Mary Brosnahan’s “They Just Need to Get a Job” examines how homelessness policies have developed in the US and UK across the decades. Drawing on the author’s experience working in the field, the book gives an overview of how housing has moved from being seen as a social need to a commodity. Glyn Robbins writes that the book vividly illustrates the misplaced and failed homelessness policies put in place on both sides of the Atlantic, and provides viable alternatives to the way housing is currently provided.
Brosnahan, Mary. “They Just Need to Get a job”: 15 Myths on Homelessness. Beacon Press, 2024
Rarely has a book, or its title, been timelier. They Just Need to Get a Job is about homelessness in the US. But one of its many strengths is in illustrating the links between how attitudes and policy towards the poor and unhoused have developed on both sides of the Atlantic.
These common roots are taking another twist with the UK government’s current assault on the benefit system, particularly targeting those it deems fit, but unwilling, to “get a job”. Mary Brosnahan explains in detailed, but very accessible, style, how such attacks on the poor and vulnerable stem from a shared, centuries-long, trans-Atlantic ideology.
The book provides truths and wisdom on every page, accentuated by the fact that Brosnahan has decades of experience working in the field. She led New York City’s Coalition for the Homeless from 1989 to 2019. This brought her into contact with numerous politicians, validating her argument that housing misery happens, not by accident, but by design.
As Brosnahan rightly says, the search for housing has become akin to the film, “The Hunger Games” and we have a generation of people who don’t know “a time before homelessness seemed inevitable and unsolvable”. But alongside detailed policy analysis, the book humanises “our homeless neighbours”, rejecting the divisive “othering of the visible poor” deployed by both US and UK governments.
Using a wide range of theoretical sources, the book describes how tectonic shifts in the global capitalist economy have engendered the transition of housing from being widely seen as a social need and responsibility, to an individual, speculative, commodity. But it is the chronic failure of the private housing market, Brosnahan argues, that not only creates homelessness, but leads to a sense of fatalism, fuelling a belief that the poor and unhoused are to blame for their own predicament.
Connecting US and UK homelessness policy
Brosnahan contends, persuasively, that structural inequality was written in to the US constitution, and in turn, connects to the UK Enclosure Acts that enshrined the primacy of the private over the collective. When large-scale displacement led to homelessness, the Elizabethan Poor Laws and their Victorian descendants established a system of punishment and sanction for the “undeserving” that has endured.
When a UK Labour government Minister recently contrasted the fate of a young person being expected to live on £70 a week due to benefit cuts, to his own status as a mortgage payer, he distilled the essence of class prejudice and moral superiority based on property ownership. But as Brosnahan reminds us, this arrogance rests on the lie that it is the poor who are “subsidised” by government, when in fact, in both the US and UK it is private homeowners and property developers who are massively enriched by public money.
It is, therefore, an additional injustice that the unhoused, disproportionately people of colour, personify urban anxieties. This is most vivid in Mary Brosnahan’s hometown, New York City, where a succession of shocking incidents has highlighted the “them and us” rhetoric perpetuated by politicians and media, particularly through the stigmatisation of people with mental ill health. She lists a stream of misplaced and failed policies aimed at controlling and criminalising the homeless population, without acknowledging the “simple and profound” fact that “a permanent home is the foundation for any person’s stability, especially for people with severe mental illness”.
Again, this myopia is shared by US and UK power elites. In 1996, US President Bill Clinton introduced welfare reforms aimed at penalising poor people not showing enough willingness to work. I vividly recall being in the company of a group of Jersey City liberals who warmly welcomed this. I fear there may be a similar reaction, by some, to Keir Starmer’s benefit cuts. But Brosnahan shows that the complacent “they just need to get a job” perspective flies in the face of social and economic reality. Just as punitive cuts in the US have made homelessness worse, so the UK government’s 2025 equivalent will inevitably lead to more evictions and as a result, more financial demands on already crisis-riven local authorities.
US/UK policy shadowing had another watershed in the early 1980s, again, with loud echoes today. Brosnahan identifies Ronald Reagan’s 1981 reduction of the budget for Housing and Urban Development (HUD), from $26 billion to $8 billion, as the moment the US was set on a course for housing disaster. At almost the same time, Margaret Thatcher’s introduction of Right to Buy for council housing in the UK had a similar effect. Fast forward four decades and President Trump has targeted HUD for sweeping cuts, while the Starmer regime’s deeply flawed housing policy is already floundering.
All politicians should read Mary Brosnahan’s book. But they may feel uncomfortable with her depiction of the corrupting relationships in the corridors of power between politicians and the development industry. I’m currently researching a biography of Abraham Kazan, the pioneer of NYC housing cooperatives, which includes an episode when one property developer, Fred C. Trump, cynically exploits his Brooklyn political connections to secure a lucrative land-deal, together with huge government subsidies. The fact that Trump’s son is now President of America, and waxes lyrical about potential real estate deals everywhere (including Gaza and North Korea), shows the politician-developer axis has reached its apogee.
Alternative models and policies for housing
But another strength of this book is that it isn’t a counsel of despair. Brosnahan highlights viable alternatives to the ruinous private market. As well as Kazan’s co-ops, she identifies Red Vienna and Finland’s Housing First as policies that have worked (one of my few criticisms of the book is that it doesn’t pay similar tribute to UK council housing). But she is clear-eyed that housing transition will require a fundamental shift in ideology, as well as policy.
To borrow one of its author’s phrases, They Just Need to Get a Job is “achingly pertinent”. We are in a time when simplistic, blame-laden narratives pose a threat, not just to homeless, disabled and poor people, but to any of us who are not part of the tiny group of billionaires and their political flunkies driving us towards ever-deeper social division, despair and ultimately, extinction. This book offers a vital source of information and hope.
- Featured image: “Housing is a Human Right” (CC BY-NC 2.0) by Thomas Hawk
- Subscribe to LSE USAPP’s email newsletter to receive a weekly article roundup.
- Please read our comments policy before commenting.
- Note: This article gives the views of the reviewer, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.
