250 words DQ

Drifting Along or Dropping into Homelessness: A Class Analysis of Responses to Homelessness

Darrin Hodgetts, Ottilie Stolte, Linda Waimarie Nikora and Shiloh Groot School of Psychology, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand; [email protected]

Abstract: Prominent assumptions about street homelessness and how it should be addressed originate primarily from middle class domiciled worldviews. This article draws on interviews with 58 street homeless people to develop a typology for explaining different forms of homelessness resulting from differences in class of origin. The concepts of social distance and abjection are used to illustrate how class politics manifests in street homelessness and in responses to this issue. Many of our homeless participants referred to two broad groupings of homeless people who display distinct experiences and cultures in their daily lives on the streets. Drifters are people who do not experience homelessness as a sharp disjuncture from their previously housed life. Street homelessness is a continuation of the hardships of their lower class backgrounds. Droppers are people whohave“fallen”onhardtimesandaspiretoreturntomainstreammiddleclasslifeworlds. Differentiating between these two groups provides a space for defamiliarizing dominant understandings of, and current generic responses to, homelessness and foregrounds the need for reorienting services to better meet the needs of drifters.

Keywords: abjection, class, domicile, homelessness, social distance, social services

Introduction Contemporaryurbanlandscapesfeaturethecohabitationofpeoplelivinginpoverty and those situated within more afﬂuent circumstance (WHO 2010). This article draws upon a class analysis to explore processes of social distancing (Hodgetts et al 2011) and abjection (Douglas 2002 [1966]) that are central to the policing of relations between social groups and for preserving social order in the city. We offer an analysis of the importance of class of origin for understanding differences within the homeless population and the reactions of more afﬂuent domiciled citizens to homeless people. In the process we reveal the functioning of social power relations in understanding and responding to homelessness. CentralAucklandisarelevantlocationforthisresearchbecauseitfeaturesregularly in media framings of homelessness. When New Zealanders think of homelessness they often think of the Auckland central business district and images of begging on Queen Street that have populated media reports for almost a century, thus constituting part of our shared cultural heritage (Hodgetts et al 2008). Within 3 km of the Sky Tower reside afﬂuent citizens in close proximity to lower socio-economic statuscitizensexperiencingthehighestpopulationdensityandpovertyindexscores

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in New Zealand (Hodgetts and Stolte 2009). Walking around the area one is likely to see street homeless people (Hodgetts et al 2010) and perhaps assume that they constitute a homogenous group, the dispossessed. We would argue that there is a key difference between members of this group that is overlooked in research. First, there is a broad grouping of droppers, or middle class people who have fallen on hard times and who must learn to adapt to street life. Second, there are the drifters, or people who are born and raised in poverty. Such people have the skills to adapt relatively seamlessly to street life, but they are less likely to comply with domiciled norms and laws. It is our contention that responses to homelessness generally comprise attempts to help the ﬁrst group back into mainstream domiciled life. These same responses also comprise attempts to acculturate the second group into a mainstream middle class domiciled existence that they ﬁnd foreign. New Zealand has a history of such attempts to assimilate marginalized groups, such as the manner in which M ¯ aori were acculturated into domiciled settler lifestyles to comply with colonial societal structures (Beaglehole and Beaglehole 1975 [1946]). Urban geographers have made useful observations regarding the increasing divisions between enfranchised and disenfranchised groups, and lower class populations ensconced in contemporary urban landscapes (Cumbers, Helms and Swanson 2010; Sibley 1995). As a structural feature of society, urban poverty involves groups of people with fewer resources than other people and a history of being rendered socially distant (Hodgetts et al 2008, 2011; Mitchell and Heynen 2009; Wacquant 2008). References to such group distinctions can be found in scholarly texts since the inception of the social sciences. Terms used to invoke such heterogeneous groups (who nonetheless defy easy classiﬁcation) include the “unsavable”, “undeserving”, “unhomed”, “deviant”, “disruptive”, “poor” or “outcasts” (Mayhew 1861; Shubin 2011; Veness 1993). The most impoverished of these groups conduct their lives on the fringes of society outside of dominant systems of employment, law and morality. In New Zealand, M¯aori are overrepresented in this group and the related street homeless population. Social scientists focus both on what is wrong with “the poor” and what is wrong with social structures that lead to entrenched poverty (cf Cresswell 1997a; Marcus 2005;Navarro2009).Inadditiontodocumentingtheinequalitiesfacedbyhomeless people and how these adversely affect them, we need to reinvigorate class analyses to open up spaces for alternative perspectives and solutions to the problems they face (cf Navarro 2009). Geographers have called for increased class analyses that retainongoinginterestsinculture,genderandidentity(Strangleman2008).Afterall, class “...rests not only on the material and labour market position of individuals, households and communities, but also on symbolic value and cultural practice, intertwining a number of interpretations of class position and class subjectivity” (Stenning 2008:10). This is important for geography because class textures the landscapes of everyday life and reproduces social inequities. Class is political, material, emplaced and discursive, being entwined within struggles over power, place and meaning. As Stenning (2008:11) writes, “We can not dismiss class, nor can we shy away from the difﬁculties of studying its complexities.” The proposition that middle and lower class lifeworlds are distinct and caught in inequitable relationships of power can be linked to neo-Weberian understandings

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of class that examine the complex interactions between structure (which is primarily understood as habitus) and outcomes for individuals (Bourdieu 1998). The divergence between middle and lower class habitus reﬂects how individual experiencesandpsychologicalfactorsgeneratevaryingopportunitieswithinsocietal structures that lead people to street homelessness. Our approach is one where class isnotviewedasareiﬁedabstraction(Cumbers,HelmsandSwanson2010),butasan ongoing process embedded in daily life where poorer people can and do transgress the status quo. This article reconnects the issue of homelessness with a class-based account to reveal power struggles embedded within and shaping current responses to homelessness. We adopt the broad term middle class to refer to people who generally can command sufﬁcient resources to the extent that their participation in mainstream society is largely taken for granted. We acknowledge the diversity inherent in such a grouping. Nonetheless, we present the argument that a broadly deﬁned middle class habitus provides the primary normative basis for deﬁning, and ﬁnding solutions to, homelessness (cf Shubin 2011; Veness 1993). This results in responses that are more relevant to the repatriation of people from middle class backgrounds to their former lifeworlds and less effective in addressing the needs of the classes below them.

Class, Social Distancing and Abjection in Shaping Responses to Homelessness While acknowledging that classes are far from homogenous entities, Lawler (2005) links a class analysis to issues surrounding middle class taste and disgust towards working class forms of existence. She notes the importance of understanding classbased assumptions and their implications for other groups. Lawler refers to Orwell’s (1975 [1937]:112) proposition that middle class disgust towards working class people in the West is captured by four words “The lower classes smell”. As Orwell observed, the middle classes deﬁne themselves through their perceived difference and distance from lower class people in terms of appearance, taste and behaviour. Middle class worldviews tend to delegitimate lifestyles associated with lower class lifeworlds, rendering“thepoor” strangeanddistant(cfShubin2011; Veness1993). Hodgetts and colleagues (2011) explored such issues in terms of domiciled peoples’ perceptions of social distance and estrangement from homeless people. Social distancingestablishesrelationshipsbetweendomiciledandhomelessgroupsalonga continuumwithfamiliarity(nearness,intimacy)atoneendandunfamiliarity(farness, difference)attheotherend.TheconceptderivesfromSimmel’s(1921[1908])work on“thestranger”; anideal typeof individual orgroupthatisdistancedsocially from others, being only partially members of society, and who often transgress social conventions. The stranger embodies social distance and revulsion when in close proximity to members of middle class, domiciled society. In geography, considerable attention has been given to the regulation of public spaces and displacement of strangers who are deemed to be “dirty”, “disruptive” and “out of place” (Cresswell 1996, 1997a; Mitchell and Heynen 2009; Sibley 1995). In her seminal work on Purity and Danger, Douglas (2002 [1966]:2) asserts that the removal of tainted bodies is not just about the fear of ﬁlth, contagion

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and disease: “There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder...Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment”. Kristeva (1982:4) reiterates this point when she writes, “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.” Dirt is in many respects both material and discursive. For instance, Douglas writes: “...if uncleanness is matter out of place, we must approach it through order. Uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained” (2002 [1966]:40). Being deemed unclean and out of place is associated with social embarrassment and sanctions including ostracism, contempt, fumigating, displacing, erasing and the re-imposition of the social order (Douglas 2002 [1966]:40). Homeless bodies are considered dirty, regulated, separated off, tidied up and puriﬁed because, as polluters, they have come to be seen as defective and to signify a lack of compliance with social norms and regulations of decency (Hodgetts et al 2008, 2010). To understand the broader processes at play in this estrangement of homeless people we must be “...prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body” (Douglas 2002 [1966]:115). We propose that such abjects are the “unsavable outcasts” referred to by Mayhew (1861) who threaten social order by living alternative and non-compliant existences (Shubin 2011). The association of groups of economically and socially marginalized people, such as “the homeless”, with ﬁlth is not new. Working-class neighbourhoods and slums have historically been seen as dirty and disease ridden, with both physical and social sanitation a major concern for nineteenth-century cities and urban environments (Cresswell 1997b; Mayhew 1861). Research into the social and cultural history of nineteenth century New Zealand explores the role of the subject of dirt in colonial viewsofpublichealth,sanitationandmunicipalgovernanceinsettlersociety(Wood 2006). Similarly, Anderson’s (1995) study of Filipino bodies as described in early twentieth century American public health literature reveals a disturbing obsession with the excretory practices of the colonial population, and how a lack of sanitation was reﬂective of Filipinos as uncultured, childish and animalistic beings. Moreover, in the present, homeless people are also often viewed as lesser beings whose bodies pollute and deﬁle mainstream spaces, and thus they need to be quarantined. The dirt and deviancy of particular urban spaces, such as public toilets, sidewalks and derelictbuildings,canalso“ruboff”orcontaminatehomelesspersonswhofrequent these settings. In these contexts, domiciled citizens often avoid or react negatively to homeless people as un-sanitized souls (Hodgetts et al 2008, 2010). Clearly, not all domiciled reactions to street homelessness are purely punitive (DeVerteuil, May and von Mahs 2009). Exclusionary practices are often combined with efforts to improve the quality of life for homeless people. Resources allocated towards assisting homeless people are usually derived from a mix of sympathetic responses to alleviate hardship and a perceived need to preserve order, aesthetics and social norms in shared urban spaces (Laurenson and Collins 2007). Domiciled institutionsandgroupshaveconﬂictedresponsestotheplightof“thedispossessed” (Sibley 1981), who are pitied and viliﬁed, embraced and pushed away. Responses

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to people in need vary according to the prescribed status of the target person as “deserving” (savable) or “undeserving” (unsavable) poor (Song 2006; Takahashi 1996). We contend that such varied responses often reﬂect the class of origin of the people involved. The lower classes are considered more deviant, disruptive, distant, strange and dirty.

The Present Study This article challenges the assumed universal applicability of domiciled, middle class assumptions regarding the meanings of home and the status of people as a basis for understanding and responding to homelessness. Such questioning arises from our observation that services to assist homeless people can have limited success for the majority of long-term homeless people from lower class backgrounds. Despite the best intentions to provide homeless people with shelter and support, most homelessness persists not because of a scarcity of resources, but as consequence of “a decidedly non-pluralistic political organization of space” (Feldman 2006:22). While keeping the everyday reality of adversity associated with homelessness in mind, our class analysis is structured according to two archetypes based on the lifeworld origins of rough sleepers. At one end of our continuum are drifters who driftalonginoverlappinglowerclassandhomelesslifeworlds.Suchhomelesspeople have ended up on the streets as a progression of an impoverished life course, and lack the habitus for sustained domiciled existence. At the other end, there are droppers who tend to drop into homelessness, usually as a result of traumatic life events, and who often return relatively quickly to domiciled life when rehoused and reintegrated. It is often easier to give such homeless people a “hand-up” given that they are looking to return to domiciled living and have the habitus to function in mainstream society. Classiﬁcation has its risks as it assumes that people can be grouped and ordered into discrete and dualistic categories (Sedgwick 2001). We recognise the limitations ofthislogicandmaintainahealthyscepticismwhilstwesuggestthatdifferentclasses are in effect markers on a continuum. From such a stance, a dualistic approach can function as a “discriminating grid” to communicate complex information (Ingold 1996). A similar approach is evident in the seminal work of Snow and Anderson (1993). These authors observed that the diversity of homeless people and their situations can “at ﬁrst glance” make “the homeless” appear like “a highly heterogeneous aggregation” (1993:38). Nonetheless, Snow and Anderson were drawn to using an interpretative framework that involved two overarching categorizations of homeless people as being either “the recently dislocated” or “the outsiders”. The ﬁrst group cross both homeless and housed lifeworlds. Accordingly, when “the recently dislocated” ﬁrst become homeless they “are understandably frightened by the stark and strange new world they have entered” (1993:46). This experience is in contrast to the second group, “the outsiders” who have been on the streets for longer and, therefore, have become thoroughly integrated into homeless streetcultures. Here, SnowandAnderson identifyhomeless streetcultures as a distinct lifeworld that is strange and different to a domiciled lifeworld, but one that over time threatens to envelop newly homeless people. Such homelessness

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can be a marked disjuncture in an otherwise middle-class lifeworld. Consequently, “the recently dislocated” are individuals who experience a fall from grace into an “in-between” state in that they are dislodged from domiciled life, but they are also out of place on the streets. The distinctions between the two groups living on the streets, as identiﬁed by Snow and Anderson (1993), may be only in part due to the length of time spent sleepingroughand/orthedegreetowhichapersonadaptstoahomelesssubculture as a way of life. Poverty, social distancing and abjection result in some groups of lower class people becoming “outsiders” long before they become rough sleepers. They come from social spaces replete with hardship and social exclusion, and where the middle class notions of home as a private haven seldom apply (cf Mallet 2004; Shubin 2011). In a ﬁgurative sense, drifters can be “homeless” well before they become houseless. Adjusting to street life is arguably a less daunting prospect for people who have grown up in poverty, and have learnt skills for surviving in adverse physicalandsocialspaces.Suchindividualsoftenknowwhattodoinstinctivelywhen moving from insecure and deprived households and onto the streets. Although we focusonprocessesofabjectionandthetexturinginﬂuenceofmiddleclassdomiciled assumptions on homeless people, we do not deny the agency of, and defensive strategies employed by, homeless people. This article presents a strand from our ongoing investigation of material, spatial and relational contexts of homelessness, which features human agency and resilience (Hodgetts et al 2008, 2010). The project engages with homeless people recruited from the Auckland City Mission—located opposite the Sky Tower—where staff facilitate our access to participants and enable us to conduct the study in a manner sensitive to the needs of the participants involved. The 58 research participants have all had at least one in-depth interview, with 36 also completing photo-elicitation exercises and 12 participants engaging in further longitudinal research over a 2-year period. We also conducted 26 interviews with domiciled people who have regular contact with homeless people, such as librarians, security guards, street cleaners and social workers. This ethnographically oriented study reﬂects Simmel’s (1997 [1903]) approach of focusing on everyday events and experiences in order to understand the broader patterning of society. According to this approach, local events reﬂect ongoing societal processes that have signiﬁcance beyond speciﬁc moments.

Drifting from Lower Class Lifeworlds into Street Life Of our 58 participants, 48 were from lower class backgrounds. Many experienced abuse as children, often whilst in state care or foster homes, and they struggle with mental health and/or substance misuse issues (O’Connell 2003; Tois 2005). These individuals have been disconnected from mainstream domiciled (read middle class) society for all of their lives. For such individuals homelessness does not represent much of a disjuncture from their lifeworlds, which have already been shaped by poverty, disadvantage and marginalization. Having less to lose at the outset, these individuals experience homelessness as simply yet more hardship. They drift, rather than experience a sharp drop, into homelessness. Furthermore, such participants

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also differentiated themselves from droppers. For example, Nick, 41 years old, has been either on the streets, in gangs or in prison since the age of 9. He refers to there being different types of streeties, and that one group stays on the streets while the other group drops in and then leaves: You get to know the difference between the streeties...A lot of people come and go from it. You get a lot of what we call like the middle class fallers—bad relationship whatever; sell everything and are drugging up and, a couple of months then they’re gone. Jacqui, 30 years old, ﬁrst became homeless when she was 11. Sexual and physical abuse is common in her extended family and many of her relations have ended up living on the streets (Groot et al 2011). Jacqui has largely accepted her life on the streets and has strong relationships with her “street family”. When asked if she ever felt unsafe being on the streets she replied “I’ve been here most of my life. It’s just normal. Everything’s all good...It’s pretty easy, street life.” Jacqui did not voice aspirations for getting off the streets or changing her lifestyle. Her account presents a familiar pattern in the stories of homeless woman and men for whom the streets provide an “escape” from dysfunctional relationships (Radley, Hodgetts and Cullen 2006). When Jacqui’s aunt, Ari¯a (52 years old), was asked why so many of her extended family were sleeping rough she explained how they had all run away from home at a young age. Ari¯a tells us: We all went through the same thing in our families. You get taught to look after your siblings. You’re old before your time, and you don’t stay at school long...The parents, uncles, aunties alike interfering with you, and then expecting you to shut up and hide things. And then they go to church, and you’re sitting in church and wondering why are they doing that and the very next day they go and do the same...You see all that, aye. It sticks in here and it hurts. We suffer through it, day in and day out. Not all homeless people from lower class backgrounds have ﬂed to the streets because of abuse. Nonetheless, such accounts illustrate that family abuse is complicated by a context of poverty, which is a double burden for children growing up in such settings. In these cases the streets can offer a preferred alternative. Once on the streets, private lives and activities are conducted in public and this contributes to the further estrangement and abjectiﬁcation of such individuals. Clinton, a 45-year-old homeless man, talked about how one night he had food poisoning, which is a common occurrence amongst rough sleepers who often eat food that has been discarded. He presents an extreme situation in which a homeless person must conduct private practices of health care and sanitation in public (Mitchell 2003). Not only is Clinton homeless, he is also literally fouling public space through no choice of his own: It had been in the middle of the night, both ends going—terrible! It was so bad I actually couldn’t walk. So it was like something feral, I had to get under a tree. I went through all my trousers. It just made you think “a toilet, a bathroom!” And, I couldn’t actually get to a toilet without messing myself. So it was a very violent tummy bug until two o’clock in the afternoon. That’s no fun, lying under that tree, cursing myself that a security guard comes along or the police. They’re not going to be interested in the fact that I’m sick.

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I’m going to be in real trouble. I’m just some weirdo guy who’s messed himself lying under a tree. And, there’s something weird here, you can’t say, “Hey I am homeless but normally I can look after myself. Right now I’m really sick and I can’t get to the toilet.” They’re just going to go, “What?!” It’s kind of funny really. Domiciled people are generally disturbed by seeing homeless people carry out “domestic” practices in public spaces (Katz 1997). Such abject bodies comprise a depressing and distasteful reminder of urban decay and do not ﬁt with middle class visions of aesthetics and safety. Most of us would be disturbed by the sight of a homeless person defecating in a park (Herbert and Beckett 2010), albeit for different reasons. While public defecation is offensive, the real issue here is not an instance of transgressive behaviour, rather it is the fact that police (and security guards) are the primary agents charged with reducing the “symptoms of economic, social and physical distress” (Herbert and Beckett 2010:242). Agents of the state moved Clinton on in an effort to cleanse the park. Clinton’s bad case of diarrhoea disrupted his more typical day-to-day efforts to blend in and avoid offending domiciled citizens. In this situation, however, Clinton was rendered socially distant given he was fouling public space and sensibilities. Alongside such unplanned occurrences which invoke distancing responses from housed people, homeless people can also present themselves as socially distant outsiders. Shaun, 44 years old, states: Most Government departments, when you are a homeless person, prefer to treat you as a non-entity, okay? You’re a nobody. One, because you’re not paying tax; Two, you’re not inside the boundaries of what “society is deemed to be” and you’re not compliant. They just don’t get us. They don’t have time for it. This extract reﬂects a homeless person’s realization that the worldviews of housed and homeless are poles apart, and that domiciled institutions struggle to comprehend street life and those people who embrace this lifeworld. Joshua, 45 years old, has also spent most of his life incarcerated in various correctional facilities. “I got taken off my family. I was born in 1961, and I got taken off my family in 1970. Then, from there I went to Borstal and straight onto prison”.Joshuahasbeenthroughalcoholanddrugtreatmentprogrammes24times. While these programmes ensure Joshua becomes sober from time to time, they do nothing to change the realities of his lower class lifeworld. Each time he has been rehoused after exiting a detox facility, Joshua returns to the streets because he is at home there, it is familiar, he knows what to do, has the skills to do it and friends to do it with. He ﬁnds his post-detox housed world “strange” and he is “not at home there”. Although, Joshua’s life on the streets is damaging for his physical health, it is clearthatlifeonthestreetsismoreconduciveforJoshua’semotionalhealththrough his socializing and home-making activities in public spaces: When all the boys get in and have barbeques...We go to Foodtown [supermarket] and go through the bins. It’s a daily thing for a lot of streeties; they hit the bins...You got heaps of people sitting around and it’s brilliant. And then you get everyone having spewing competitions to see who can spew the furtherest! It’s fun aye, it really is. We are presented here with an insight into Joshua’s social world and references to theactivitiesthatdeﬁnethestreetsasahomeforhomelesspeople.Thescenedepicts

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socializing and bonding through food, drink and shared endeavour is painted from a homeless man’s perspective, which deviates from public perception that sees drinkingasanegativeanddisruptiveactivityengagedinby“lonelyoldtramps”.For Joshua, drinking is a positive activity through which group solidarity and reciprocal relationships are cultivated (Hodgetts, Cullen and Radley 2006). Our participants talked at length about typical daily interactions with domiciled people where they felt they were judged and treated as tainted individuals who were messing up the place. They recounted passers-by, often noticing them on the sidewalk with disdain. They regularly experienced being dehumanized as abjects to be avoided. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that homeless people generally lack access to the private spaces of domestic settings. By conducting much of their private lives in the open, they are often considered to be deﬁling public space and transgressing domiciled-based norms (Hodgetts et al 2008). In the process, participants spoke overtly about feeling like non-human scum. For example, a life trajectory of chaotic, marginal and unsafe housing (cf Robinson, 2005) manifests for Daniel (45 years old) in feelings of displacement, failure and self disgust. Daniel’s account reﬂects contextual information that is rarely considered when domiciled people come across a drunk who is messing up the street: I went to the streets originally because I kept on getting raped and abused. Drinking alcohol takes the pain away...I don’t feel like a person sometimes. I don’t know what I feel most of the time, ashamed of being where I am now. It’s a feeling of disgust I suppose...I’ve had my times when I’ve been suicidal. When you’re sitting on a piece of cardboard in a sleeping bag, Bourbon in your hand and the tears are pouring out...The emotional strain and stress of doing what I’m doing everyday is getting to me... Self-loathing and shame are associated with the positioning of self as abject. Daniel’s profound sense of self-disgust reﬂects the threat for homeless people of losing themselves to street life (Hodgetts, Hodgetts and Radley 2006; Radley, Hodgetts and Cullen 2006). Things are made worse for Daniel and others through forced displacement and a lack of privacy: “We might be homeless, but we deserve our privacy.” Going to the bathroom, sleeping and drinking are all “acceptable” behaviours when done in private, but are domestic practices deemed “unacceptable” when performed in public (Mitchell 2003). This inevitably leads Daniel into contact with authorities and the regulation of public spaces (Mitchell and Heynen 2009). Examples of conﬂict between homeless people and domiciled people suggest a common rejection of the ambiguity home(less) people present. Daniel discusses a particular sleeping spot that the council kept moving them on from by repairing the fence to impede access to the space: The council just keeps repairing it...There’s no law that says you can’t sleep out, but where you sleep is another thing! So they can trespass you from that area...The police, they say you can only drink alcohol at home or a pub. Well, the street is our home! If we’re sitting on the street drinking that’s because we’re at home. Homeless people struggle to maintain a sense of place and privacy in public. Trespass laws seek to close off many of the small spaces of the city that make survival for homeless people possible (Mitchell and Heynen 2009). Policy strategies

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can constrict the ability of homeless people to inhabit and make a life in the city, or to maintain personal hygiene and self-respect. Daniel’s efforts to make a home on the streets comprise tactics for survival that break the rules of such public places in thatoneisnotsupposedtomakeahomeordwellhere(deCerteau1984).However, Daniel also works to clean up his space so that he might be able to dwell there in the future and avoid being abjectiﬁed. This constitutes a compromise with middle class assumptions and resistance to him being estranged and abjectiﬁed. Daniel’s efforts reﬂect subservience to the contestation over the mutual constitution of place and class (Stenning 2008). It is perhaps not surprising that some homeless people come to resent and resist middle class culture, and/or “opt out” to instead participate in the shadowy subcultures that vie for space in the city. Many participants take a deﬁant and assertive stance emphasizing the rights of homeless people to dwell and engage in “typical” domestic practices in public. Several participants reported being confrontational with authorities who attempted to regulate their activities, such as street home-making, parties and begging. In relation to begging, Joshua defends his lifestyle and place in prime public spaces: This security guard is a busker’s fucking nightmare. In thirty minutes he came back and I’d moved one store down. He goes, “I gave you a warning,” and I said, “Read that warning mate, on the shop was I outside of.” He read it and he goes, “You cheeky prick!” So he couldn’t do anything ‘cos you’re allowed to busk legally outside any shop, as long as you’ve asked the shop keeper, for thirty minutes and then you must move on. Homeless people frequently come to the attention of the police due to drinking and illegitimate income-procuring activities. It is in instances such as the one Joshua describes that homeless people come face to face with the regulation of society that theyarenotfullyengagedwithorhaveoptedoutof,butwhichinﬂuencestheirlives (Mitchell 2003). We see how class struggles have become manifest in new forms of segregation and policing in urban spaces. The accounts above invoke the ways in which drifters experience and resist attempts to delegitimize and regulate their lifestyles (cf Shubin 2011). Central here is that the views of one class of people have consequences for others. In this case the lifeworlds of homeless people from lower classbackgroundscanbecomeinvalidatedbecausethesetransgresstheassumptions regardinghomeandtheappropriateuseofspaceheldbymanymiddleclasspeople. Veness (1993) questions the use of the term “homeless” as it is often constructed fromadomiciledperspectivetobeassociatedwithalackofadomesticdwellingand to refer to the “unhomed”. To conduct domestic practices in public is to transgress mainstream understandings of home. The movement and contestation in relation to assumptions of home and homelessness (Veness 1993) reﬂects a politics of space associated with class and housed status.

Dropping out of Middle Class Domciled Existence and into Street Life A key strategy employed by people at risk of estrangement and abjection is to conform to dominant moralities and expectations in order to be reintegrated into

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society (cf Douglas 2002 [1966]). We propose that such strategies are more feasible for droppers than drifters. People who drop into homelessness retain vestiges of middle class habitus, which facilitates their attempts to seek help from domiciled people and to secure pathways out of homelessness. As we will argue later in this article,researchersandserviceprovidersaremoreequippedtounderstandmembers of this group as their life experiences are more “recognizable”. These people are more likely to receive public sympathy and support because they possess the social skills and traits that make them seem more like members of the “domiciled public”. Reintegration into domiciled life means receiving the supports they need to return to a familiar domiciled place. Luke,49yearsold,exempliﬁesthedropperscategoryofhomelessperson.Formally a health professional, Luke explains what led to him ending up on the streets: I’ve had depression building up throughout my life and in the mid 90s it came to a head when the two closest people to me died on the same day, an hour apart. My grandmother, who was the only relative I was close to (I’m totally alienated from the rest of my family) and my ex-lover. And it totally enveloped me—the depression...I stopped showering, going out, and eventually I couldn’t stay where I was as I was given notice. But, I couldn’t really move anywhere as the housing was pretty dreadful for someone in my situation. Luke’s world started to unravel following the deaths of two signiﬁcant people. Luke stillengagesinmiddleclassactivities(writingpoetryandreading)whilehidingaway from other street people with a view to returning home to a domestic lifeworld. He presents the public library as a place to be safe, to engage in conversations and to provide an escape from a life predominantly lived alone in marginal spaces on the streets. Continued visits to the library and engaging in academic pursuits provided continuity between his domiciled and homeless existence: Not only because I’ve been a constant reader and studier throughout my life, but also because I know about four or ﬁve people who work in the library. I always have someone to chat with...I gave myself a personal meaning, a social signiﬁcance, a personal value by not allowing my situation to dominate my desire to carry on certain areas of my life unchanged. Like my constant desire to learn, and to research and to communicate. They were intrinsic to my core nature. And a lot of homeless people run the risk of losing that core. Despite homeless people frequently being characterized as being out-of-place, nonpersons(Feldman2006;Mitchell2003;Sibley1995;Whiteford2008),somecanand doexperiencepositiveinteractionswithmembersofthepublic(Hodgettsetal2008, 2010). Luke invokes the library as a site for the maintenance of self through simple activities such as chatting. His comments raise the importance of relationships with library staff in supporting a sense of belonging, respite and refuge among homeless men (Hodgetts et al 2008). This identity work reﬂects how middle class homeless people attempt to hold onto core aspects of their being despite the adversity of street life and the potential to lose oneself to the street. The variations in approaches to street life between drifters and droppers provide additional illustrations of the different lifeworlds and habitus of these groups. In a study of homelessness and social distance (Hodgetts et al 2011), Luke was referred

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to by a housed participant (Sue). In her interview, Sue (41 years old) talked about thesocialclosenessshefelttoLuke,asamiddleclasshomelessmanwhosleptinthe doorway at the bottom of her building and who she described as her neighbour. Luke was juxtaposed in the woman’s account with Joshua (see previous section) and others, for whom she felt increased social distance because they were not good neighbours because they failed to observe mainstream social norms. Joshua and his mates drank and slept in a park across the road and made a “disgusting” mess of the place. Droppers were at pains to differentiate themselves from drifters and to align themselves with mainstream domiciled society. For example, Brett, 44 years old, ﬁrst became homeless in Auckland in 2001 as a result of a relationship breakup, a failed business and addiction to drugs and alcohol. Brett is mostly a loner on the streetsandkeepsadistancefromother“streeties”.Brettworkshardto“ﬁtin”asjust another “normal person” so he is not noticed as being homeless. Brett’s account also invokes the idea that there are different classes of homeless people and how one group of homeless people lacks the skills and education needed to operate in society, which means they will most likely remain homeless. He tells us: I’ve always been pretty much a loner on the streets. That’s why I go to pubs and clubs to be around [housed] people. I like to keep clean and tidy. Just because you live on the streets doesn’t mean you have to be a bum! I don’t beg. I ﬁnd that too demoralizing. I try to avoid them [streeties] as much as possible. I don’t like it cos it’s not the way I ever lived. I didn’t start living on the streets till I was 39. So it was a totally different world for me, but I’m a survivor I can adapt to whatever world I’m living in. In one way I suppose I’m lucky because I wouldn’t class myself as stupid or ignorant. That’s why with the library and things like reading that keeps my brain busy. It’s an escape and with being educated and having manners and things like that means it’s a lot easier to adapt and socialize with normal people I guess. For a lot of other lower class street people they can’t do that. They don’t have the education or the skills to be able to do that. No, they can’t move into other worlds, which is why in some ways they’re stuck here. Droppers share and comply with the domiciled deﬁnition of homelessness while drifters tend not to do so. Drifters work to make a home on the streets whereas droppers simply seek to survive, whilst desiring a shift back to the domiciled life. Such distinctions between lower and middle class participants remain over time in terms of the difference in their desire for a middle class domiciled existence. However, such desires can be eroded the longer middle class people remain on the streets (Snow and Anderson 1993). Along our continuum, Richard stood out as a participant who grew up in a middle class family. While Richard had a middle class start in life, as a teenager his behaviour was considered too disruptive for his school and home environment. As a common feature in youth homelessness among the middle classes (Kidd and Davidson 2007), coming from an afﬂuent background meant his parents could afford visits to a psychiatrist. Richard has not established a “normal” middle class adult existence due to his drug use. Instead, he has circulated between insecure or temporary lodgings, prison, psychiatric institutions, rehabilitation centres and the streets. Despite the 25 years of living an itinerant lifestyle, Richard says:

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I don’t prefer being on the street. I hate it, really hate it! The main reason I think why I am homeless is because I spent quite a few years in treatment centres. And it’s become apparent to me that I’m institutionalized. I function well in a structure like a rehab treatment centre or in prison. When I’m left to my own devices it gets progressively worse. Richard’s disrupting life event is drug addiction, but without the drugs Richard would be functional in a mainstream lifeworld. The way Richard talks about his lack of material wealth at his age is reﬂective of middle class norms and values to which he aspires: My life, the fact that I’m 45-years-old, I don’t own my own house. I don’t even rent a house. I don’t have a car. I don’t have a girlfriend. I have little self respect and or respect from others, several teeth missing. I don’t have a dental plate. And yet, I come from a family of high achievers and I was an intelligent person and so the shame of that. Richard’s account reveals shame about the contrast between his current lifestyle and his middle class background. In reﬂecting on his life, Richard believes that he has let everyone down beginning with his school teachers and his parents. At times like this, Richard reveals that he still feels “out of place” in his current homeless lifeworld—even though he has been there for a long time. Begging or car-window washing are common activities amongst many homeless people. However, Richard views such activities as “beneath him”. In contrast, drifters did not list material aspirations such as a car or indeed the possibility of dental care. Their sense of self was not at all connected to whether or not they had material wealth, and home ownershipwasacompletelyalienaspirationforthem.Eventhoughamajorityofour participants had abysmal dental health, a lack of access to dental care was simply considered a “fact of life”.

Implications for Understanding Homelessness and Responses Classness is emplaced in the everyday actions of homeless people. Our research shows a relatively clear delineation in terms of class of origin as one of the key elementsinunderstandinghomelessness.Middleclassparticipantsspokeoftraumas such as bereavement, injury, mental health and job loss, which are more likely to endear them as deserving homeless people. They have fallen on hard times, seem less strange or distant and can be helped back into the familiar fold. People from the lower classes, however, tend to experience homelessness as an unremarkable part of a cycle of poverty and disadvantage that marks their lives, rather than experiencing a fall. Although the pathway back to domiciled life is frequently difﬁcult even for middle class people, there is no pre-existing path to follow to a mainstream lifeworld for the lower classes. We propose that when services fail for the lower classes it is often due in part to misunderstandings and disconnections betweenmiddleandlowerclasslifeworlds.Thepathwayoutofhomelessnessusually involves adjusting to domiciled situations that comprise an unfamiliar domain. Processes of abjection and estrangement become central to the disciplining of this group.

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Missingfrommuchofthewritingonabjectionaretheexperiencesandreactionsof the abject. How do homeless people respond to the ways in which others construct them as ﬁlthy beings to be avoided and displaced? In response to the threats of abjection there are clear trends of response that differ between our two groups. Driftersattempttoclaimaspaceonthestreetsfromwhichtowranglewithpoliceand manipulate the rules. Droppers try to comply and hide away out of sight while they await rescue. In exploring such accounts we move beyond abstract theorizing and the tendency in psychoanalytic theories on abjection (Kristeva 1982) to universalize human experience. Ours is a shift towards recognizing human agency in the ways people conduct their lives as subjects of abjectiﬁcation. We nonetheless retain the centralrelationalorientationtotheorizingabjection(Berressem2007;Douglas2002 [1966]; Kristeva 1982) in the argument that middle class domiciled groups can markthebodiesof lower classes as disgustingandﬁlthy. Suchdistinctions ofdisgust function to warrant the cleansing of homeless people from the urban landscape to maintain respectability of place. Central here are processes of social difference and distance between classes of people (Hodgetts et al 2011). Homeless bodies are “...somethingrejectedfromwhichonedoesnotpart”(Kristeva1982:4).Theabject lies “quite close” as something intolerable and dreaded that is not constrained by expectedaestheticandmoralstandards.Abjectioninvolvesacomplexandcontested process, whereby the “abject” as stranger remains in society as a sign of difference and repulsion. How homelessness is understood and reﬂected on by domiciled middle class people has implications for the extent and shape of services provided to assist homeless people and the rationales behind such interventions (Song 2006; Takahashi 1996). Understanding the diverse situations of homeless people is helpful (DeVerteuil, May and von Mahs 2009), but it is also important to realise that there are distinct patterns such as that suggested by the framework in this paper. While many service providers acknowledge the diversity of homeless people, the broader political and administrative programmes for addressing homelessness are usually more limited. In general, policy prescriptions tend to focus on simply providing rudimentary housing (often low quality and/or temporary), and operate from the presumptionthathomelesspeoplewill(somehow)adapttoadomiciledmainstream lifeworld with relatively little preparation and few supports (Busch-Geertsma 2005). Nonetheless, at the coal face most helping agencies not only deal with immediate survivalist needs of their clients, but also the issues, hardships and complications that pre-date their clients’ homeless situations. MacLeod (2002) noted that the voluntary and community sector is increasingly holding a primary role in providing care for homeless people and those adversely affected by welfare and housing reforms. Community agencies must do this work with limited funding and under considerable bureaucratic constraints and public scrutiny. It can be more difﬁcult for agencies to provide services to assist drifters because to recognizetheirneeds(oreventheexistenceofsuchacategoryofhomelesspeople), is to raise the prospect of the lower classes and poverty as political issues (cf Navarro 2009).Thescopeforsuchconsiderationstendstobecircumventedincurrentpublic discussions in favour of an individualized view of the rational and self-responsible citizen who can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Given the predominance

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of public discourses about self-responsibility (Ravenhill 2008), agency workers and donors may experience impatience with homeless people who can be perceived to be making too little effort “to help themselves”. Thus, the supports and services available to homeless people can be ﬁckle, and particular homeless individuals can “exhaust” goodwill if they are not seen to improve their situation at some point. The spirit of services attempting to assist “those less fortunate” is not in question. However, we concur with Hoffman and Coffey’s observation of the “audit culture” affecting homeless services with its emphasis on “numbers served” rather than “how they are served” (2008:208). Beyond the inconstant resources derived from charitable donations, community-based services are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they can “solve” homelessness and deliver successful outcomes in order to maintain local or central government funding. The trend towards linking funding to narrow measures of outcomes, such as homeless street counts or the throughputofsuccessfullyrehousedhomelessindividuals,isproblematic(O’Connell 2003; Stolte 2006). This situation risks the dilemma of “inverse care” (cf Hart 1971). Inotherwords,homelesspeoplewiththefewestchallengesintheirlivesareassisted ﬁrst, as they are the most likely to be rehoused and reintegrated with the least amount of time, effort and resources. Meanwhile homeless people who “fail” to respond positively or promptly to services to rehouse and reintegrate them risk being overlooked or treated with disdain. They become relegated to the very end of the social assistance queue. Yet, this group, which usually constitutes the lower classes, are the most in need of support, as their transition to mainstream society is aschallengingasimmigratingtoaforeigncountry.Thereluctancetoassistthemost entrenched homeless people with the most complex life situations (the drifters) may be born out of administrative demands, but it also aligns with more conservative views of homeless people as failing to respond and lacking the initiative to “help themselves”. Consequently, the hegemony of a middle class habitus can lead to a further dis-functionality between various welfare agencies and clients, and the further structural disadvantage of drifters. Brieﬂy,effortstoassisthomelesspeoplearelikelytobelimited,eveninappropriate, if there are few attempts to acknowledge realities beyond mainstream middle class assumptions and worldviews. A failure to acknowledge other lifeworlds means that services for homeless people are tailored to people who are generally comfortable with mainstream and middle class norms and values, even if they have temporarily transgressed these by sleeping rough. Such status quo services are designed to assist fallen mainstream citizens and to assimilate lower class individuals. There is a need to recognise that the situations of homeless people from the lower classes appear quite distinct and require different approaches that take non-mainstream lifeworlds into account. Being critical of the application of middle class assumptions onto homeless people creates a dilemma for us. Although we seek to legitimate the everyday cultures of our participants, we also acknowledge that street life comes at a considerable cost to their wellbeing (Hodgetts, Chamberlain and Radley 2007). Homeless people can survive and may in some cases thrive more viably when on the streets. What we wish to do is open up a space for considering how we might start to develop viable alternatives that respond more closely to the needs of people from lower and underclass lifeworlds who are most at risk of street life.

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Acknowledgements This research was funded by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand (application number 06-UOW-045). We thank the staff and clients of the Auckland City Mission for their time and participation. We appreciate the feedback on this article from David Neilson, Robyn Longhurst, Cathy Coleborne, Neville Robertson and Alan Radley.

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