Mechanism of Homelessness 4———Agency and Structure(Politics & Individual)

Nowadays, homelessness was caused by an interrelation of individual factors and trigger points, occurring within a structural context where people are lacked resources to negate it, as recognised in the ‘new orthodoxy’ to understand homelessness issue.

The individual factors that cause homelessness may occur to anyone. The resources people have, will underpin the ability they have to manage the life risks, without going over the edge. And the resources are distributed through the structures of society. Anyone may go over the edge, most people negotiate with edges at points in their life, but the risk of going over increases if they lack resources to buffer the risks this edgework brings.

So how certain events may have been triggered within the structure reality the people studied operated in and led to their homelessness?

Agency and structure

Agency can be understood as the sense of individuality. This is their internal sense of unique existence recognised by themselves and others. Agency does not refer to actual actions or outcomes, but to the internal processes, independent of but embedded in structures, that individuals subjectively experience.

For example, if someone with high levels of social, economic, and human capital, leaves a partner suddenly, he/she may immediately be able to move into housing of their own. They may move to live with friends or family who also have high levels of resources. In doing so they may also access a degree of emotional support that assists them manage depression that may accompany the stress of their relationship breakdown. Due to their own access to resources of human and financial capital through employment and income, they may have no concerns about obtaining their own housing again in the future. They will be able to continue their career, the positive social status, and security this provides in their life, due to the high levels of social, economic and human capital they have.

This capital acts as a buffer to the individual problems anyone may experience in their lives. For people who lacked these resources may have to rely on the state or agency at some point to access accommodation and social support. They usually had their own housing prior to becoming homeless, and it was usually the trauma, edgework, and need to escape the situation they were in that led to them becoming homeless. This can occur due to the very need to assert the individuality, to escape from a structured reality that the house they live in. For example, issues like family breakdown, depression, real pressure from the working environment, that can make someone to “escape”.

And Housing…..

According to Fizpatrick & Stephens(2005), the material reality that someone is in is also particularly embodied in the condition and location of the housing they can access, which in turn does crucially return to housing policy. Economic, housing and interpersonal structures all intersect to influence the material reality an individual experiences, which will in turn affect their actions, resilience and circumstances over their life course.

For example as Fitzpatrick & Stephens (2005) argue, social housing allocation based on individual need rather than desert led to the residualisation and decline of certain areas. People who are not in the greatest need ( e.g who have family they can stay with) can wait longer to obtain social housing. Those who cannot wait as they have no where else to live will be more likely to take the tenancy offered. “This may well be in an area with a high density of less popular social housing. Therefore there will also be a high concentration of the more ‘needy’ in society in that one location, with vulnerabilities, and low levels of social, human and economic capital being generated by the community there, and less opportunities for them to move on in the future.” It may be rational for people to live alone rather than with a partner, as they are provided with more benefits in this way. Also, Dench, Gavron & Young (2006) argue that this policy of allocation due to need, led to the dispersal of traditional working class communities, who had less ‘need’ than new migrant groups, in the East End of London, which in turn led to community resentment between these groups and fragmentation. Despite the intention being (of the middle class liberals that introduced this policy) that this was that it was a more just distribution of scare resources to do so due to need rather than ‘desert’ or local connection.

Therefore a lack of resources cannot just be explained by economic or housing structures alone. The cultural change and how it is to people experience them, also play a part. Structural conditions generate individualised problems, in a feedback loop involving complex casual mechanisms, that are experienced on people and structure.

Definition:

Residualisation:  “the process whereby public housing [and other social housing] moves towards a position in which it provides only a ‘safety net’ for those who for reasons of poverty, age or infirmity cannot obtain suitable accommodation in private sector.”(Pearce & Vine, 2012)

Residualisation typically includes changing characteristics of social housing system; with rising levels of unemplyment or ecomonic inactivity and declining incomes in comparison with the population as a whole.

Reference:

Fitzpatrick, S. & Jones, A. (2005) ‘Pursuing Social Justice or Social Cohesion?: Coercian in Street Homelessness Policies in England’, Journal of Social Policy

Dench, G., Gavron, K. & Young, M. (2006) The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict (London: Profifile Books).

Pearce, J., & Vine, J. (2014). Quantifying residualisation: The changing nature of social housing in the UK. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 29(4), 657-675. Retrieved August 6, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43907299

Fooks, G. & Pantazis, C. (1999) ‘The Criminalisation of Homelessness, Begging and Street Living’, Kennett, P. & Marsh, A. (eds) Homelessness – Exploring the New Terrain (Bristol: The Policy Press)

Forrest, R. (1999) ‘The New Landscape of the Precarious’, Kennett, P. & Marsh, A. (eds) Homelessness – Exploring the New Terrain (Bristol: The Policy Press) 17–36.