Housing First and 'Ending' Youth Homelessness in the Neoliberal Era: A Case Study of the Infinity Project & Calgary's 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness

The purpose of this study is twofold. First, I conduct a mixed-methods program evaluation of the first known Housing First program for Youth called the Infinity Project in Calgary, Alberta. I analyze Infinity using Gaetzs (2014b) Housing First for Youth Framework and investigate the main outcomes of the program using HMIS and Outcomes Star data. The second purpose of this research is to conduct a grounded analysis of the Infinity Project and the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness it is embedded within through the lens of neoliberal governmentality. The findings show that the Infinity Project strongly adheres to Gaetzs Housing First for Youth Framework, although informally in some respects. The youth also retain their housing at levels comparable to the Canadian literature, and show modest improvements in their physical health and in the use of public services. The program faces several challenges, particularly in securing affordable housing for the youth and the necessary mental health and addictions support. These findings suggest that while largely successful at a programmatic level, there are multiple systemic and structural challenges that are beyond the control of the program. From a governmentality perspective, I argue that the Housing First and 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness models are insufficient to address homelessness because they do not challenge the neoliberal status quo in two ways. First, while there are important sites of resistance, the initiatives remain mired in neoliberal governmentality at the levels of the individual, population and spatially. Second, they do not address the root structural causes of homelessness, including poverty, the lack of affordable housing, colonization / discrimination and the inadequate welfare state and social service sector. I question whether using the language of ending homelessness in the absence of primary prevention can be harmful to the overall cause of addressing homelessness as it continues to allow governments to abdicate on their responsibilities, and reinforces the notion that homelessness is solved through strategies targeted at the individual level. Instead, these efforts must be combined with primary prevention strategies that are targeted at a universal level, and which situate housing and obtaining a particular standard of living as a human right. Only then may we be closer to ending mass homelessness that is characteristic of modern neoliberal society.