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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Homelessness is a punishing condition that inflicts unquestionable harm on those who experience it. It is also a social problem that starkly lays bare deep societal failure. As Cameron Parsell shows, society - along with the public policy measures intended to address it - treats being homeless as an identity, casting those who experience homelessness as fundamentally different from "us." To be homeless is to face daily victimization, to be a recipient of someone else's care, and to have autonomy taken away. Parsell argues that we have at our disposal the knowledge and momentum to demonstrably reduce and even end homelessness. Our first task is to confront the fact that homelessness is a relatively predictable phenomenon that disproportionately impacts people who are failed by society in myriad ways. We must respond to the problem in ways that understand and thus do not recreate the dehumanizing conditions experienced by those who are homeless. Homelessness is a choice: of how we organize society. Sketching the defining features of homelessness, this critical introduction will be a valuable resource for students studying homelessness, housing, marginality, and poverty across the social sciences and social work.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
1 What is Homelessness?
The problematization of homelessness
This book
What is homelessness?
Politics, critique, and subjectivity
Objective versus subjective definitions of homelessness
2 Homelessness as a Societal Problem
Structure and agency: a complex interaction
Housing
Housing and poverty
Trigger events
Suppressing trigger events
Race
Concluding remarks
3 Homelessness as the Experience of Violence
Violence and crime among homeless populations
Understanding, experiencing, and responding to violence
How can the disproportionate rates be understood?
Violence experienced by people who are homeless, as victim and as perpetrator
Gender disparities in sexual violence
How do people respond to violence?
Concluding remarks
4 Being a Homeless Service User: Dependence and Autonomy
Charity
Charitable resources as key to survival
Celebrating charity to the homeless
The experience of receiving charity
Shelters and formalized homelessness services
Surveillance and control
Housing, home, and autonomy
Concluding remarks
5 The Experience of Homelessness: Identity and Identification
The historical portrayal
Identity change
Stigma and the feeling of being othered
Being named and having identity imposed
Self-identities
Gender, identity, and homelessness
The impact of identity on homelessness
Concluding remarks
6 What Can Societies Do about Homelessness?
Abolishing homelessness
Removal through design
A more nuanced criminal justice response?
Coercive removal to realize care?
Shelter and change
Shelters, hostels, and emergency homeless accommodation
Critique
Concluding remarks
7 Supportive Housing Models
Housing First and permanent supportive housing
Evidence
Cost benefits and their limitations
Concluding remarks
8 What Should We Do about Homelessness?
The myth of solving homelessness through more evidence and better practices
Nothing short of societal transformation
Reframing the problem
De-commodified housing
A new way to help
Improving life and societal cohesion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Homelessness
A Critical Introduction
Cameron Parsell
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Cameron Parsell 2023
The right of Cameron Parsell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5449-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5450-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023931480
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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1What is Homelessness?
The presence of homelessness constitutes evidence of societal failure. This is uncontroversial. People who are homeless in wealthy democratic societies with a welfare state powerfully demonstrate the numerous and interacting problems concerning how we organize society. At a straightforward and immediate level, homelessness is synonymous with a lack of the fundamental resource required to live as a participating citizen. The operation of society assumes that the population has access to housing.
It is not an exaggeration to say that housing is a precondition for being safe, for gaining an education and participating in the labor market, and of course for not only sustaining but also enriching relationships and family life. Housing is also necessary for maintaining good health. The absence of housing is so deleterious for health, it accelerates death. According to the OECD (2020: 3), people who are homeless die “up to 30 years earlier than the general population on average.”
Housing is also central to accessing the opportunities to participate in democracy. Housing represents the resource that is necessary to “determine one’s own life” (Roessler 2021: 171). The experience of homelessness throws life into an unpredictable chaos whereby one becomes reliant on the care, and subject to the control, of others: often on both. It directly subverts the aspects of basic human life and dignity that we take for granted, or at least that we hold as normative. Homelessness illustrates societal failings through the production of human suffering.
Both the impacts on people who are homeless and the societal dysfunction that homelessness represents animate public concern. Throughout Europe and the United States, with their varying cultural views on state intervention and citizen independence, the general public is concerned about homelessness. From what we know from recent surveys conducted in the United States (Tsai et al. 2017) and in Europe (Petit et al. 2019), the public want there to be more government spending on homelessness and, in the case of the United States, public perceptions about homelessness are becoming increasingly liberal. Homelessness is a problem that is widely acknowledged to threaten any notion we have of living together in a society characterized by fairness and mutual respect. In fact, similar to what we witnessed in the twentieth century with the eradication of polio and smallpox, governments of some countries even advocate radically reducing homelessness as a major social transformation to which their administrations commit. We saw this in 2007 when Australia’s incoming prime minister and government pledged to halve the rate of homelessness. In Scotland, the government’s 2020 formal strategy was to end homelessness. Albeit in a small and privileged subsection of the population, US values and rhetoric about less government occur alongside government plans and interventions to end homelessness.
Covid-19 brought these ambitions, or lack thereof, into sharp focus. Public commentators argue that the pandemic changed the world and challenged our taken-for-granted assumptions about how we live together, and homelessness, perhaps as much as anything, substantiates these claims. Both public and political concern about people who are homeless have been heightened since Covid-19. The virus has illustrated how homelessness constrains otherwise taken-for-granted ways of living, such as having a home to practice hygiene, complying with medical advice, and, of course, observing quarantining and physical distancing. A home is the fundamental resource we require to control our lives, and, as it turns out, to provide the best opportunity to protect ourselves and others from infectious diseases.
Covid-19 is a reminder that societies are interdependent, and the presence of homelessness is a health threat to us all (Parsell et al. 2023). The heightened concern has spurred on what is in some countries unprecedented state intervention to assist people in moving from homelessness to safe and secure accommodation. For at least a period of time during the pandemic in 2021, the widely held belief across the globe, that we are limited in what we can do to meet the needs of people who are homeless because of budgetary constraints, was thrown out of the window. It is worth noting here that government responses during the pandemic across many countries illustrate that deliberate state intervention into homelessness is both possible and successful at assisting people to achieve life changes. We will return to the opportunities for such government intervention in Chapter 8.
Of course, Covid-19 is a mere blip on the historical calendar, and public concern about homelessness in the wake of the pandemic is not generated by fear of virus transmission and the unequal impacts of the virus. Ordinarily, public concern for people who are homeless is most frequently directed toward its overt manifestation, known as unsheltered homelessness or rough sleeping. This concern is shaped by and embodied in representations in popular culture, such as sensational Hollywood movies including The Soloist, The Pursuit of Happyness, The Lady in the Van, and The Fisher King. Most people who are homeless, however, do not sleep in the open spaces of the urban realm. The overt forms of homelessness represent what might be metaphorically thought of as the tip of the iceberg. Countless more people who are homeless, a number we cannot even reliably estimate (Busch-Geertsema et al. 2016), are concealed from public view in formal homeless accommodation, doubled-up with others in shared and cramped housing, or living in makeshift structures and accommodation in both urban and rural areas.
In fact, homelessness in rural areas and small towns, in both its overt and concealed forms, is a concern for countries across the globe, albeit an all too unrecognized concern. Paul Milbourne and Paul Cloke (2006) argue that the focus among researchers, governments, and the media on homelessness in cities has downplayed rural homelessness. Homelessness is framed in the public imagination as an urban problem, representing both the decay of city life and city resources struggling to cope with the inflow of people from rural areas through migration. Rural homelessness certainly does exist, but it is hidden “within the physical, socio-cultural, and political fabric of rural space” (Milbourne and Cloke 2006: 2). To understand the state of homelessness in the modern world, we need to look beyond both the metropolis and its unsheltered form.
Most of us do not see, much less know about, the suffering that homelessness creates among the many. This book is largely interested in the hidden forms of homelessness in addition to the overt. This is not simply because of the mass of people whose homelessness is concealed. It is in the hidden forms of homelessness that we find disproportionate numbers of families and children who are out of view (Mayock et al. 2015). An insight into hidden forms of homelessness can, on the one hand, illuminate the dynamics of markets and, sometimes, government policy and inaction that perpetuate these forms of exclusion and suffering, and, on the other, shed light on the agency and survival capacities of people in dangerous and impoverished conditions.
The problematization of homelessness
The public are animated by homelessness because of the harms it causes to those impacted, but societal interest is also motivated by the myriad social problems that homelessness is symptomatic of. This book will take a keen interest in examining the divergent social processes – across numerous societies – that produce homelessness and represent latent opportunities for addressing it. As is illustrated in the next chapter, homelessness can be the culmination of societal problems that are both diverse and, on face value, may seem unrelated. Societal problems can be seen as the immediate trigger – for example, tenancy evictions and discharge from hospital – or they might be the result of underlying structural conditions, such as access to a livable wage and affordable housing. These two levels of problems cannot be neatly de-coupled, but rather should be understood as interactional. Moreover, societal problems do not produce homelessness randomly among the population (Bramley and Fitzpatrick 2018). The suffering that homelessness represents is disproportionately directed toward people whom society fails in multiple ways. The wide public concern about homelessness is a product of the wide sections of society that homelessness touches. We may all share a concern about homelessness because it represents societal failure, but the failures of society we are concerned about may diverge in material ways.
We care about homelessness because it can signify a problem concerning, for example, housing supply and affordability, income support and poverty, family dynamics, mental health, disability, addiction, domestic violence, veterans, incarceration and recidivism, migration, citizenship, systems of support, and collaboration across government and community organizations. These broad aspects of society have an equally broad set of interest and advocacy groups responsible for them, each with varying levels of power and influence. There are powerful lobby groups invested in veterans, for example, each one of which garners significant political support, support that has been used, in the United States specifically, to lead the federal government to plan to prevent and end homelessness among veterans. This is not just rhetoric. Massive federal government investment saw significant reductions in veterans’ homelessness in the United States between 2007 and 2017 (Tsai et al. 2021). Meghan Henry et al. (2017) show that political will led to a reduction in veterans’ homelessness by half.
The same political focus and downward trends in prevalence cannot be said to be the case for people exiting prisons, who are at great risk of ending up homeless, and in turn being reincarcerated. Social science knowledge, in accordance with intuition, illustrates that access to safe and affordable housing upon release from prison successfully prevents both homelessness and recidivism (Couloute 2018). This knowledge notwithstanding, in the United States as well as elsewhere, there are no bipartisan objectives to end homelessness among this cohort and only infrequent systematic examples of providing people with access to safe and affordable housing upon release from incarceration. Even though some of the same forces and societal structures place both veterans and people exiting prison at risk of homelessness, the former have wide public support and legislative access to resources, whereas the latter do not. These two brief examples illustrate core themes developed in this book. Homelessness, and the societal failures that produce it, evoke powerful emotive responses from the population. These emotive feelings are not, however, distributed evenly across the population of people who are homeless. Homelessness can be produced by societal processes that disproportionately impact some people, and we have at our disposal the political and policy tools to intervene to successfully disrupt homelessness among cohorts of the population.
Our willingness to alter social processes and to redistribute resources to address homelessness is shaped by what type of problem we understand homelessness to be, which in turn is shaped by which people in society end up homeless. The sections of the homeless population we focus on, or ignore, are significant because they are shaped by our beliefs about what constitutes a desirable society. In most countries, age is a critical determiner of how homelessness is understood as a problem, especially among children and older people. Gender too is a salient feature of the problematization of homelessness, particularly in many countries where older women’s homelessness is a concern; older women’s homelessness, in particular, represents the disturbing illustration of how patriarchal society disadvantages women in the labor market and penalizes them for child-rearing. The disadvantages that flow from a patriarchal society mean that older women may have fewer assets in later life to avoid homelessness.
Gender and age, along with military service and incarceration history, are just some of the ways that our problematization of homelessness – including what we should do about it – is mediated by how we make meaning of people’s problems and how we interpret their homelessness as representing a particular type of societal failure. We can of course divide up the homeless population into other categories to determine the nature of the problem, including along lines of citizenship, race, indigeneity, disability, sexual orientation, and experiences with other forms of state intervention, particularly foster care and psychiatric systems.
The significant point being introduced here, a point that will be developed over the coming pages, is that our concern about homelessness can be either, or both, about the suffering that it produces and the way homelessness represents a challenge to our beliefs of what society should look like. When we focus our attention on some groups of the homeless population, such as veterans or older women, but gloss over others, such as prisoners, we are implicitly identifying what we believe society should look like in terms of those to whom we have a responsibility to provide care and resources and those for whom we believe society does not hold these responsibilities.
The problematization of homelessness has significant implications for what we do to respond to it. Driven by some scholarly research and public campaigns, people are invited to think about the issue through tropes such as “homelessness can happen to anyone” and “anyone is only two pay checks away from homelessness.” These campaigns seek to destigmatize homelessness and help the population believe that they themselves are not immune to homelessness. These narratives have wide moral appeal. They serve as an impetus to appreciate our potential vulnerabilities, our shared need for safety and security, and they illustrate the risks that the commodification of housing produces. However, they obscure deep structural inequities within society that operate to put some groups at significant risk of homelessness, while protecting others (Bramley and Fitzpatrick 2018). In latter chapters, this book tackles head-on the challenges of reconciling the political and moral worth of destigmatizing homelessness with the empirical reality that some life experiences are strong predictors of homelessness in adulthood. The uneven distribution of homelessness represents a challenge to ensure that public debate and social policies are not framed as responses to a deviant at-risk population whose behaviors or demographics explain their homelessness. When we think critically about the sections of society that disproportionately end up homeless, we are forced to think about the unjust social processes that systematically produce these predictable forms of suffering. It is unlikely that homelessness can happen to anyone, and this is because society is organized in such a way that some benefit while others are systematically disadvantaged.
Some are drawn to identify with the homeless out of a romantic idea that homelessness constitutes a form of freedom or escape from the oppressive structures of mainstream society. This idea of homelessness has resonance in the history of many countries, where tramps, hobos, and frontier travelers are nostalgically remembered for their pioneering individualism (Cresswell 2001; Kusmer 2002). From this perspective, people are concerned about homelessness not because it’s a problem, but rather because it is constructed as a solution to the oppressive forces of mainstream capitalist society. This form of homelessness constitutes a purposeful rejection of organized society, thereby creating moral heroes (Wilson 1956).
The idea that homelessness can be a solution builds on a long-held belief that homelessness can be the personal choice of homeless people (Parsell and Parsell 2012). This view is not only about blaming the victim; it is also put forward by those advocating a progressive politics. Often, as a way of rejecting punitive measures that force people who are homeless from public space (as we discuss in Chapter 6), some claim that people have a right to be homeless. This position, which foregrounds rights, evokes the higher-order normative stance that people ought to be free to live as they see fit, including the right to avoid traditional housing, consumerism, and dominant (Western) ways of living. The belief that homelessness is a chosen state is more frequently couched as a deviant choice. Here, homelessness is an indirect choice, a consequence of deviant behaviors such as addiction, not complying with norms of self-discipline, and selfishly relying on welfare. Be it as a romantic view or a means to blame the victim, the belief that homelessness is a choice is both pervasive in society and a significant constraint to altering social processes to address it.
Without any doubt, concern about homelessness is principally driven by the view that it represents a societal injustice by failing to provide basic resources to citizens. The provocation of citizenship is significant. On the one hand, it is unproblematic to assert that the experience of homelessness represents a failure of the state to provide people with their citizenry rights. On the other hand, the experience of homelessness subverts people’s capacity to comply with citizenry obligations, and, indeed, it is an experience that can facilitate compounding disadvantage. The unpredictability and instability of homelessness make participating in employment, training, and education challenging, to say the least. Further, the experience of being homeless – including lacking a fixed mailing address or contact details – makes complying with government administrative systems and welfare rules difficult (Szeintuch 2022). Homelessness is thus a form of exclusion in and of itself, and a state that, moreover, reinforces exclusion.
Some see homelessness as evidence of neoliberalism and deliberate social processes to exacerbate the disadvantage of the poor (Beck and Twiss 2018). Concern about inadequate distribution of resources and the injustice that it represents drives advocacy for societal change. Across the social science literature, the framing of homelessness as a social injustice spurs advocacy for greater state intervention into the supply of affordable housing and increasing access to crucial resources, such as health care, education, training, and employment with livable wages (Fitzpatrick, Watts, et al. 2021; Lee et al. 2010; Pawson et al. 2020). The study of the social problem of homelessness fits hand in glove with advocacy for social change. The study of homelessness cannot be extracted from normative ideas of society. We engage with these in Chapter 8.
Others are similarly interested in homelessness out of a desire to bring about an ideal society, but rather than more state intervention into housing and the provision of public resources, they see the solution to homelessness to be charitable care. These charitable responses to homelessness are believed to be the hallmark of a community-based society, including subsidiarity and action from the ground up (Parsell et al. 2022). Homelessness can be a venue where people, including in faith-based organizations, can exercise care, compassion, and voluntary service. In the United Kingdom, responses to homelessness are part of wider ideological and political shifts about the organization of society, particularly the push toward more localized forms of governance and resource distribution (Fitzpatrick, Pawson, and Watts 2020). Some see the presence of homelessness to be an ideal venue where the new ethical citizen can demonstrate their commitment to society by providing the spontaneous ground up support that is indicative of a connected and solidary society (Parsell et al. 2022).
Homelessness captures society’s imagination because it represents a bellwether for how society is traveling. Concern about homelessness is, at the same time, concern about what society should look like. Whatever our lens, we see homelessness either as an indicator that society is broken in some way, or that it represents a mechanism to achieve some type of ideal. Our proposed solutions to homelessness reflect and draw on our views about what we believe society should look like: freedom from capitalism, freedom to live off the grid, more state intervention to address poverty, more personal responsibility and family unity, or more community-based responses from engaged citizens to connect with their fellow humans in need. Homelessness is a problem that goes to the heart of ideas about how society should function and how we should live together. Our views about what we should do about homelessness, including nothing at all, speak volumes about what we believe our fellow citizens are entitled to, on the one hand, and what we the collective believe we should do for our fellow citizens, on the other.
Ultimately, we care about transforming society to address homelessness because of the way it meaningfully harms human life. It does so by excluding people from the resources they require to live healthily, in reciprocal and loving relationships, and by controlling their lives. According to Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009), homelessness harms us all, including the lucky ones who are not homeless, because we live in demonstrably inequitable societies that are required to waste public money and observe the waste of human potential that homelessness represents.
This book
The way we make meaning of the problem of homelessness is thus far more than an academic exercise. Our construction of the problem of homelessness and, as noted, who is impacted, directly influences what society does about homelessness. The way we understand the problem is critical to how we might alter society to do better. This book has been written as a critical introduction to homelessness driven by analyses of debates, policies, and published research, including some of my own, to illustrate how the problem of homelessness has been produced, thought about, and debated internationally. These countries include the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, countries across Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as some countries in Asia, such as Japan, Singapore, and South Korea: a range of countries that we might as shorthand refer to as wealthy democracies with welfare states. These countries are diverse in countless ways, to be sure, but we will show that the experience of homelessness and the processes that produce them share many similarities. This examination includes a deep analysis of what countries do to respond to homelessness. Despite the profound diversity internationally in the generosity of state intervention for people who are homeless or the diverse forms of community or voluntary-based support services, all wealthy countries have formalized legislation, policy, and significant budgets to respond to people who are homeless. Each country has what Elizabeth Beck and Pamela Twiss (2018) refer to as their own homelessness industries. There are significant consistencies across these countries in terms of how they respond to homelessness. As wealthy democracies with welfare states, these countries share some similar opportunities for societal change to end homelessness.
This book analyzes these diverse homelessness responses for the primary purpose of articulating a way forward for what we should do differently. There is a vast international knowledge base that offers insights that may transcend national and cultural contexts to advance societal change to better deal with and ideally prevent homelessness. The examination of the multiple causes of homelessness in Chapter 2 can be read as an indicator of how we might act differently in order to prevent homelessness.
To advance an agenda to eradicate homelessness, we need more than a critical analysis of the societal problems that underpin homelessness and the limitations of what we do internationally. An empirically robust and morally compelling roadmap for what we can do differently, more productively, to address the issue must be informed by the reality of what it is to experience homelessness.
This critical introduction tackles the experience of homelessness head-on. The empirical evidence presented in Chapters 3–6 demonstrates that the experience of homelessness is anything but a romantic or idealized life free from the pressures of mainstream society. Homelessness is dangerous, characterized by the absence of control, and is defined by what is lacking. In Chapter 4 we demonstrate, perversely, how many of the dominant modes of responding to homelessness replicate some of the negative experiences of being homeless. The experience of homelessness can include both the systematic exclusion from mainstream resources and being managed and controlled by homelessness services. We can do much better. In fact, there are examples from across the globe where societies, and movements within them, take radical and decisive action to address homelessness. We can only seriously grasp the issue by understanding the interacting structures within society that produce it among certain people at certain times. This is illustrated throughout Chapter 2. Chapters 7 and 8 then argue that sustainably addressing homelessness requires radical change to the organization of the society that generates the problems. We cannot address, much less prevent, homelessness, as Linda Gibbs and colleagues (2021) assume, by tweaking existing systems and leaving unjust institutional arrangements in place. We cannot, furthermore, address homelessness without meaningfully engaging with the experiences and insights of those who are homeless who can themselves contribute to driving an agenda of social change.
Prior to embarking upon this, we first need to engage with the question: what is homelessness?
What is homelessness?
The apparently simple question “what is homelessness?” turns out to be far more complicated than one may assume. To start with, this is because it is a concept that is characterized by the absence of something and a something that is in and of itself multidimensional and largely experiential: namely, home. To understand what homelessness means we have to first understand what home means. This is anything but self-evident; home is a contested concept (Easthope 2004). As opposed to housing, which can be defined in clear objective terms, such as building materials, size, color, design, etc., home is a concept that, as Shelley Mallett says, “functions as a repository for complex, interrelated and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationship with one another, especially family, and with places, spaces, and things” (2004: 84).
This engagement with what home means, especially emphasizing that the bricks and mortar of housing ought not to be conflated with home, offers a hint to the conceptual challenges defining homelessness. At its core, the scholarly literature on what home means stresses the importance of people’s subjective meaning-making. Like community, home conjures up something positive about the human condition, but its precise meaning can be equally amorphous. For Sara Ahmed (1999), home transcends the spatial and, rather, encompasses a feeling of belonging. Peter Somerville (1997) makes an important addition to our understanding of the meaning of home in the context of homelessness, pointing out that home has cognitive and intellectual components whereby people have a sense of home even in the absence of experience or memory. People who are homeless may have aspirations about a future home that they have never experienced, but their aspirations meaningfully convey what they want that is different in life (Parsell 2012). Even for people who are homeless and have no access to one, the idea of home holds significance. It is this significance that we need to consider when thinking about how to define homelessness.
Yet an individual’s subjective meaning-making of home is clearly a challenge to identifying an objective and cross-cutting definition of homelessness. We will return to this below. If we move beyond academic discussions about what home means, our next challenge is empirical: numerous countries have their own, country- and culturally specific, definition of homelessness. There is no such thing as an international definition: how we define homelessness depends on where we are in the world.
Kate Amore and colleagues (2011) pointed out that concerns expressed in the 1990s about the lack of an international definition, despite the need for one, were equally apparent in 2011. Writing two years later, Amore argued that “in sum, the field has seen a proliferation of definitions and classifications of homelessness, but a relative lack of engagement with ideas of conceptual validity or international standardisation” (2013: 224). It is difficult to conceive of the day when there is an internationally agreed definition of homelessness. It is always going to be a concept that says a lot about the norms and expectations of a given society. Leading scholars in the field conclude that it is undesirable to impose a one-size-fits-all definition of homelessness “uniformly across the globe” (Busch-Geertsema et al. 2016: 126).
Although there is no agreed-upon international definition, assertions from the 1980s that homelessness is undefinable and that the concept should be abandoned (Field 1988; Watson 1986) are no longer accepted. There is wide agreement among scholars and governments that each country does indeed require a definition of homelessness, for multiple reasons. Dominant among these is the need to have a count of the homeless population. Volker Busch-Geertsema and colleagues (2016: 127) conclude: “It is therefore vital that the definition employed is objective, operationalisable and measurable.” Amore and colleagues agree, concluding that definitions of homelessness can shape policies and interventions to address it and that defining homelessness is critical to “monitor the effectiveness of such interventions” (Amore et al. 2011: 20). Here we can see that homelessness definitions can play a useful role in measurement by identifying successes and limitations of what we do to address the problem.
As well as the idea that definitions are important for assessing levels of homelessness, calls to establish objective and agreed-upon definitions are often driven by advocacy for homelessness to be recognized and put on the agenda as a prominent social issue, thus opening up conversations about social change. Articulating the significance of a homelessness definition vis-à-vis enumeration and social change, Graham Tipple and Suzanne Speak (2009: 103) conclude that “numbers tend to drive investment and can enable lobbyists or officials to direct funding to address the problem.” From this perspective, defining homelessness is a means to ensure that it has the status and identifiable form to be a problem that can be addressed.
In addition to putting the problem on the political agenda through measurement and lobbying, a core reason to define homelessness is so that governments are able objectively to determine who is eligible – and, by implication, ineligible – for public assistance. Official government definitions of homelessness are therefore profoundly significant in the lives of people who meet the criteria. Even within one country, however, there can be multiple definitions or categories of homelessness used to allocate resources.
The United States represents a noteworthy example of multiple official government definitions of homelessness, with many categories of the homeless population that receive resources based on their identified status. Different federal government departments, such as health, education, and housing, use different definitions, which are deemed necessary to appropriately identify and respond to their target populations. The most significant definition of homelessness in the United States is that of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This is because it is used to determine eligibility for the Continuum of Care program (the primary homelessness response) funded by the federal government, as well as to inform point-in-time enumeration of the homeless population. This is considered the official count of homelessness (Henry et al. 2021).
The HUD definition is underpinned by the definition set out in the McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, which was amended in 2009 as The Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act. Under this Act, an individual or family is homeless if they lack “fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” In addition to lacking a residence, the McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act defines as homeless an individual or family whose primary nighttime residence is a publicly or privately operated shelter, an institution that provides temporary residence, and public or private places not designed for humans to sleep in.
As well as formal definitions to allocate resources and enumerate the population, the United States has the category of chronic homelessness, pertaining to people who “have disabilities and have also: 1) been continuously homeless for at least a year; or 2) experienced homelessness at least four times in the last three years for a combined length of time of at least a year” (National Alliance to End Homelessness 2021). People who are chronically homeless in the United States are eligible to receive permanent supportive housing, an evidence-based and generous state resource (Rog et al. 2014). Individuals who meet the chronic homelessness definition are likewise identified as a priority for the state to “prevent and end” their homelessness (United States Interagency Council on Homelessness 2010).
Rather than an act of law, in Canada the most influential definition has been published by the Canadian Observatory of Homelessness. The Canadian definition is broad: it includes not only unsheltered people and those living in emergency shelters (as in the United States), but also people provisionally accommodated, meaning those whose “accommodation is temporary or lacks security of tenure” (Gaetz et al. 2012). The Canadian definition thus explicitly includes people whom we might think about as experiencing forms of hidden homelessness, and, as we discuss below, it draws on important ideas central to the meaning of home. The broad Canadian definition is very different from that used in Japan, where homelessness is narrowly defined. The official Japanese definition includes only those who are rough sleeping, and not people who are sheltered (Okamura et al. 2021).
The United Kingdom has a formal definition of homelessness which is referred to as “statutory homelessness.” This is a broad definition. Statutory homelessness is defined as “unintentionally homeless and falls within a specified priority need group” (United Kingdom 2018). For people who meet the criteria of statutory homelessness, there are significant implications; they are referred to as “acceptances,” and local government authorities have a “statutory duty to provide assistance.” The UK government observes that people who meet the statutory homeless definition “are rarely homeless in the literal sense of being without a roof over their heads, but are more likely to be threatened with the loss of, or are unable to continue with, their current accommodation” (United Kingdom 2018).
There are multiple definitions adopted by different European countries, but most of them draw on the highly influential European Typology on Homelessness and Housing Exclusion (ETHOS) (O’Sullivan 2020). The New Zealand government draws on ETHOS to inform its official definition of homelessness. The ETHOS definition was developed to enable the collection of data to present a consistent picture of the incidence of homelessness across Europe. As Amore et al. (2011: 21) point out, “ETHOS is both a definition and a typology (or classification) of homelessness.” ETHOS takes it that there are three core dimensions to home: the physical domain, the social domain, and the legal domain. Lacking access to these domains signifies homelessness or housing exclusion. Although there is an important debate about where the boundaries should be drawn between homelessness and housing exclusion and the conceptual basis for the boundaries (Amore et al. 2011; Amore 2013), the ETHOS definition is significant for specifying the important elements of home. It provides a framework for considering how the nature, quality, and social environment of a dwelling can shape how we live. It is attuned to how housing is not synonymous with home, but, at the same time, it considers how the built form and physical structure of housing influence whether people can experience the subjective, personal, and social dimensions of home.
In addition to academic debates about the meaning of home and contestation among scholars about validity and conceptual boundaries, definitions of homelessness are subject to vigorous debate (Fitzpatrick, Watts, et al. 2021) and challenges because of their political and human implications. Core to such debates is disagreement over a broad or narrow definition of homelessness, which at the same time is about who is included in homelessness definitions and who is excluded. The question of who is excluded from a definition that itself defines exclusion is an interesting paradox, but this is important for resource allocation and for what type of problem homelessness is accepted as being. A broad definition – for example, one that includes people residing in insecure and overcrowded housing – means that the size of the homeless population will be large. Where a statutory definition, such as exists in the United Kingdom and the United States, is too broad, the number of people for whom the state is responsible for providing services and resources is greater. Advocacy organizations will invariably favor a broad definition as it enables them to campaign for change on the basis that homelessness is a widespread problem (Busch-Geertsema 2010), as opposed to a narrow definition where only those who are unsheltered or in homeless accommodation are deemed to be homeless.
If the definition is too broad, it will include so many people and living situations that it can become meaningless and risk losing community support. If, for example, people who are at risk of homelessness are included in the definition, the conceptual clarity of homelessness – along with the additional ambiguities of identifying risk – becomes problematic. There is some agreement that definitions of homelessness need to be contained and not include those who are at risk of homelessness (Amore et al. 2011; Busch-Geertsema et al. 2016). This agreement notwithstanding, definitions are shaped by politics and prevailing attitudes, and raise difficult questions about subjectivity.
Politics, critique, and subjectivity
In the same way that the interests of advocacy groups lean toward a broad definition of homelessness, so governments responsible for homelessness favor narrow definitions that focus on unsheltered homelessness (Amore et al. 2011). Craig Willse (2015) argues that narrow definitions advocated by governments are used to demonstrate that the problem of homelessness is contained, and that it is a problem that concerns a distinct sector of the population rather than being about the organization of society. A narrow definition that ensures that only a small number of people are counted as homeless implies that the organization of society is sufficiently productive to adequately accommodate the vast majority of its citizens. In Singapore, for example, homelessness or homeless persons are not mentioned in government legislation, but rather the Singapore government deals with the issue through the Destitute Persons Act, the Miscellaneous Offences Act, and Vagrancy legislation (Tan and Forbes-Mewett 2018).
The way we define homelessness and the size and nature of the population it throws up, if one is defined and counted at all, thus says an awful lot about society. Homelessness definitions do not represent objective categorizations of social problems, but, as Keith Jacobs and colleagues (1999) observe, are structured by interest groups to have their agendas prioritized on the political landscape. Homelessness definitions are therefore not only about homelessness per se. They also give an insight into how advocacy groups can successfully have their interests recognized as a problem that deserves public and political attention. The way people live or ought to live is implicit in how we define homelessness and this constitutes a challenge to how we can objectively define a person as homeless.
A homelessness definition invariably takes a position on the cultural norms within a society pertaining to what citizens can expect housing to look like and how they should live in and use it (Chamberlain and Mackenzie 1992). These expectations are not universal. Cultural norms in society about what constitutes a home and adequate housing, moreover, change over time. What is considered as adequate housing and an appropriate way to live today in terms of size, privacy, and multigenerational families sharing one dwelling is materially different from what was seen as adequate at the turn of the twentieth century. In many wealthy countries, houses are far bigger now than they were 100 years ago (Viggers et al. 2017). This is associated with different cultural norms about access to independent bedrooms, bathrooms, and, thus, access to privacy. Privacy is recognized as a core domain of home, but what we consider adequate privacy in the home is anything but standard across societies and time.
In addition to our own ideas and expectations changing over time, broader ideas of home and adequate housing vary across cultural groups, both within any one society and across societies. The diversity in ways of living and in the use of housing puts pressure on definitions that assume adequacy means the same thing for all people. This challenge is highlighted profoundly when Indigenous people’s homelessness is considered. As we demonstrate in the next chapter, in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Indigenous people experience disproportionately high rates of homelessness. Beyond the disturbing reality this represents and what it says about systematic racism, we must also ask whether our objective definitions of homelessness – which governments and scholars in the field agree that we need for a range of useful reasons – meaningfully reflect the experiences and realities of Indigenous people.
A significant issue to consider is whether definitions of homelessness are grounded in Eurocentric assumptions about the relationship between housing and home (Habibis 2011; Kearns 2006). The international field poses thorny questions about whether homelessness definitions constitute an imposition on Indigenous people by judging their housing and ways of living against standards that conflict with their own realities. Kelly Greenop and Paul Memmott (2016) argue that anglophone ideas about overcrowding and homelessness in Australia make little sense to the way Indigenous people live, particularly in terms of cultural responsibilities to share housing with extended kin. In Australia, severe overcrowding is officially defined as homelessness. For Indigenous people, however, welcoming extended kin into the household, even if it means severe overcrowding, is a source of pride and “key to their identity as an Indigenous person” (Greenop and Memmott 2016: 288). Rather than being seen as a problem and the antithesis of home, sharing housing with kin embodies the meaning of home.
Focusing on Indigenous people in Canada, but also making a broader point about Indigenous homelessness in settler societies, Julia Christensen (2016: 4) takes aim at objective homelessness definitions used by governments, as they “fall short of adequately describing and conceptualizing Indigenous homelessness.” She goes on: “Not only are such definitions ill-fitting for Indigenous peoples’ ideas of how to live properly, they also keep the focus squarely on occupation of a dwelling, with little to no regard for the socio-cultural dimensions of Indigenous homelessness” (2016: 4). Core to the debate about Indigenous homelessness and the limitations of objective homelessness definitions is the realization that dominant understandings of what home means fail to take account of Indigenous perspectives. Also writing in the Canadian context, Dominic Alaazi and collaborators found Indigenous people’s sense of home and housing to be “qualitatively different from non-Indigenous people in similar circumstances” (2015: 31). Even though the physical structure of housing is an important element, the meaning of home for Indigenous people, and thus the definition of homelessness, must also be seen as a connection to land, identity, family, and culture (Alaazi et al. 2015; Christensen 2013). Robin Kearns (2006) engages in this debate in his work about Māori people, the Indigenous people of New Zealand. He illustrates the fact that Māori have a strong sense of feeling for home even when they are inadequately housed, or even sleeping rough, because they “regard themselves as tangata whenua (literally, people of the land), a status they acquired by living entirely off the land within their tribal territories for generations prior to European contact” (2006: 250). Analyses of home and homelessness for Indigenous people therefore represent a powerful challenge for objective definitions of homelessness used to enumerate populations and allocate resources.
The conceptualization of home for Indigenous people that focuses squarely on connection to land and identity provides an insight into how colonization and its legacy are experienced as homelessness. Scholars interpret this as spiritual homelessness (Christensen 2013; Memmott et al. 2003), an idea that not only puts pressure on objective definitions of homelessness anchored in the adequacy of a dwelling, but also, as Christensen says, represents a “profound irony of being homeless in one’s homeland” (2013: 823). In a further reminder of the need to approach objective definitions of homelessness with some caution, Greenop and Memmott write that “housing measures become assimilationist when they continue to prescribe housing needs according to Anglo-Australian nuclear family norms” (2016: 294).
It is easy to conclude that Indigenous people in settler societies experiencing vastly higher rates of homelessness than non-Indigenous people represents an injustice and societal failings on many levels. In parts of Canada, for example, Indigenous people are anywhere between eight and eleven times more likely than non-Indigenous people to experience homelessness (Agrawal and Zoe 2021). The scholars noted above alert us to the additional burden and source of injustice when our objective definitions of homelessness serve to prescribe certain ways of Indigenous living as a problem. The stakes are high, especially given that our objective definitions of homelessness are used to say something about the other.
April Veness contributes to this debate with reference to non-Indigenous people in the United States. She clearly demonstrates the many problems with a relativist definition of home and homelessness, but her in-depth research among people experiencing objectively defined homelessness and entrenched poverty found that they “actively dismiss the broadly-based homeless label that threatens to envelop and invalidate their personal worlds. Instead they assert their own alternative to society’s definition of home and hope that their homes are left alone, intact” (1993: 321). Veness does not romanticize the experiences of people for whom society has failed to provide adequate income or housing. In line with experiences of Indigenous people defined as homeless, her research forces us “to rethink what home means” (1993: 337). If we can accept that any definition of home must take account of people’s subjective experiences and meaning-making (Easthope 2004), and that homelessness is the absence of home, we must be open to considering how our objective definitions of homelessness must be infused with the realities and subjectivities of the people we define.
Objective versus subjective definitions of homelessness
An objective definition is important for the many reasons articulated above, but also for the reasons engaged above there are important limitations when people’s subjective experiences are discounted. However, a subjective definition of homelessness is problematic in many ways. People may not even perceive their situation as homeless when their life experiences show them that society is not going to provide anything better (Parsell and Phillips 2014). People come to accept as normal the deprivation, including demonstrably inadequate housing, to which society subjects them. We should not conflate people’s acceptance (adaptive preferences) with adequacy. There are significant risks with a subjective definition of homelessness that does not take account how people’s perceptions of adequacy are mediated by their experiences of societal failure.
It is also important to be cautious about a subjective definition of homelessness because it would almost certainly throw resource allocation into chaos. Without a clear objective definition, there would be no reliable or systematic way to provide public assistance to people who require it. A subjective definition would be equally problematic as it would very likely be used to discount the extent of societal failure that produces the consistent, and in many countries growing, numbers of the population experiencing homelessness. As Jacobs et al. (1999) note, dominant objective definitions have helped to put inadequate housing and our need to do something about it on the political agenda.
The limitations of a purely subjective definition mean that an objective definition of homelessness is required, but we need to consider how such a definition would be beneficial by taking account of the experiences of the people who are defined. The not-so-subtle emphasis here is on “the people defined.” As Ruth Lister (2021) illustrates with reference to poverty, naming one’s self is a right, whereas being defined by others is an exercise and illustration of power. Naming and constructing social problems not only shape what policies emerge as a result, but, by definition, they also work to restrict and exclude certain people (Bacchi 2009). Poor people face the challenge of having their own sense of identity recognized and socially validated. Definitions of homelessness are not benign categories that are merely used to enumerate and allocate resources; they are conceptualized in a way to prescribe a proper way of living and of judging people as lacking when they do not meet the criteria set out in the definition. The other people need to be at the table when definitions about their lives are constructed.
The definition put forward by Busch-Geertsema et al. (2016), which draws on both Amore (2013) and ETHOS, offers a promising start. They define homelessness as severe housing deprivation that is the state of “living in severely inadequate housing due to a lack of access to minimally adequate housing” (2016: 125). This definition emphasizes homelessness as a form of deprivation that is forced upon people, highlighting how living conditions can be imposed upon people and is beyond their control.
Given that homelessness is a state of forced deprivation, we must ensure that rigid definitions of homelessness are not also enforced on people. As we examine in some depth in the next chapter, we can only meaningfully grasp an individual’s experience of homelessness by examining the resources that are made available or withheld through the deliberate structuring of society. Conceptualizing homelessness as forced deprivation and exclusion from adequate housing, and creating the conditions for people to determine whether these conceptualizations make sense of their experiences, serve as a start to ensuring that definitions of homelessness can be both broadly applicable and individually meaningful.
The priority given to people experiencing housing deprivation to have the opportunity to describe what home and homelessness means to them speaks to a broader point about labels and the language we use to refer to people. It is critical to not use language that assumes a person’s experience of homelessness encapsulates their identity. In this book, we use the terms “people who are homeless,” or “people experiencing homelessness.” These terms are used to distinguish the state of homelessness from the people experiencing it. The book thus avoids the term “homeless person,” a term that, as we examine in Chapter 5, can give rise to a misunderstanding that homelessness says something salient about the identities of the people defined in such a way.
2Homelessness as a Societal Problem
In 1990, Elliott Sclar lamented the New York Times and the liberal view that it pushed. The view presented homelessness as a mental health issue; more specifically, a problem of homeless people not being in mental health institutions. Still widely held years later, many link the deinstitutionalization of people in mental health facilities with the growth of homelessness. Yet, Sclar’s comments from more than 30 years ago are as relevant today as they were then: homelessness is the decision to defund affordable housing, which culminates in too many people who are poor trying to access too few affordable housing units.
If defining homelessness was not tricky enough, determining the nature of the problem provokes even more interest, angst, and debate. In its simplest terms, determining what type of problem homelessness is has revolved around debates about whether homelessness is a structural or an individual problem. The structure versus individual disagreement is characterized by contradictory questions about the extent to which we explain homelessness as resulting from the behavior of the individual who is homeless, including how they could (ought to) behave differently, or the extent to which a person’s homelessness is a product of social forces outside their control. The general thrust of these debates is not of course unique to homelessness. They pervaded the social sciences throughout the twentieth century and are critical to contestations over other domains of human and social life, including unemployment (Sharone 2013), poverty (Lister 2021), and health (Marmot 2005).
