329 Part F _ Responses to “The Discourse of Consumer Choice…” Consumer Choice in Housing First Nicholas Pleace Centre for Housing Policy, University of York, England and the European Observatory on Homelessness Introduction Hansen Löfstrand’s and Juhila’s (HL & J) article in last year’s open edition of this Journal (Hansen Löfstrand and Juhila, 2012) is an important contribution to debates about Housing First. The progenitor of what is now a global Housing First movement is Pathways Housing First (PHF) in New York. HL & J employ Foucauldian discourse analysis of the PHF ‘manual’ (Tsemberis, 2010a). Their key argument is that PHF effectively employs attempted behavioural modification as a ‘solution’ to chronic homelessness in a way that mirrors the underlying philosophy of the ‘staircase’ or ‘linear residential treatment’ models that PHF was nominally designed to replace. … having analysed the discourse of consumer choice in the PHF model, our conclusion is that the two models should not be seen as entirely different, as they both aim to support clients’ independence, motivation and recovery; in other words, both aim to render people as self-responsible as possible. (Hansen Löfstrand and Juhila, 2012, p.64) Others have found what they regard as significant holes in the evidence in which Housing First surrounds itself, for example in how efficiently Housing First delivers improvements in drug and alcohol use or how cost effective it is (Johnson et al, 2012), and also suggested selective use of evidence when Housing First has been positively compared with staircase services (Kertesz and Weiner, 2009; Rosenheck, 2010; Stanhope and Dunn, 2011). However, HL & J are among the first to raise questions about the underlying philosophy of Housing First and perhaps the first to question how much of a distinction there really is between Housing First and staircase services. The critique to which HL & J subject PHF and, by extension, other Housing First services is potentially fundamental. In questioning the philos- ophy of Housing First, HL & J are criticising how the evidence about Housing First is being interpreted and questioning whether current understanding of how and why Housing First appears to be ‘effective’ is actually correct. ISSN 2030-2762 / ISSN 2030-3106 online