Mobility

Mobility as a Defining Feature of Homelessness: A Historical Review

For 150 years, academics have considered mobility as a key feature of homelessness, often discerning patterns and types of homelessness through this feature. Following these definitions over time offers a way to understand the shifting relationship between mobility and other conditions of homelessness.

Within the United States, the issue of homelessness in general, and homeless mobility in particular, became especially prominent in the 1860s and 1870s. The disruptive effects of the Civil War, largescale immigration, boom-bust economic cycles, the growing popularity of the railroad and the subsequent opening of the Western frontier—all created a highly visible group of homeless individuals, primarily men, alternatively known as “hoboes,” “tramps,” “bums,” and the like. Although definitions varied, all focused on mobility and work: “The hobo was a migratory worker, the tramp a migratory non-worker and the bum a non-migratory non-worker” (Cresswell 2001, 49). These designations were frequently conflated, however, as the “tramp crisis” of the 1870s produced a strong moral, social, and legal backlash against anyone who appeared transient. Transiency became a crisis in the 1870s, a result of growing numbers of highly mobile and seemingly unattached men. This backlash was based on the widely held perception that “mobility appears to involve a number of absences—the absence of commitment, attachment and involvement—a lack of significance. The more widespread associations of mobility with deviance, shiftlessness and disrepute come to mind” (Cresswell 2001, 15).

With the gradual closing of the Western frontier, homeless individuals began to pool in the nation's large urban centers in areas known as “skid rows.” By the early 1900s, the tramp problem was coming under intense academic scrutiny, concomitant with the rise of the social sciences. The most prominent of these early efforts to categorize the homeless was Nels Anderson's The Hobo (1923), in which Anderson employed two familiar criteria: mobility and work. To measure mobility, he used Chicago's “main stem” (skid row) area as a point of reference as a major node for nationwide and regional movements. Five categories emerged: the seasonal worker, hobo, tramp, bum, and homeguard. The first three were particularly mobile. The seasonal worker moved between summer labor in the countryside and winters in the city. The hobo was less temporally and spatially consistent, usually moving wherever and whenever employment was available. The tramp simply enjoyed the experience of traveling. Homeguard refers specifically to men who rarely left Hobohemia (another term for skid row) and worked intermittently. Many were former migratory men who decided to “settle down.” The bum was not only immobile, but congenitally unemployable and without any visible means of support.

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