Introduction—An Americanization of Homelessness in Post-Industrial Countries

The economic success of the United States in the late 1990s triggered considerable debate as to whether other advanced industrialized nation states ought to have emulated U.S.-style neoliberal policy in an attempt to make their respective countries more competitive and successful in an age of globalization. Furthermore, the United States had already been at the forefront in implementing neoliberal policy including workfare, privatizing and devolving homeless service and shelter provision to the local scale, and initiating punitive approaches to combat street homelessness during the 1980s and thus well before other countries (Piven and Cloward, 1993; Wolch and Dear, 1993; Stoner, 1995; Daly, 1996; Wright et al., 1998). As new center–third way types of welfare reforms were implemented across Europe, most notably in Blair’s U.K. and Schöder’s Germany, there was widespread concern about a Transatlantic social policy transfer with potentially all the negative ramifications of U.S.-style social policy (Theodore, 1998). However, existing comparative social policy research almost unanimously stated that wholesale Americanization did not occur and that most countries remained rather path-dependent, actually increasing welfare expenditures and improving services (Alcock and Craig, 2001; Esping Andersen, 1999; Goodin et al., 1999; Handler, 2004; Huber and Stevens, 2001). Ten years on, this is an argument worth revisiting. Homelessness—an extreme form of social exclusion and poverty—is a particularly good test case for the ways in which societies respond to a complex social problem involving the provision of multiple services including welfare assistance, housing, work, and health care. To date there is little comparative international research on homelessness and homeless policy (for discussion, see Edgar et al., 2003, Edgar, 2009; Helvie and Kunstman, 1999; Toro, 2007; Collins, 2010). At the same time, there is increasing evidence that homeless people in Europe face punitive policies that restrain their ability to use urban spaces (Doherty et al., 2008). Such evidence begs the already asked question: Are circumstances and policy responses to homelessness in cities of industrialized countries increasinglyAmericanizing in that they show U.S.-style approaches and bear similar social and economic outcomes?