Between Homelessness and Housing: On the Frontlines of the Housing Process

Abstract

This dissertation examines how housing happens for people surviving street homelessness in Seattle. It focuses on the JustCARE coalition – a pandemic-era intervention that offered low- barrier lodging and intensive case management in lieu of government inaction and police-led encampment sweeps. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and local documents and reporting, the dissertation traces how housing is orchestrated across intersecting layers of society. The dissertation conceptualizes housing as a multilevel process shaped by macro, mezzo, and micro forces. The findings show that the transition from homelessness to housing is produced through political and economic decisions, administrative policies, organizational structures, and human interactions and relationships. The dissertation argues that reducing homelessness to either a structural or individual issue – or a housing, drug, mental health, or governance problem – obscures the interdependence of these factors. Ultimately, the study offers a layered account of why housing is so hard to obtain for the most marginalized, revealing how human agents and systemic constraints collide in the governance of unsheltered homelessness.