Supported Housing in Britain and Sweden

Land Use Policy, 2016

Shelter is a key component of an individual's well-being and as a consequence is an area of policy development that cuts across national policies including welfare, health and social. Supported housing is a subset of the wider category of social housing, offering support services intended to help people with a range of challenges live as independently as possible. This paper is based on case study research in an English county that has a diverse range of rural and urban contexts. The analysis draws on evidence gathered mainly from interviews with decision-makers representing the largest supported housing providers in the region across a range of specialisms and needs provision. The research demonstrates that supported housing professionals have a range of concerns for the future of supported housing provision. Respondents reported that reforms to welfare payments and funding of housing support is creating great concern for the organisations and the fracturing of services meant it was increasingly difficult to offer comprehensive coverage in the county. However, the housing professionals also discussed a range of innovative and entrepreneurial responses to these uncertainties. This paper concludes that on the one hand there is a real and pressing threat of increased residualisation within the sector and within services for these most vulnerable groups reduced in both their scope and coverage. While on the other hand, those organisations able to operate more flexibly, and who were communicating effectively with local authorities, felt they had the best chance to respond to uncertainty in the policy landscape.

Social Inclusion, 2023

Sweden has seen a rise in homelessness alongside its strained housing market. References are increasingly being made to structural problems with housing provision, rather than individual issues. Housing has been organized through the local social services, which are responsible for supporting homeless people. With a foundation in housing studies, this article analyzes the Swedish social services’ challenges and actions in a time in which affordable housing is in shortage, and housing inequality a reality, through the lens of social services. The focus is on the intersection between the regular housing market and housing provision (primary welfare system), the social services needs‐tested support (secondary welfare system), and the non‐profit and for‐profit organizations (tertiary welfare system), with emphasis on the first two. The article is based on interviews with people working for the City of Malmö and illustrates how the housing shortage problem is moved around within the welfare system whilst also showing that social services’ support for homeless individuals appears insufficient. Social services act as a “first line” gatekeeper for those who have been excluded from the regular housing market. Moreover, recently implemented restrictions aim to make sure that the social services do not act as a “housing agency,” resulting in further exclusion from the housing market. The article highlights how the policies of the two welfare systems interact with and counteract each other and finally illustrates how homeless individuals fall between them. It highlights the need to link housing and homelessness in both research and practice to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of housing markets and how homelessness is sustained.

2015

Social Inclusion

The deinstitutionalization of psychiatric care has not only altered the living conditions for people with severe mental illness but has also greatly affected social services staff. In the Mental Health Act launched by the Swedish government in 1995, a new kind of service called ‘housing support’ and a new occupational group, ‘housing support workers,’ was introduced. However, housing support does not currently operate under any specific guidelines regarding the content of the service. This study explores housing support at local level in various municipalities of one Swedish county. The data is based on discussion with three focus groups: care managers, managers for home and community‐based support, and housing supporter workers. The perspective of institutional logics as a specific set of frames that creates a standard for what should or could be done, or alternately what cannot be questioned, is applied to analyze the constructed meaning of housing support. The meaning of housing ...

European Journal of Social Work, 2008

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cesw20 Normality or care Á an inventory of Swedish municipalities' responses to unstable accommodation for vulnerable groups Normalitet eller omsorg Á en inventering av svenska kommuners respons på osäker boendesituation för sårbara grupper This article presents an inventory of policies and housing support interventions to the homeless and those at risk of becoming homeless in a representative sample of Swedish municipalities. Two types of intervention are included: various types of accommodation for those who are already homeless and daily life support for those at risk, either provided or financed by the social services in the municipality. Data were collected in 2004Á2005 through a questionnaire e-mailed to local authority officials, in a stratified sample of about half of the Swedish municipalities (n 0147). The results show that two types of housing intervention dominate the field: daily life support and sublet contracts, both of which have a relatively high normality factor, with a setting in normal housing. Daily life support includes care and is usually implemented before the tenant is evicted. The level of care related to various interventions fluctuates more between the municipalities than normality does. The more densely populated municipalities were more engaged in developing housing policies and administrative bodies to handle these. However, the implementation of housing policies does not seem related to improvements in the qualities of the interventions. On the contrary, the local authorities that have housing policies and administrative tools adapted to these policies provided a lower degree of both normality and care in the interventions. The results suggest that aspects of normality and care in the same type of housing interventions vary depending on the type of municipality, while the existence of policies has no influence on care and a negative effect on the degree of normality provided through the interventions.

2013

Psychiatric Services, 2012

The articles in this special section rejoin a conversation about the terms and conditions of social participation that was suspended some time ago. While welcoming the move, this commentary raises some questions about the vehicle. The formidable achievements of supported housing notwithstanding, it still functions as an abeyance mechanism ensuring its occupants a kind of sheltered livelihood. Arguably, then, the larger social questions gathered under the encompassing terms of social inclusion and citizenship will not be fully addressed, and may be occluded, either by declaring supported housing a forward operating base of recovery or by rewriting its original remit as an undeclared experiment in reintegration. To extend its promise will mean first confronting the purposes served by supported housing, by design or default, in its present configuration. One's first response to this special section is relief: at long last, the field appears to be rejoining a conversation suspended in this country some 30 years ago. In the late 1970s, the limits of the Community Support Program (CSP), which had championed social inclusion, became all too apparent. One touchstone was Making It Crazy (1), which documented in unflinching, unforgiving detail just how thoroughly a folk psychiatric divide ("crazies" versus "normals") governed the lives of ex-patients. It wasn't just stigma or threadbare "natural supports" that were the problem. Disability benefits turned a clinical condition ("chronicity") into a social status, contriving a livelihood at the cost of second-class citizenship and social exclusion. But the reappraisal conversation soon faltered, defeated first by politics and then by homelessness, which rippled through the United States on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. A stranger to asylum, here was King Lear's "unaccommodated man" abandoned to the urban heath. Rebuilding community support structures was suddenly beside the point. Survival trumped social inclusion, making shelter the order of the day. Against that backdrop, the achievements of supported housing as a response to homelessness are formidable indeed, and the reflections that follow are not meant to gainsay them. This commentary is part of a special section on social integration of persons with mental illness, for which Robert A. Rosenheck, M.D., served as guest editor. Disclosures The author reports no competing interests.

2015

Tese de doutorado, 2024

A tese aborda o modo como passados coloniais “pressionam” o presente ao atravessarem a vida das populações que habitam a Amazônia brasileira sob a forma de uma presença colonial durável. O trabalho é resultado de uma investigação histórico-etnográfica sobre e ao longo (de) grandes estradas construídas e simbolicamente produzidas como soluções para o problema da integração nacional. É fruto de pesquisa em arquivo e de trabalho de campo realizado durante o governo Bolsonaro em(tre) cidades localizadas às margens da Transamazônica e da Cuiabá-Santarém, em região situada entre os Estados do Pará e Mato Grosso. Os diferentes registros que compõem a narrativa apresentada integram uma etnografia histórica sobre a conformação do reservatório de racionalidades coloniais-raciais-estatais mobilizado ao longo do tempo para justificar a necessidade de intervenções civilizatórias na Amazônia. A partir de cenas (re)montadas para ressoar a durabilidade de sedimentos coloniais-raciais que cortam o tempo, demonstro como as estradas da integração nacional atuam na capilarização de gramáticas raciais, de gênero e sexualidade marcantes nas narrativas de fundação do Brasil, destacando como a retórica da conquista da fronteira incorporada nos projetos de abertura de novas estradas na Amazônia tem atuado na conformação dessas mesmas gramáticas. Ao longo do trabalho, volto-me ao modo como estas racionalidades se tornam mecanismos de sustentação da durabilidade colonial-racial ao adentrarem o cotidiano e o senso comum, constituindo passagens para o fortalecimento da extrema-direita na região. Na tese, argumento que as estradas da integração nacional atuam como caminhos para (re)feitura da lógica da conquista e como veias que possibilitam a capilarização e sedimentação de gramáticas raciais de longo-prazo, abordando as particularidades das dinâmicas duráveis do colonialismo, da ferida colonial da raça e do racismo anti-indígena na Amazônia brasileira.