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Complex needs in homelessness practice: a review of ‘new markets of vulnerability’

Abstract This article reviews institutional responses to adult homeless people, to argue that there is a contemporary flourishing of debates about complex needs across homelessness research and practice fields. These understand housing need as a mental and physical health issue and a care and support need, with foundations in biographical and societal events, including trauma. Responses to complex needs are conceptualized as enterprising; fresh, proactive, preventative and positive. There are a range of legislative, policy and funding drivers for these responses, from across English homelessness, housing support and adult social care fields. At the same time, debates about what complex needs are, and how best to respond to them, are evident in international debates about homelessness models of support in the Global Western North. ‘Complex needs’ is defined as a travelling concept, which provides foundation for interventions in different locations. The article conceptualizes institutional machinations around the governance of complex needs as ‘new markets of vulnerability’. This term theorizes new markets and new marketizing strategies in the context of a larger reconfiguring of the mixed economies of welfare around market mimicking devices and practices. Intensification of activities around complex needs give insight into processes of neoliberalisation in contemporary modernized welfare ‘mixes’.