Shelters

In its primary sense, shelter refers to any humanmade contrivance designed (or adapted) to provide protection from the elements. Across cultures, shelter varies markedly in material, durability, portability, and ownership. It also varies in occupancy; well into the Middle Ages, houses in Europe routinely included livestock as well as family members among their occupants. Whether cave or lean-to, tenement or palace, shelter buffers (and demarcates) culture against nature. King Lear may have been evicted [Page 499]from his royal home, but he found shelter when Poor Tom shared his cave on the heath.

With respect to homelessness, its usage has generally been more restricted. Peter Rossi's well-known definition of homeless, for example, includes anyone who “lacks regular access to a conventional dwelling” (Down and Out in America, 1989). Researchers (though not all policymakers, as we will see) have tended to operationalize this as anyone “living in the street or in shelters.” But that assumes that the genus “shelter” has been rigorously defined and catalogued and, as the Census Bureau discovered in its last two decennial efforts to include homeless persons in the national count, that is not the case. Aside from the difficulties raised by what we might call residential status—Are facilities for victims of domestic violence to be included? What about hospitalized persons who were homeless at the time of admittance and will be again when discharged?—there are the more obvious ones of coverage. Not all built structures that may function as shelters advertise themselves as such. Church basements and jails both may serve the purpose, but neither comes to the bureaucratic mind when mapping out the universe for a one-night count of the homeless poor. And that oversight underscores a recurring difficulty in the wrestling with the meaning of this term: Shelter may be defined categorically as a place whose purpose is formally avowed and acknowledged or as a function that may be fulfilled covertly and informally.