Faced with the highest per-capita rate of homelessness in the country, San Francisco has struggled to address its homeless problem for more than twenty years. Until recently, the city relied primarily upon criminalization tactics to manage the problem, issuing criminal citations for sleeping outside, loitering, panhandling, and other activities. In 2003, the newly elected mayor, Gavin Newsom, ushered in a new policy regime designed to "truly help" the City's homeless: converting cash assistance into concrete housing and services, phasing out troubled emergency shelters, and involving the community in large, city-coordinated volunteer initiatives. Using the case of San Francisco, my research examines this approach as an emerging paradigm in American poverty management, which I characterize as a shift from punitive neoliberal measures toward a liberal politics of benevolence.

Unlike many studies of homelessness, my research is not a study of homeless people but rather a critical examination of poverty policy in planning and, more specifically, the ways in which San Francisco manages its homeless problem through a range of spatial, economic, and political interventions. I argue that, while the benevolence embodied in San Francisco's current approach mitigates some of the harsher aspects of prior interventions, it nonetheless introduces a set of exclusions to the realm of homeless policy, including new definitions of the deserving and undeserving poor, institutional mechanisms of control, and geographies of homeless marginalization, thereby reproducing the exclusions and contradictions intrinsic to liberalism.