Caring for the Criminalized: How Crisis Acuity and Organizational Ties to the State Shape Street-Level Coordination and Adaptations to Homelessness

Introduction

Homelessness in the United States has intensified alongside a wave of state policies that criminalize unsheltered people. As governments pursue enforcement-oriented approaches, social service organizations must balance responding to urgent needs with collaborating with state entities that can perpetuate harm. Street-level research increasingly examines how organizations and providers respond to such acute crises, revealing how governance arrangements and organizational practices differ from more ordinary times. Yet most studies treat crises as static, even though shifts in acuity can reshape coordination and frontline practices. Further, organizational adaptations may differ by their relationship to the state (i.e., public vs nonprofit). While nonprofit research often highlights the value of state collaboration and calls for comparisons between public and private agencies, critical social work scholars emphasize how state entanglements can draw organizations into punitive or criminalizing practices. Drawing on these perspectives, this paper investigates two central questions: how does escalating crisis acuity—as intensifying homelessness criminalization—shape crisis response coordination and organizational adaptation? And how do these adaptations differ depending on an organization’s relationship to state entities?

Method

This paper draws on an interpretivist ethnographic case study of the homelessness criminalization crisis in Austin, Texas. Data were collected over 21 months, from summer 2020 to spring 2022, and involved 750 hours of field observation and 30 interviews, including with administrators and providers from both public and nonprofit homelessness service organizations. Field notes, which captured city-level coordination and organizational actors’ discussions, were analyzed chronologically using an eventful, temporal approach, revealing three key periods of escalating crisis acuity. Interviews, which provided firsthand texture to field observations, were analyzed thematically to trace how city and street-level organizations responded as the crisis evolved, with attention to differences between public and nonprofit providers.

Findings

Findings show how the rise and rapid implementation of a punitive approach, focused on removing visible encampments, intensified crisis acuity, increasing provider ambiguity, fracturing coordination, and exacerbating harm. Political and community pressures to reduce visible homelessness produced competing approaches of care and criminalization, destabilizing coordination and heightening ambiguity for providers. Public providers, closely tied to the city, could at times mitigate harm for people in visible encampments but risked complicity as police enforcement rapidly escalated. In contrast, nonprofit providers were more separate from city efforts and focused on the most vulnerable, yet their separation paradoxically limited their ability to influence outcomes or reduce harm.

Conclusion

This case demonstrates how crisis response coordination and adaptation are shaped by rising crisis acuity and state-provider relationships. Rapidly escalating acuity, compounded by competing approaches, can complicate coordination, undermine shared strategy, and heighten ambiguity. The paper also highlights how adaptations are shaped by organizational position relative to state entities, drawing on nonprofit studies’ focus on public–nonprofit differences and social work’s growing critiques of the state’s role in criminalizing vulnerable groups. Criminalizing homelessness harms both homeless individuals and the service systems designed to support them, underscoring tradeoffs in public provision and government–nonprofit collaboration.