From Streets to Solitude: A Critical Criminological Examination of Street Homelessness and Housing Adequacy in North Wales

This paper is drawn from the author's ongoing PhD on the criminalisation and victimisation of people experiencing street homelessness (PESH) in North Wales. It critiques housing policies that relocate PESH without the wraparound support required. A critical-structural perspective demonstrates that vacancy-led frameworks, while decreasing the number of PESH, can also reinforce and intensify the social harm and victimisation of PESH. Galtung's (1969) model of structural violence and Wacquant's (2009) model of spatial banishment frame what this paper refers to as administrative containment. This policy practice meets housing targets by relocating PESH into service-deprived locations. Data is extracted from the PhD study. Mabon a PESH continuously abandons his rural tenancy, as it is located in a hamlet with only three buses a day to access his GP and social support; his behaviour is interpreted as rational resistance, not deviance. Bleddyn, an outreach worker, describes how the rarity of housing stock and performance pressures obligate them to "offer the next available vacancy", irrespective of relational or clinical fit. Collaboratively, both narratives
illustrate how distance from health services, transportation, and human contact can convert successful housing policies into predictable pathways of relapse. The study finds that these displacements increase poverty, undermine recovery and re-stigmatise PESH with labels such as "failed tenancy". Until housing policy shifts from vacancy-filling tick-boxes to rights-based and needs-led provision,administrative containment will persist, and individuals like Mabon will continue to choose to sleep on the streets over isolation.