“Expensive” people: Consumer citizenship and the limits of choice in neoliberal publics

Abstract

In a context of neoliberalism, decisions made for a “public” good are often articulated as what makes the most financial sense, and citizenship is exercised as a matter of consumer choice. Neoliberal theory positions choice as an unmitigated good, and as universally available when markets are deregulated and goods and services are privatized. Examining rhetorics of choice, however, illuminates the often-invisible power relations that shape choice, and makes visible the ways in which choice is conditioned by inequality. This essay attends to the cost–benefit analysis used to promote the spread of Housing First, an approach to addressing chronic homelessness in the United States. It argues that a neoliberal discourse of choice reconfigures possibilities for rhetorical citizenship by constructing “good” and “bad” consumer citizen subjectivities, constraining agency for “expensive” people while concentrating responsibility for public decision-making among “taxpayers.” These discourses thus limit membership to neoliberal publics to people with access to private resources.

While George W. Bush’s presidential legacy is often imagined in terms of his response to the September 2001 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina, or the conflicts the United States pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan, his administration is also widely credited with having caused a significant decline in homelessness (Frum, 2013; Lurie, 2013). Bush appointed a homelessness czar, Philip Mangano, to oversee the federal response to this domestic problem through the US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH). USICH framed its approach in terms of the President’s Management Agenda, helped communities formulate benchmark-filled plans to end homelessness, and mobilized business authors to write and speak in favor of a model called Housing First (which houses chronically homeless people first, then provides support services). This turn toward business rhetoric was intentional. Mangano (personal communication, 19 January 2016) explains, “We were trying to make [this approach to homelessness] as simple and adaptable and good for dissemination as possible … based on business principles and practices … [W]e were replacing a social service vernacular with a business and economic vernacular.” This vernacular has had staying power; business rhetoric remains central to the arguments people make to support Housing First today.

A turn toward business rhetoric is, of course, much broader than in discussions about homelessness. In contemporary public policy deliberations in the United States, decisions made for a “public” good are often articulated as what makes the most financial sense. Increasingly, as neoliberal ideologies predominate, the warrants for arguments in public policymaking draw upon tools like cost–benefit analysis, which hold that it is in the public’s best interest to make the choice that saves them money. In cost-based public policy analyses, then, social problems are assessed primarily as economic problems with economic solutions. Publics addressed by these arguments are called to exercise consumer citizenship—to enact civic practice via their roles as economic beings (homo oeconomicus).

For public sphere scholars, this shift in public policy discourse provides an opportunity to examine how, in a neoliberal public sphere, consumption shapes possibilities for civic engagement. In neoliberal theory, civic practice is manifested via the performance of “choice,” a term that increasingly appears as justification for public policy that privatizes public goods (as in school vouchers) and advocates for deregulation (smaller government reduces infringement upon individual choice). Indeed, one of neoliberalism’s foundational texts is Milton and Rose Friedman’s (1980) Free to Choose, in which consumer choice appears as an unmitigated good, the prerequisite for economic and political freedom. The deployment of choice in neoliberal policy rhetorics, however, belies this promise.

The following examination of the rhetoric used to promote the spread of the Housing First model makes visible the typically invisible power relations of choice, revealing the ways in which it is conditioned by inequality. I assert here that a neoliberal discourse of choice shapes “good” and “bad” consumer citizen subjectivities, limiting membership to neoliberal publics to people with access to private resources. In these discourses, “good consumers” are agents who are able to participate in the market as autonomous actors and make policy decisions. “Bad consumers” are excluded from public decision-making because they consume public resources without making any apparently productive market contribution.

To conduct my analysis, I examined cost–benefit arguments for Housing First generated primarily between 2002 and 2009, the early days of national level advocates’ efforts to spread the model to local communities. In particular, I attended to these arguments as they appeared in newspaper coverage of communities considering adopting Housing First programs, documents created by USICH and the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) to advocate for such programs, and the transcripts of interviews I conducted with people involved in Housing First’s promotion (listed as “personal communication,” approved by the Institutional Review Board at University of Wisconsin—Madison).

I begin this essay by exploring the relationship between consumption, citizenship, choice, and the public sphere. Next, I provide context for notions of consumer empowerment in the promotion of Housing First as an approach to address homelessness. Then, I will explicate the rhetorical constructions of good consumers and bad consumers as the bases for membership in neoliberal publics and attend to these constructions’ implications for agency in a neoliberal public sphere.

Consumer citizens in the public sphere

Rhetoricians have long been concerned with issues related to citizenship—its definition, exercise, and functions. While this sometimes refers to literal, legal citizenship and the discourse surrounding it, more often scholars are interested in the discursive practice of citizenship (Asen, 2004) and in rhetorical citizenship, which Christian Kock and Villadsen (2014) describe as “citizens’ possibilities for gaining access to and influencing civic life through symbolic action; or … how people may be involved with, and evaluate, public rhetoric” (p. 10). In the market-driven culture created by neoliberalism, consumption and citizenship have become deeply intertwined. The primacy of the economic in this culture has reconfigured civic participation and placed limits on rhetorical citizenship.

Consumer citizenship upends much of our existing public sphere theory by shifting the enactment of civic participation from shared deliberation and decision-making to the exercise of individual choice. Consumption is how we choose in a market model: through the products we purchase, the media outlets we view and fund, the schools we select to receive our children’s vouchers, and more. This notion of citizenship is exemplified by President George W. Bush’s 20 September 2001 entreaty to US publics to choose to continue their “participation and confidence in the American economy” as a symbol of their support for “the values of America.” The circulation of neoliberal logics transforms political subjects into “always and only” economic beings whose democratic engagement becomes a matter of spending (Brown, 2015). Neoliberal logics support an “ideology of privatization,” that “favors free markets over government regulation and associates liberty with personal choice of the kind favored by consumers” (Barber, 2007, p. 117), rather than the common interests or shared consequences (Dewey, 1927/1954; Habermas, 1962/1989) scholars have commonly attributed to publics. Because of this, there is general agreement among rhetoricians that neoliberalism is detrimental to democratic practice (Asen, 2017; Biesecker & Trapani, 2014; St. Onge, 2016). Looking to rhetorics of consumer choice allows us to understand how neoliberal publics are constituted, and how they exclude.

Contemporary public policymaking in the United States reflects and reifies an emphasis on consumer citizenship via its use of business management practices and their concomitant discourses in government. Cost–benefit analyses have become commonplace in local and federal government, budgets are regularly attached to performance goals (Nathan, 2001), and government is described by its representatives as a “business” with “customers” rather than constituents (Clinton, 1993; Obama, 2011). Consumer citizenship “involves a restructuring of political possibility” (Dean, 2008, p. 67) in which these market-based discourses help shape publics’ conceptions of what policymaking is, what their roles are in the policymaking process, and by what standards they ought to judge proposed policies. Smart consumer citizens form opinions about policy primarily in terms of their economic impacts, even when other values are present. Market-based rhetorics of choice, like cost–benefit analyses, appear as tools to promote good decision-making. Yet, not everyone is afforded the same opportunities to exercise choice in the public policymaking process.

Even as consumer citizenship can appear to open up new possibilities for public participation in policy conversations, those possibilities are conditioned by power and economic inequality. Many scholars position consumption and traditional citizenship practices as in conflict because of its emphasis on the individual (Barber, 2007; Crenson & Ginsburg, 2002; Munck, 2005; Young, 2005), but consumer citizenship can also be understood as the making of public choices based on one’s own desires (Banet-Weiser, 2007; Clarke, et al., 2007). Néstor García Canclini (2001) argues that consumer citizenship does not have to mean a disregard for the public, but it can lead to a redefinition of public values and goods: “when we select goods and appropriate them, we define what we consider publicly valuable, the ways we integrate and distinguish ourselves in society” (p. 20). Likewise, Ashley Hinck (2016) explains that despite “inconsistent logics of publicity” and “unusual public sphere structures,” (p. 17) fan-based citizenship (a type of consumer citizenship) “opens up many possibilities for new forms of civic engagement and social change” (p. 16). Indeed, consumption has created new venues for the exercise of choice and for democratic participation. However, rhetorics of choice have also created consumer subjectivities that place limits on who can access these opportunities and how publics are defined (who is included/excluded).

This essay demonstrates how neoliberal discourses of choice themselves serve to limit access to the very choice they promise. One’s standing as a consumer citizen (as a “good” or “bad” consumer) is both shaped by these discourses and significantly impacts opportunities for rhetorical citizenship under neoliberalism. Choice is a complicated value. While it can appear as a vehicle to empowerment, it can also serve as a reason to shift responsibility for oppression from institutions to individuals and to “divert attention from the ways individual … choices contribute to oppressive social structures” (Hayden, 2018, p. 4; see also McCarver, 2011; Vavrus, 2007; Woods, 2013). Hence, choice has limited efficacy as an argument for liberation. It is not the universally accessible value that neoliberal discourse implies.

Housing First and “consumer empowerment”

Established by Sam Tsemberis, a clinical psychiatrist, in the early 1990s, Housing First was originally developed to help chronically homeless and/or mentally ill homeless people by providing them housing without prerequisites. The concept is the reverse of traditional shelter models that ask homeless people to make life improvements before qualifying for housing assistance; in this model, homeless people are provided with housing first, then social workers/case managers work with them to help address the issues that may have contributed to their becoming homeless (Tsemberis, 2010). Over the past 25 years, Housing First has become a popular public policy, an approach recommended and implemented by federal, state, and municipal governments seeking to address homelessness around the world. Housing First spreads as a message, a discourse, not just as a program. Over time, as Housing First circulates, the messages advocates use to move it through the policy process change, as do the ways it is recognized by the publics who encounter it.

Consumer choice has always been central to the rhetoric used to promote Housing First. The model’s program structure is a reversal of the traditional “housing readiness model.” In contrast to homeless and mental health service models that dictate particular kinds of behaviors as signs of progress toward, and readiness for, independence, the literature supporting Housing First articulates its core values as facilitating consumer choice and realizing a human right to housing (Tsemberis & Asmussen, 1999; Tsemberis, Gulcur, & Nakae, 2004; Stefancic & Tsemberis, 2007). Consistent with the values of the consumer movement in mental health (a movement that advocated for the increased involvement of people living with mental illness in their own treatment; see Pulice & Miccio, 2006), Housing First “empowers” consumers by giving them more control and reducing service providers’ control over their housing and the services they receive. Programs rooted in a Housing First philosophy upset the balance of power by providing “alternatives to the dominant system of care” (Tsemberis, Moran, Shinn, Asmussen, & Shern, 2003, p. 306). Its emphasis on consumer choice requires a reversal of traditional power structures in service provision. Ana Stefancic and Tsemberis (2007) explain, “Housing First challenges traditional provider-consumer relationships by requiring clinicians and other service providers to relinquish authority in prioritizing consumers’ needs and goals” (p. 274). In this model, people experiencing chronic homelessness are in charge.

By centering choice and allowing people to control their living spaces, bodies, and treatment plans, Housing First empowers formerly homeless people in the spirit of the consumer movement. But consumer is also a market term. As Clarke, Newman, Smith, Vidler, and Westmarland (2007) aver, “the consumer is an economic construct: a key figure in the liberal social imaginary of Western capitalist democracies” (p. 2). The concept of consumer choice, particularly in a neoliberal economics framework, is grounded in the assumption that individuals are and ought to be “rational decision-maker[s]” and “arbiter[s] of products,” whether those products be goods for purchase or services to be obtained (Gabriel & Lang, 2015, p. 2). Ability to choose is the “supreme value” in this market-driven framework, where Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang (2015) explain:

Choice means freedom … Choice is good for the economy [as the] driving force for efficiency, innovation, growth and diversity … A social and political system based on choices is a political system based on citizen freedom [democracy] … [and] consumer capitalism means more choice for everyone. (p. 25)

Housing First’s emphasis on choice resonates with American consumer culture, one in which “the customer is always right,” and choice equals freedom.

While the consumer movement does not particularly prioritize economic empowerment, reintegration into the market is one of the (by)products of the Housing First approach. People experiencing homelessness are often treated as non-citizens because of their inability or (perceived) unwillingness to participate in the economy; their social and political power, as well as their belongingness, is compromised by their economic status (Arnold, 2004; Feldman, 2004). The absence of housing serves as a visual signal of an economic and moral failure to serve as “contributing” members of society (Katz, 1989). Kathleen Arnold (2004) explains that the otherization of homeless people is due in no small part to “the idea that identity in a modern nation state such as the United States is inextricably linked to both nationalistic and economic concerns. One’s labor and participation in the market constitute the primary contribution to society while being housed has become a clear symbol of economic independence and socially important labor” (pp. 87–88). Housing First removes the visual marker of one’s social/economic exclusion when it places homeless people in housing, presumably thereby reducing the otherization that diminishes their citizenship. The transition from homelessness to housing can, in this way, be viewed as an empowering “passage from exclusion to inclusion” (Rowe, Kloos, Chinman, Davidson, & Cross, 2001, p. 14).

In addition, Housing First literally returns people to the market as consumers—and helps ensure that they stay there. A portion of their income each month supports the private housing market as a rent payment when the housing is obtained via a scattered site voucher approach. Further, as Housing First consumers have the ability to make choices about where they live, both in terms of neighborhood and apartment, they arguably have a hand in shaping the market—if only in small ways—as they influence the demand side of the housing supply–demand curve. Housing vouchers permit homeless people, for example, to have standards and preferences for their living spaces that they may not otherwise be in a position to exercise. In these ways, Housing First creates conditions for economic empowerment, for consumer choice.

Over time, however, the arguments that appear to drive public conversations about the model shift away from messaging about the empowerment and choice Housing First gives to homeless people, and toward an explanation of the model’s economic benefits to taxpayers. In the process, members of housed publics are positioned as the decision-makers that matter, while homeless people are relegated to subjects about whom decisions are made. The adoption of this business language by advocates relies upon cost–benefit analysis, a decision calculus and lexicon familiar to publics living within the strictures of neoliberalism. Cost–benefit analyses are neoliberal rhetorics of choice. They convert policy options into monetary values to create quantifiable reasons to choose to adopt or reject policies. In the process, particular kinds of programs and consumers become characterized as valuable, while others become labeled as “too expensive.”

Bad consumers, good consumers

Housing First was highly successful at housing people, and at keeping them housed—research on this approach consistently showed a housing retention rate of 77%–88% (Padgett, Henwood, & Tsemberis, 2016, p. 57). This research captured the attention of national-level advocacy groups like the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) and the US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH), which began building a message from the fragments of local communities’ stories, shaping them into a particular and consistent story about Housing First that they told to whomever would listen: governors, mayors, county executives, news media, planning committees, and more. Philip Mangano (personal communication, 19 January 2016), executive director of USICH during the George W. Bush administration, describes this as a process of “marketing” a “solution” to chronic homelessness. Marketing, of course, is about promoting and selling products/services. It is persuasion motivated by capital. And, indeed, many of the primary tactics used to “sell” Housing First were about money. In my interviews with people involved with the spread of Housing First at every level—federal, state, and local—money was continually cited as an important reason to adopt the model. Linda Kaufman (personal communication, 2 December 2016), who worked for both the Washington, DC, government and DC’s first Housing First program before becoming a national-level advocate, explains that “the power of the purse strings” persuades people to adopt Housing First, even when arguments about its effectiveness failed. Mangano holds that it is a “re-framing of homelessness in economic terms that’s been generating an unprecedented amount of political will all across our country” (Interagency Council, 2008).

Cost-based studies are foundational to the arguments national-level advocates make for the widespread adoption of Housing First. The economic argument for Housing First essentially amounts to this: (1) chronic homelessness is expensive, and (2) housing people is the most cost-efficient method of addressing chronic homelessness. On their websites, in speeches, and in key documents like their toolkits, national-level advocates offer cost comparisons as reasons for communities to create plans to end homelessness, or to simply implement permanent supportive housing.

In 2000, NAEH released “A Plan, Not a Dream,” a framework for how to end homelessness across the country. The report moves directly from a presentation of US homeless demographics to “The Cost of Homelessness,” before it offers Housing First as a core strategy. This section breaks the costs of homelessness down into hospitalization and medical treatment, prisons and jails, emergency shelter, and lost opportunity—which laments the “loss of future productivity”—via cost studies from communities around the country. These serve as one of the primary arguments for the planning approach NAEH advocates. “Because they have no regular place to stay, people who are homeless use a variety of public systems in an inefficient and costly way,” the report says. “Preventing a homeless episode or ensuring a speedy transition into stable permanent housing can result in significant cost savings” (pp. 7–9). For USICH, Mangano (personal communication, 19 January 2016) explains that these cost comparisons were the core of its message to communities working on homelessness: “In the basic business principle of doing cost studies and cost–benefit analysis, we were providing the raison d’etre for communities to invest in Housing First.”

The argument often begins with the same statistic: 10% of homeless people consume 50% of the resources available to address homelessness. These numbers, which emerge from a study of administrative data on homeless shelter usage (Kuhn & Culhane, 1998), appear in rhetorical justifications for Housing First at all levels. They are cited in NAEH’s “A Plan, Not a Dream” and its 2006 “Toolkit for Ending Homelessness,” and in guides USICH designed to help local communities create 10-year plans to end homelessness. Journalists use these numbers to explain how “society gets a much better payoff” when it addresses chronic homelessness with housing, and local government and service providers share this statistic to justify their approach (The New York Times, 2003, p. A30). For example, Kerry Bate, executive director of the Salt Lake County Housing Authority in Utah appeared in a 2004 newspaper article about a set of Housing First apartments. The article says: one “target is the 10 percent of the homeless population that is considered ‘chronically homeless’ and seems to revolve constantly between street and shelter. While making up only 10 percent of the homeless population, this group eats up 50 percent of homeless resources, Bate said, meaning if that group were off the street homeless resources could be refocused” (Snyder, 2004).

This 10 percent/50 percent statistical comparison is used to justify a focus on a small subset of the overall US homeless population. For example, at the 2002 NAEH National Conference, US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Mel Martinez (2002) said:

I share your deep concern for every segment of the homeless population. But I cannot ignore the research, which tells us that 10 percent of individuals who experience chronic homelessness consume more than half of all homeless services. Because they use so many resources, they need to be a priority in our strategy. (emphasis mine)

Mangano echoed this sentiment as a presidential priority at the US Conference of Mayors the next year (C-SPAN, 2003).

As this statistic circulates, chronically homeless people come to be as understood as bad consumers. They are identified by the resources they use and the expenditures they require. This appears as poor consumer citizenship not just because they are consuming a disproportionate amount of the resources allocated to address homelessness; they are also depicted as using up a disproportionate amount of the broader public’s resources. The editorial board of the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2004) put it this way: “people who are homeless and have a chronic mental illness or drug addiction—or both … consume a disproportionate share of public tax dollars when they’re shackled to a gurney in a hospital emergency room or locked up in jail.” NAEH’s (2006) “Toolkit for Ending Homelessness” describes the benefits of permanent supportive housing in terms of burden-alleviation for public resources: “This model relieves taxpayers of the expensive round of emergency services [chronically homeless people] now require” (p. 10). The toolkit also quantifies cost savings for a number of public services. In USICH’s “Good to Better to Great” (n.d.) presentation, inspired by the work of business author Jim Collins, USICH describes the “Budget Implications” of addressing chronic homelessness this way: “Ending chronic homelessness often results in reductions in: emergency room visits, ambulance fees, EMT costs, hospital admissions, arrests, incarcerations, court costs, treatment costs in acute behavioral health programs” (p. 12). This was the only slide in the presentation, used by USICH to share best practices for plans to end chronic homelessness with local communities that offers any justification or “implications” for the plans. That people experiencing chronic homelessness consume public resources because of their inability to access private resources does not typically appear in the arguments made to support Housing First.

Neoliberal discourse tends to presume universal subjects, individual market actors who have equal opportunities in existing economic and political systems. Notions of equality are figured without consideration to particularities, such that differences in economic or political power appear as the result of personal decisions rather than systemic factors (Asen, 2017; Cisneros, 2015; Enck-Wanzer, 2011). Rhetorics of neutrality support the idea that this kind of equality is democratic (Gent, 2017). Accounting for differences in need or access appears to violate principles of equality and fairness, thus choice appears as universally accessible under neoliberalism. In such a system, people are free to make good or bad choices. Homeless people appear as bad consumers because their consumption of resources is not the same as that of housed people (whose need for public resources is generally offset by access to private ones).

In line with neoliberalism’s emphasis on individualism and competition, bad consumers’ levels of consumption are attributed to poor personal decisions and/or bad personal circumstances. Notice how the aforementioned Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial refers to shackles and jail to illustrate disproportionality, leaning on stereotypes of homeless criminality to make the case for a redirection of funds to supportive housing approaches. Later in that piece, the authors point to “a 49 year old Atlanta native and former chef who was hooked on crack and diagnosed with schizophrenia and manic depression. [He] spent 12 years of his life in the twilight zone of drop-in homeless shelters, jail, crashing in empty parking lots at night and getting high,” before finding permanent supportive housing through a Housing First program (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2004). Here we see traditional indicators of poor choices—substance abuse, criminality, and irresponsibility—appear in concert with accusations of disproportional consumption. Similarly, in a St. Paul, Minnesota Legal Ledger article touting the cost-effectiveness of permanent supportive housing, Mangano draws on these characteristics as reasons to support Housing First programs: “The most mentally ill person, the most addicted person, the most disabled person, with the right set of services supporting them in housing are quite capable … of … getting their life more on a path, a trajectory of self sufficiency” (Shaw, 2005). Homelessness is a personal problem, he indicates, but with a more cost-effective approach, homeless people can achieve better personal outcomes and cease their reliance on public services. A self-sufficient citizen is one who has moved away from the public and toward the private.

Expensive people

All of this leads to an assertion that homeless people are very “expensive” people. Mangano regularly says things like, “Contrary to public perception, these are the most expensive people to the public wallet” (USICH, “The 10-Year,” n.d.). In newspaper and magazine articles that discuss chronic homelessness and its solutions, individual people are often named as costly. For example, a 2007 article in the Modesto Bee started with this line:

Mick Matthews and his girlfriend, Marlene, Terry and Linda Cool, Steve Harris and Mad Dog—they’re not just homeless, they’re the chronic homeless, and they’re very, very expensive. So expensive, in fact, they’ve caught the attention of the Bush administration. (Shea, 2007)

A New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell (2006) describes “Million-Dollar Murray,” a “chronic inebriate” in Reno, Nevada who, over 10 years of homelessness, “accumulated hospital bills … substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors’ fees, and other expenses” in excess of 1 million dollars. The article was widely distributed and cited by other news outlets – NPR (2006) interviewed Gladwell about the article shortly after it was printed. USICH distributed Gladwell’s article to every sitting member of Congress and to all of the mayors and county executives with whom it had a relationship (P. Mangano, personal communication, 19 January 2006). Murray became famous for being “expensive,” as Housing First became increasingly recognized as the most effective way to address expensive people like him. In this construction, it is not homelessness that is expensive, nor the way that governments, service providers, and communities manage it, but the people themselves who cost “the public” lots of money.

The “expense” of these people appears as a matter of mere arithmetic. They cost communities lots of money; therefore, they appear to be objectively “expensive,” and the most desirable choice implied by the cost–benefit analysis appears obvious. But perceptions of expense are directly related to perceptions of worth, and assignations of worth are not value-free. A US$4 apple would feel extraordinarily expensive to the average grocery shopper but a US$4 coffee at Starbucks may feel like a very reasonable purchase to the same consumer. The value of the coffee cannot be explained solely by scarcity or any other objective factor. Starbucks has become a ubiquitous presence in most US cities. It is, these days, nearly as American as apple pie. Yet its cultural capital makes it “cool,” making people more willing to spend more money to consume it. Similarly, subjectivities are differently valued according to their perceived worth in a society. It may feel less expensive and more reasonable to spend US$1 million of public funds on the healthcare costs of a politician, for example, than a “chronic inebriate.” These valuations are ideological—the perceived relative worth of a person (or group of people) is based in beliefs about how the world ought to work, and what people are supposed to do.

The practice of anonymizing people can make these cost–benefit analyses appear even more objective by reducing them to numbers. In many cases, homeless people remain unnamed in presentations of these analyses—their “cost” to the “public wallet” stands in for them. This happens particularly often in news coverage of plans to address homelessness. Here are a few examples: in 2003, The Denver Post editorial board wrote, “According to a study by the University of Pennsylvania, the chronic homeless cost cities about $54,000 a year per person in services.” The Christian Science Monitor (2006) offered, “Dayton Ohio … has found that on the street, one group of mentally ill homeless individuals cost taxpayers $203 a day”—which is more than US$74,000 in a year. The Spokesman Review points to a study in King County, Washington, to say, “When they were on the streets, [‘the city’s worst homeless drunks’] cost taxpayers at least $50,000 annually as they made the circuit from ER to sobering center to jail to street” (Sennett, 2006). These descriptions (and studies) quantify individuals in terms of their burden to taxpayers without any back story. They offer generalized categories of people like “the chronic homeless,” “mentally ill homeless,” or “homeless drunks” and attribute a dollar amount to people readers identify with these categories, defining their value (or lack thereof) in terms of cost.

Each of these costs is offered in contrast to the cost of housing the “expensive” people who comprise the chronically homeless—the alternate cost to their current consumption of public resources. In King County, people who used to cost taxpayers US$50,000 can receive housing and services for only US$13,000 a year (Sennett, 2006). With Housing First, the cost of a mentally ill homeless person dropped from US$203 per day to US$85 per day (Christian Science Monitor, 2006). And compared to a cost of US$54,000, Housing First in Denver “will cost about $11,000 a year per client – a fifth of the cost of ignoring the problem” (The Denver Post, 2003). In every one of the at least 70 such cost studies like this, the differences in cost before and after Housing First are striking (P. Mangano, personal communication, 19 January 2016). These cost–benefit studies demonstrate the monetary benefits of Housing First to the state or locality implementing it, and allow their circulation to others who may be considering the model. The comparisons make Housing First appear not only as an objective matter, but as the obvious choice, because they have reduced the complexities of homelessness to arithmetic. As Mangano says, “when you look at the costs associated with the random ricocheting [through services in the system] versus the costs of the housing, I can assure you, you don’t need to be Warren Buffet or even Suze Orman to understand which is the better investment in those two” (Interagency Council, 2008). It’s simple math. The good consumer chooses the cheaper option; indeed, only the good consumer is offered a choice.

Taxpayers

The primary perceived distinction between good consumers and bad ones is that bad consumers supposedly consume without any apparently productive market contribution, whereas good consumers are able to participate in the market as autonomous actors. Cost-based arguments make Housing First and plans to end chronic homelessness relevant to people who may not otherwise be interested in or committed to addressing homelessness by interpellating them into the conversation as “taxpayers.” In media coverage of Housing First, “taxpayers” are the presumed audience. More than that, they are constituted by this rhetoric as the public. Following Michael Warner’s (2005) conception of a public as a group of people who are addressed, we know that the public constituted by these cost–benefit arguments is one which excludes homeless people. In texts produced to persuade communities—or policymakers—to take up the model, the public benefit of Housing First is described in terms of taxpayer savings and quality of life. This rhetoric positions policymakers as responsible primarily to the supposed financial needs of taxpayers, making the desires and wellbeing of people experiencing homelessness, at best, secondary. As Don Mitchell (2003) notes, “Although homeless people are nearly always in public, they are rarely counted as part of the public” (p. 135). In this discourse, homeless people are always offered as foils to “taxpayers,” as expenses to the “taxpayer,” not as consubstantial with them. Although many homeless people work, and pay taxes, the “taxpayer” here is a housed taxpayer who should not be expected to bear the high costs associated with homelessness.

In contrast to the bad citizenship displayed by homeless consumers, “taxpayers” are positioned in these arguments as good consumers. Instead of being defined by their costs, they are people who contribute to the “public purse” via taxes paid on their private expenditures. Although they also draw on public funds (e.g., through mortgage deductions or other kinds of tax credits), their use of these resources is offset by their role as economic generators; “taxpayers’” spending appears to entitle them to public resources. Hence, these good consumers are also producers—they produce public revenue as they consume private goods.

When choice becomes linked to the market, as in neoliberal theory (Friedman & Friedman, 1980; Harvey, 2005), it is constrained by the market itself (Brown, 2015). People who have financial capital to contribute have the agency to both participate in the market and, via its investment or the political capital with which it imbues them, to make decisions about social issues. Good consumers, and their positions in the market, also become the reason for those decisions—even when they are not the most directly affected population. The cost–benefit studies, and the attendant arguments advocates make in favor of Housing First, are aimed at persuading this audience of good consumers to support policymakers in the model’s implementation in their communities. Even Tsemberis, whose ostensible goal is to bring consumer choice to homeless people through Housing First programs, appears to address “taxpayers” as the publics with agency:

“Your tax money is already spent on police, homeless outreach services, and emergency medical care to a much greater degree than when you put a person in housing …” … With a home, “you have a shot at helping this person get his life together … Why is it better to leave [him] on the street, suffering and paying endlessly for him?” (Fisher, 2008)

Responsibility for both the economic and social costs of homelessness (and the ability to choose how to address it) lies with the “taxpayer.”

“Taxpayers” are portrayed in Housing First discourses as victims whose money is subjected to the abuses of disproportionate consumers, and they are constituted by the discourse as political subjects who must protect themselves and others from such abuses. Through the figure of the “taxpayer,” articulations of disproportionate consumption are made to feel personal to members of this public: my money is supporting chronically homeless people’s over-consumption of resources; therefore, I am directly affected by the behaviors of homeless people. In this way, the “taxpayer” trope supports neoliberalism’s shift toward individualism. “Taxpayers” are invited to see themselves, as individuals, as the reason they should support Housing First, rather than people experiencing homelessness. These arguments also tap into neoliberalism’s particular conception of equality. They imply that chronically homeless people do not deserve any more resources than anyone else—not just other homeless people. William O. Saas (2017) explains that “taxpayer money” is commonly used “to evoke or advocate for a kind of ‘moral accounting,’ typically in support of a conservative vision of ‘fairness’ or ‘fair share-ism.’” Within such a vision, homeless people’s failure to consume public resources in the same quantity as housed people can appear as a matter of flawed character, indicating greed, selfishness, or gluttony. These logics cause access to healthcare, housing, and other basic necessities achieved via public funding to appear to “taxpayers” as “luxuries” when they are offered to homeless people (Gent, 2017).

Moreover, pointing to an over-consumption of public resources helps to avoid the appearance of “taxpayer” selfishness. Claims of disproportionality are rooted in a belief that resources ought to be allocated proportionally, or “equally.” Notions of scarcity compound this effect by fueling trade-off thinking (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). When a subset of the public accesses more resources than others, this appears as a violation of equality because neoliberal conceptions of equality assert that markets create a baseline of equality—everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed (Gent, 2017). However, markets are necessarily unequal because they are based on competition. Efforts to create equality by improving access to resources for particular groups of people (generally marginalized people), violates the laissez-faire sensibility that guides neoliberal economics and its attendant conceptions of citizenship (Brown, 2015).

In an environment where people perceive public resources to be limited, the misuse of my taxes ostensibly makes fewer resources available to all non-chronically homeless members of the community. In this way, a lack of proportionality in service consumption seems to treat unfairly members of the public writ large, even though other community members’ comparative usage of these resources indicates less need for them. As Danielle S. Allen (2004) explains, democracy requires some level of individual sacrifice and loss for the common good of the people. “Social or economic loss becomes political,” she says, “when citizens believe themselves disadvantaged by a collective decision” (p. 46). In this case, “taxpayers” are invited to understand themselves as the public, as responsible for correcting collective inaction on the unequal consumption of public resources. The focus of claims advocates use to invite them to support Housing First is not on the problems and inequalities that lead to some homeless people’s greater need for public resources, but on the proportion of public monies spent to address those needs. In the process, homeless people become not the victims of inequality but the perpetrators of it, while “taxpayers” appear unselfishly interested in preserving public resources for all.

This apparently unselfish interest also appears highly rational. Arguments in favor of Housing First appeal to market rationality by providing data that suggests a community cannot afford not to implement it. Inaction amounts to fiscal irresponsibility, even to waste. A University of California—San Diego cost study of 15 chronically homeless people showed that over 18 months, “the costs of those people incurred by the city and county government came to $3 million or $200,000 per person” (Bryson, 2004). Mangano frequently points to this cost study to make the following comparison: “For the same amount of money, they could have rented them oceanside condos and provided services. But after the expenditure, all of these people were in the same situation as they were in the beginning” (Bryson, 2004). The comparison operates under the assumption that giving a homeless person an oceanside condo appears unreasonable—but spending the equivalent amount of money on a homeless person without actually improving their lot appears unreasonable and wasteful. Good consumers make rational financial decisions and seek to reduce waste.

Meanwhile, homeless people are the problem because of their bad consumption, caused by their bad decisions. They appear to have surrendered their inclusion in the public because of their overuse of public funds. They are not addressed in media coverage of Housing First programs—even when they are represented (when their “stories” or numbers stand in for them). They tend to be absent from public meetings where discussion about Housing First programs takes place. When controversy arises regarding the placement of a Housing First program, the voices of housed people are amplified above those of the people who would most directly benefit from the program. In short, people experiencing homelessness are excluded from neoliberal publics because of their lack of purchasing power. They consume, but they consume the wrong things—public things, rather than private things. As such, there are limits to their consumer citizenship; neoliberal decision-making discourses actively exclude them from the publics empowered to make choices about their own circumstances.

Conclusion

The increasing predominance of neoliberal rhetorics of choice and the shift toward consumer citizenship does not mean that people who are experiencing homelessness have no agency. We know that marginalized groups can assert claims to “rhetorical agency and political intelligibility,” (p. 125) and, Michael Middleton (2014) tells us, there are forms of political participation “that allow homeless persons to be seen otherwise and to challenge the responses to homelessness sustained by dominant constructions of their experiences and identities” (p. 125). There is certainly evidence of counterpublic resistance to neoliberal discourse and logics (Asen, 2017; Eltantawy, 2008; Slosarski, 2016). And, importantly, inclusion in a neoliberal public and assimilation into good consumer citizenship need not be the goal of such resistance (Chávez, 2015). What this case study reveals, rather, are the limits of figurations of agency in neoliberal publics. In the neoliberal conflation of consumers and citizens, homeless people become the problem to be solved, and “taxpayers” the reason for solving them. In the process, vulnerable, “expensive” people are continually excluded from public deliberation regarding their own situations. They are not addressed, nor provided opportunities to respond. Instead, they must make opportunities—a tall order for people whose daily survival needs tend to supersede concerns about democratic process.

In an effort to successfully pass policy through institutional systems that are not designed to empower marginalized groups, advocates sometimes adopt the systems’ argumentative frameworks. Housing First advocates need their approach to be legible and persuasive to taxpayers/stakeholders who have never experienced homelessness and, as Mangano (personal communication, 19 January 2016) acknowledges, decades of relying on compassion- and rights-based rhetorics did very little to actually house homeless people. In contrast, the cost–benefit analyses that advocates offer as justification for Housing First programs are neoliberal rhetorics of choice that center individual desires while making them appear as a matter of upholding a public good. These arguments have been persuasive. The model has been widely adopted and has housed hundreds of thousands of people. Over the past 25 years, Housing First has spread across the country and internationally, becoming one of the US federal government’s five core strategies for addressing homelessness. As of 2010, the original Housing First model (the Pathways to Housing model) had “been replicated in more than 100 cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe,” and it has only continued to spread (Tsemberis, 2010, p. 11).

Because this “works,” meaning that Housing First does result in economic betterment for people experiencing homelessness, there is a strong temptation to understand these rhetorics as capable of restoring neoliberal citizenship to people who have lacked agency within its strictures. One may even argue that Housing First does offer consumer choice to homeless people. However, the rhetorics of choice advocates employ to justify the model also serve to limit access to choice. They serve a sort of sifting and winnowing function, separating the bad consumers from the good consumers, and so shape people’s imaginations about who belongs to and has agency within a neoliberal public. Bad consumers, or “expensive” people, are those whose lack of access to private resources causes them to draw on public funding in ways that differ from good consumers. Their need, construed in these discourses as cost, disqualifies them from membership in the neoliberal public and prevents their participation in public conversations regarding their circumstances—and their subjectivities. “Taxpayers,” the people who are addressed in policymaking discourse that aims to redress the problems of bad consumers, become the publics whose interests are used to justify those policies. They are the ones to whom policymaking choice is actually extended.

Advocates’ use of dominant frameworks to try to empower marginalized groups may improve the economic status for some, but it also reinforces purchasing power—the right kind of consumption—as a condition for rhetorical citizenship. When consumer citizenship is the primary way in which publics obtain legitimacy in a neoliberal public sphere, “citizens’ possibilities for gaining access to and influencing civic life through symbolic action” (Kock & Villadsen, 2014, p. 10) are constrained by their material resources. Examining the discourses that create these constraints allows us to understand how these publics are constituted and gain insight into the ways this affects agency in public policymaking processes. It reveals the limitations on participation in public conversations about one’s own circumstances for people who are regarded as bad consumers, illuminates how consumer choice discourses shape those subjectivities, and makes visible some of the ways in which power and inequality are currently conditioning civic engagement. For these reasons, and more, we must continue to scrutinize the rhetorics that fuel neoliberalism and its reconfiguration of the public sphere.