Homelessness

Homelessness denotes an extreme and particular form of poverty characterized by a lack of secure housing. Homelessness is commonly divided into two groups: absolute and relative. Absolute homelessness refers to people who have no shelter at all and are forced to either sleep rough (outside, in stairwells, etc.) or stay in a temporary shelter. Relative homelessness includes many people who are able to attain some form of accommodation but for a variety of reasons are precariously or insufficiently housed. This includes those who are doubling up/couch surfing, those who are staying in a rooming house or residential hotel, and/or those who are under constant threat of losing their housing due to eviction. The definition of homelessness is politicized, as different definitions produce wildly varying estimates of the number of homeless as well as different courses of remedial action. The definition of homelessness is often either broadened or restricted, depending on the context and ideological disposition of the analyst, to include panhandlers, itinerant laborers, “squeegee kids” (who approach drivers with offers to clean their windshields), the disaster afflicted, refugees, and others. From a geographical perspective, where homeless people live and what they do there are particularly important to the definition of who is homeless.

Homelessness is not necessarily a permanent condition; people may move in and out of homelessness, often several times in their lives. Homelessness (whether absolute or relative) can be divided into transitional, chronic, and episodic forms. Transitional homelessness consists of brief experiences of homelessness, often due to family or economic disruptions, and is the easiest form to treat with preventive or emergency services. Chronic homelessness describes an experience of being homeless that lasts for lengthy periods and is interrupted only temporarily by “housed” experiences. Episodic homelessness refers to repeated forays in and out of homelessness; it is the most difficult form to address through government policy. Thus, public policy interventions tend to target the chronically homeless while neglecting episodic homelessness.

Early debates often counterposed an individual agency model against a structural understanding of the causes of homelessness. Individual/agency explanations of homelessness focus on life-changing events (family breakup, domestic violence, disability) and/or personal failings (mental health, addiction, delinquency, poor job skills) in predicting homelessness. Structural explanations, on the other hand, consider capitalist housing and labor markets as systems that produce poverty and homelessness. The foci of research on the structural causes of homelessness include economic restructuring, mass unemployment, rent gouging, gentrification, deindustrialization, deinstitutionalization, housing policies that benefit homeowners at the expense of renters, and the privatization of social housing.

Research has sought to provide more holistic perspectives that integrate the structural and agency models. Economistic work in this area, for instance, finds that while combinations of individual-level variables predict who is most susceptible to homelessness in a given place, local housing and labor market conditions determine the number and proportion of the poor that actually end up homeless. However, this work has been criticized for treating individual-level risk factors as exogenous to housing market conditions, when the evidence suggests that the two are in fact linked. For example, the research suggests that depression and substance abuse are as much an outcome of homelessness as their cause and that [Page 1441]the move out of homelessness is a major factor in reducing both problems. To counter these shortcomings, homelessness research has moved to examine the pathways into and out of homelessness, in which the various risk factors and life situations make certain people who are more susceptible to homelessness interact with the structural processes occurring in labor and housing markets.

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