In light of how we have seen the way in which sheltering services for the homeless are oftentimes unresponsive to or ignorant of the structural violence causing homelessness and instead focus on ameliorating pathologies within individuals (i.e. in The Value of Homelessness and Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance), I am curious about whether or not a shelter can have political agency in the fight to “end homelessness.” Can a shelter simultaneously save drowning people who were thrown in “the river” and beat up the person or phenomenon that threw such individuals in the river in the first place? Or, is addressing structural violence antithetical to the mere existence of shelters, meaning a shelter addressing structural violence can no longer be what is commonly known as a shelter because shelters are inherently geared toward ameliorating individuals?
I guess that this is essentially a question of whether or not there is a place for social work in the fight to “end homelessness.” One could argue that efforts to “empower” poor people are really fallacies that end up perpetuating a cycle of individual blame and failure and that the only place for psychology in battles against homelessness is in the process of medicalization, which, as we see in the chapter about Ariel in Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance, does nothing for homeless people.
What do you all think about this? I briefly researched “homeless shelters and political activism” on the web and came across an organization called the National Coalition for the Homeless, which doesn’t seem like a homeless shelter at all. Check out their website at: http://nationalhomeless.org