstreamed the use of the Housing First model, positions housing as a right for all, grounded in a moral economy of dignity.

Section 1 provides the high-level context of the scale of homelessness and policy in both countries. Section 2 explores the conceptual roots of moral economies and situates it within the wider changes to the political economy that we are currently living through. Section 3 examines how the everyday practices of homelessness services demonstrate contrasting moral economies, while section 4 looks at how they are manifested in the material reality of accommodation. Section 5 looks at how COVID has upended our traditional moral economy of homelessness in England. Finally, I conclude by reflecting on the lessons from each section and laying out questions for further research.

Context

England

Homelessness in England has risen significantly since 2010 (Figure 1). Austerity has led to over a third of local authorities cutting their housing spend by 50% (Calver and Wainwright, 2018). Cuts to the welfare state and increasing use of sanctions have also been responsible for many people becoming homeless (Reeve, 2014). The chancellor, George Osborne framed the cuts as differentiating between ‘strivers and shirkers’ (Hasan, 2012) - making it clear that the distinction between benefit recipients and everyone else was not just an economic one but a moral one (Grohmann, 2020).

In terms of policy, the 2017 Homelessness Reduction Act was “one of the biggest changes to the rights of homeless people in England for 15 years” (Garvie, 2018). It placed new duties on local authorities to properly assess the causes of homelessness and agree a personalised plan to prevent it; it also places renewed emphasis on prevention (ibid.). However, the Act did not require councils to offer housing to those who are not a ‘priority need’ and did not provide significant additional resources, meaning its impact has been limited (St Mungo’s, 2019).

Finland

Finland is the only European country successfully reducing homelessness (Centre for Public Impact, 2019). In 2007, the government set a target of eradicating long-term homelessness by 2015. They launched the ‘Name on the Door’ initiative, based on the Housing First model pioneered in America (Y-Foundation, 2017) - since then there has been a 33% reduction in long term homelessness (Figure 2), and rough sleeping (including in shelters) has almost been eliminated (Y-Foundation, 2019). Critical to its success has been the government’s ability to build new housing: Helsinki owns 70% of the land within the city limits and has its own construction company.

Theoretical framework

We are living through a time of deep change to the mainstream, hegemonic political economy. Following the decline of the post-war welfare consensus, neoliberalism and individualism have been the driving force of policy in the UK and USA for the last 40 years. Epitomised by Reagan’s view that “Government is not the solution to our problem, Government is the problem” (Reagan, 1981) the emphasis on individual responsibility “came to replace the productive citizen as the idealised subject of policy making in the 1980s, so the social housing sector came under attack” (Koch, 2018: 4). Despite the financial crash of 2008 requiring huge government intervention, it is only recently that a move away from individualism has become apparent. This is well demonstrated by the fact that 54% of Americans now think that the government should play a bigger role in solving the country’s problems, up from only 34% in 2012 (Gallup, 2020), despite the scars that were left by the Great Financial Crash. Clearly, COVID has accelerated that trend. But social movements such as #metoo and Black Lives Matter have reframed problems such as sexual harassment and racism in structural terms, rather than individual.

To understand what the changing macro political economic paradigm means for the material reality and everyday lives of homeless people, this essay uses the framework of moral economy, popularised by EP Thompson in his 1971 essay The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century and “precisely the anthropological way to study the political economy” (Palomera and Vetta, 2016). Writing about the food riots in England of the 18th century Thompson argued that, while triggered by hunger, they took place within a “popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices... grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action” (Thompson, 1971: 80, emphasis added).

Similarly, James Scott, writing about peasant rebellions in Burma and Vietnam, saw those mobilisations as the result of “a violation... of the social pattern of moral entitlements and expectations” (Scott 1976, quoted in Palomera and Vetta, 2016: 5). Palomera and Vetta argue that the concept has frequently been mischaracterised in one of two ways. Some authors have applied it as a normative concept - labelling particular forms of political economy morally better than others on the grounds of equity and social justice (e.g., Orlando, 2010). Others - such as Fassin (2009) have shifted the analysis to the economy of morals - in the production and distribution of feelings, emotions, and values. But core to both original understandings is the insight that it is the expectations and assumptions about economic relationships - about what different groups have a legitimate claim to and deserve - that constitute a moral economy. All economies are ‘moral economies,’ in that all are characterised by a set of norms, meanings and practices that govern these expectations.

Palomera and Vetta’s project is to bring “capital and class back into the equation” (Palomera and Vetta, 2016: 2) and to apply it to a broader set of fields and actors than Thompson’s original work on the English crowd. They further argue that moral economy is an approach that can both analyse relations between capital, class and state and provide an anthropological analysis of the ways in which they are always embedded. Its strength is its ability to “highlight the ambiguous logics and values that guide and sustain livelihood practices, by looking at the dynamic fields of struggle around the boundaries of what is good and acceptable, their power hierarchies and the political projects they might inform” (Palomera and Vetta, 2016: 2).

 Moral economy analyses have most often been used to understand protests. But although they “may begin with a defense of “customary entitlements,” they “will not end there” (Harvie and Milburn, 2013:8). Whilst acknowledging the long history of housing protests and struggles, this essay takes homelessness services themselves as the focus of study. As I will show below, a different view of what homeless people deserve is one of the distinguishing features of the Housing First approach. Insa Lee Koch’s detailed ethnographic work on a British council estate explores how the move from a politics of welfare to one of lawfare is grounded in a moral economy of blame. She examines the ‘punitive paradox’ of liberal democracies demanding ever more illiberal polities, as seen in the turn to the ‘law and order’ agenda (Koch, 2018, 2019). The rise of ‘Anti-Social Behaviour Orders’ is emblematic of the various forms of state control that working class people are subject to, but that (except in rare cases) middle- and upper-class people are not. However, Koch resists a narrative of liberal democracy in decline, noting that “in the post- war period, frequently upheld as the ‘golden age’ of British social democracy, working class citizens were exposed to forms of social governance that did not apply to their middle- class counterparts” (Koch, 2019: 5). But Koch’s analysis is not just focused on the actions of the state. She also wants to tell the “less familiar story of how citizens make sense of their own dependence upon the authorities in their daily struggles for security and survival” (ibid).

This essay builds upon Koch’s work by turning its attention to the forms of state control that homeless people in particular are subject to, and at how they too respond to those forces. Koch’s research was conducted primarily between 2009 - 2011. The New Labour government, and then the incoming Conservative administration led by David Cameron, were grounded in the moral economy of personal responsibility and blame, but as suggested above, the years from 2016-2021 have seen that paradigm challenged. Efforts to explain homelessness fall largely into two schools of thought: “the “personal pathology” school, which concentrates on immediate reasons why people become homeless… [and] the “structural” school, which concentrates on external broad social conditions affecting a person’s ability to maintain stable housing” (Glasser and Bridgman, 2009: 44). That move towards a structural perspective is particularly important for shaping values around homelessness. If society moves towards understanding problems as structural, and therefore in need of collective solutions, attitudes about what homeless people deserve may also change.

Everyday practices of homelessness services

England: The staircase model

Homelessness services in England are based on the ‘staircase model’ in which users must engage with physical and mental health services, abstain from substance abuse, and often take part in life skills education in order to become ‘housing ready’ and able to live independently.  This locates the problem of homelessness within the individual themselves - ‘medicalising’ a problem of social inequity (Lyon-Callo, 2000). A pervasive culture of surveillance and draconian rules are common at shelters, as documented in a variety of studies. It often begins from the moment a homeless person enters, as “the intake interview is the first opportunity for the staff and guest to diagnose the disorder(s) of the self that caused the person to be homeless.” (Lyon-Callo, 2000: 7)

Shelters impose strict limits on visitors. Often people from outside the shelter cannot visit at all, and in one hostel residents had to “leave the doors and windows of their units open whenever another shelter resident visits, enabling staff to have access to resident "personal space" through uninterrupted supervision” (Williams, 1998: 12). Williams cites Weisman in arguing that rules such as these suggest that homeless people do not need “privacy, self-expression, friendships, and sexual relations, or at least that these needs should not be taken seriously" (Weisman, 1992: 78). Thinking in terms of moral economies, I would shift the emphasis: homeless people are not thought to deserve those freedoms. The staircase model can be self-defeating even on its own terms. Some homeless people avoid engaging with health services in order to avoid the rules and regulations, and because it leads to a deterioration in self-esteem (Donley and Wright, 2012). It can also be harder to take on more work - one female resident says she “can’t cover extra hours at work, stay on late or do overtime without worrying about having to get back in time” (Ravenhill 2014).

The moral economy of blame at the centre of this approach is internalised by both residents of shelters and employees. One male resident of a shelter who is made to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as a condition for extending his stay, despite having only drunk twice in the previous two months, eventually “came to articulate his problem as being within himself. What else could he do, but struggle to change?” (Lyon-Callo, 2000). Equally, Tom, a 20-something staff member at one shelter, believes that “You can't just provide free shelter to these people and not force them to work. It's like giving a fat person who's on a diet lots of food… These [homeless] people have to be taught responsibility” Williams (1998). It’s clear that Tom locates the problems faced by homeless people in their character flaws and blames them for it.

Finland: Housing First

Finland has widely adopted the Housing First model. This approach starts with housing - the immediate priority is “enabling someone to live successfully in their own home as part of a community” (Pleace, 2016: 12). Housing is not seen as a final reward, but as a basic human right for all. Eight principles underpin the approach, although in Finland those have been slightly adapted. Whilst a full exposition of all is outside the scope of this essay, two points are worth highlighting to note the contrast with the standard model. Beyond the rights-based approach, a Housing First approach has to “respect [the] individual and their strengths, rather than focusing negatively on their limitations” (ibid: 30) - immediately inverting the assumption shown in the previous section by Tom that homeless people are inherently incapable.

Critically, “access to housing… is not conditional on behavioural change or accepting treatment,” (ibid: 31) upending the power dynamic that exists in most homelessness service provision, in which staff are always able to threaten residents with eviction for non-compliance. This means that is someone does not stop drinking or will not accept treatment for mental health problems they will still continue to be offered housing. These changes in practice make a big difference to how residents feel about the service. As one male Housing First user said “Here, you close your door and you've got no more problems” (Bretherton and Pleace, 2015: 47). For another resident, the independence stands in contrast to previous accommodation:

In the housing unit with social services, you marched to a routine: you had breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and supper…What having my own apartment means to me is that I don’t have to be on my toes all the time. (Y-Foundation, 2017)

Discussion

The ‘standard model’ of homelessness services, with provides housing conditional on adherence to following strict rules, epitomises the politics of ‘lawfare’ - staff (and often service users) “invoke modes of punitive control and a logic of individual blame to manage problems that lie outside the law” (Koch, 2018). This is grounded in a moral economy of blame, in which homeless people are seen to be responsible for their situation, rather than focusing on structural factors such as the housing market or labour market. Whilst service providers may articulate a structural understanding of the problem, their practices reinforce the ‘medicalisation of social inequity’ paradigm.

Housing First’s conceptualisation of housing as a right, the lack of compulsory engagement with health, addiction, or education services, and the commitment to seeing its users as having agency and strengths - rather than deficiencies - marks it out not just as another homelessness service, but as emblematic of a different moral economy. However, it’s not a return to the post-war moral economy of welfarism, in which “housing was often presented as a right gained through criteria of citizenship and labour” (Alexander, 2018) because there are no conditions at all - an unemployed drug addict is just as deserving of housing as someone who works. The Y-Foundation (2017) argues that this is important because “human dignity belongs to everyone” - which is why I argue that it is grounded in a moral economy of dignity.

Moral economies and materiality

The differing moral economies underpinning the staircase and Housing First models of homelessness services are not just evident in their practices, but also in the material reality of the accommodation. Temporary accommodation - including shelters - often leads to health problems (Shelter, 2014). Many are in poor physical condition.  A systematic review of health conditions in shelters found inadequate ventilation, insufficient air supply, and overcrowding were common; some also had issues regarding drinking water and sanitation (Moffa et al, 2019). One female resident had lived in hostels that “are alive with lice and all sorts of diseases” and argued that “it’s cleaner living in a cardboard box on the street than in hostels” (Ravenhill, 2014: 178). She also noted the intense lack of privacy, as there may be “8 people or so to a room and all you have is a curtain between your beds” (ibid).

The clip below shows one shelter in Manchester. Whilst it does not appear to suffer from some of the physical deterioration mentioned above, it clearly demonstrates the pervasiveness of surveillance, lack of privacy and an implied lack of security (given that shelter staff are required to be on 24-hour watch). The fact that women and men are in the same room shows a gendered impact of shelters: that they are often unable to meet the differing needs of their users.

The transformation of Alppikatu 25

Alppikatu 25 was one of the first shelters in Finland to be transformed into Housing First style accommodation. Figure 5, below, summarises those changes; Figure 6 shows the layout of the new rooms. The amount of space available to each person massively increased, and they now have private bathrooms and kitchens, as well as communal spaces. Residents can decorate and personalise their rooms, creating a physical environment that they feel comfortable with. There is no longer a curfew - residents can come and go as they please. Most importantly, there is a front door: residents are free from rules and observation within the privacy of their own home. There are, however, still elements of control: staff restrict and supervise children’s visits, for example. Intoxicated residents are not evicted but directed to treatment - maintaining some of the power imbalance of shelter life, albeit in a less coercive manner.

Bourdieu argued that the “material conditions of existence” produce habitus: “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu, 1977: 72). The physical construction of shelters is crucial to the creation of a certain habitus of homelessness: one in which residents are expected to endure deteriorating health, reduced personal hygiene, and constant surveillance. Like the inhabitants of Bentham’s Panopticon, they are seen but never see, an object of information but [often] not a subject in conversation (Foucault, 1977). Many homeless people resist this domination by opting out of living in shelters altogether.

Maintaining this habitus, and with it the idea in the public’s mind of “the homeless person not as somebody who has a problem, but somebody who is a problem” (Williams, 1996; referenced in Grohmann, 2020: 137) enables the neoliberal framing of housing as an asset rather than a right. The Housing First model upends this by rejecting the surveillance culture of shelters. In Alppikatu, the change “was not just a physical renovation. It was also a mental one. Especially for the staff, who had to begin putting the Housing First principle into practice after the transformation” (Y-Foundation, 2018: 32).  The change in physical space brought with it new expectations about what quality of life homeless people had a right to and could expect: it required a new moral economy.

The disruption of the moral economy of blame by COVID-19

On March 23rd 2020, the UK Government implemented a national lockdown in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19, ordering people to stay at home (Institute for Government, 2021) and follow social distancing rules. In recognition of the fact that homeless people would struggle to follow these rules, given the lack of secure housing and crowded conditions in hostels, the government launched ‘Everybody In,’ which requisitioned empty hotel rooms for emergency accommodation. The strategy was to “protect their health and stop wider transmission” (Hall, 2020: 1); approximately 15,000 people were placed in hotels and the measures were likely to have prevented over 20,000 infections (Neale, 2020; Lewer et al, 2020).

The scheme has been praised for the speed with which it housed so many rough sleepers (MEAM, 2020). In a series of interviews with people who had been housed in one hotel, Neale (2020) finds that their views of the accommodation were overwhelmingly positive, and the hotel staff were singled out for praise. The accommodation was seen as offering safety, privacy, security, quiet and warmth. Comparing it to living in shelters, they appreciated the fact that they could go to bed and get up when they wanted, use the room at all times of day, maintain some privacy, and separate themselves from people with substance abuse problems. It’s clear that many of the features appreciated about the Everybody In scheme mirror the Housing First approach. As Vilencia et al (2020) write, “housing as a life-nurturing, safe place is at the center of political discourse...The right to suitable and secure shelter has suddenly shifted from the “radical” margins to the object of unprecedented public policy interventions worldwide.”

It’s also notable that the justification for action - protecting the health of homeless people - is confined to COVID-19. No such additional investment has been made in supporting their health in other ways, despite the fact that the average age of death was only 44 years old in 2019 (ONS, 2020). It seems likely that the impossibility of incorporating the risk of COVID-19 within the moral economy of blame enabled action. In other words - homeless people deserved to be protected from COVID-19, unlike the other health hazards they face, because it was clearly not their fault.

COVID-19 may have caused a brief rupture in the dominant moral economy of blame, but the world that will emerge after the crisis passes is still unclear. After the initial phase of the crisis, the government announced new rules that would make rough sleeping grounds for refusing someone’s right to remain in the UK (CSJ, 2021) - further marginalising homeless immigrants. Vilencia et al go further (2020), arguing that measures taken to prevent homelessness, such as mortgage holidays, although dressed up as programmes aiming to reduce hardship, were in fact designed to protect the overall system of housing as an asset. Notably such measures functioned through allowing renters to accumulate more debt, rather than providing financial relief. Thus, they primarily protected global capital by preventing mass defaulting amongst tenants.

Conclusion

The staircase and Housing First models manifest alternative moral economies of homelessness. The first, rooted in a moral economy of blame, sees homelessness as caused by deficiencies of homeless people, and makes support conditional on engaging with services. The second, rooted in a moral economy of dignity, sees housing as a fundamental right that can’t be withdrawn. It emphasises the agency of homeless people to choose whether and how to engage with support.

This essay looked at how these differences are manifested in terms of everyday practices. In shelters, strict rules, pervasive surveillance, and the threat of eviction suggest that homeless people do not deserve basic freedoms such as privacy, self-expression, friendships, or sexual relationships. Housing First, by contrast, seeks to build on their users’ existing skills, helps them gain a sense of purpose, and prioritises harm reduction over abstinence. These differences were found not just in practices, but also the material reality of accommodation. Shelters are often in poor physical condition and pose a health risk to their residents and are constructed in a way to enable surveillance. Combined, they thus construct a particular homeless habitus: unhealthy, unclean, and dangerous. Examining the transformation of a shelter in Finland to a Housing First block showed that giving homeless people additional space and an improved standard of living required a mindset shift in the staff: they had to reappraise the quality of life that homeless people deserve as they shift to a new moral economy of homelessness.

COVID-19 caused a rupture in the moral economy of blame, providing space for the UK government to support homeless people during the first wave of the pandemic. However, as the country has slowly returned to something like normal, that support has been cut away - showing how fragile the perspective it was grounded on was. Structuralist understandings of social problems have been gaining traction in recent years - from sexual harassment to racial injustice - and support for government action has been increasing. Further research could examine whether and how these macro trends are impacting on the ground service provision in England, by looking at the extent to which the ‘staircase model’ is being replaced by a Housing First approach. Arundathi Roy wrote that COVID is a “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next” (Roy, 2020) - Finland’s success shows what might be possible if we are able to step through.

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