Homelessness

Following an explosion in levels of homelessness of all kinds across the advanced capitalist countries over the past 20 years or so, there has been a significant increase in the number of academic studies of homelessness during recent years, including a growing body of work by geographers.

It is important first to define homelessness. This is by no means an easy task. Even if we confine our attention to the problems of homelessness in the advanced Western economies (rather than considering the much more extensive problems of homelessness and insecure housing in the global South), distinctions need to be drawn between different forms of homelessness, for example, between visible homelessness (or rooflessness) and hidden homelessness. Complicated legislative distinctions are also often drawn between different homeless groups, and these differ in different countries. These distinctions are important because they may determine whether or not a person is counted in official estimates of the homeless population or becomes eligible for (state) aid. Complicating this issue further, others have sought to think instead about the experience of homelessness, defining homelessness not in relation to the absence of accommodation but rather in relation to the absence of those feelings of security and belonging (usually) associated with a sense of home.

Hence, problems of definition make it very difficult to establish an accurate picture of the size of the homeless population because it must first be determined how homelessness is being defined. Such problems also make it extremely difficult to trace the distribution of (different) homeless populations or to compare levels of homelessness in different places.

In seeking to understand the geographies of homelessness, we can consider three key themes usefully. First, geographers have explored the causes of homelessness. Early work in the field often located the causes of homelessness with the individual, suggesting that people become homeless either because of some kind of pathology (e.g., alcoholism) or because they suffer from particular vulnerabilities (e.g., mental or physical ill health). As the traditional population of older, single homeless men has been supplemented by a new homeless population of younger people, women, and a growing proportion of people from ethnic minority groups, the current orthodoxy is to instead look to those broader structural changes that have had especially hard impacts on particular groups over the past couple of decades, thereby making them especially vulnerable to homelessness. Of these, particular attention has been focused on processes of economic restructuring (with deindustrialization and selective reindustrialization leading to a significant rise in the number of long-term unemployed and a more insecure labor market) and changes to state[Page 227] welfare regimes (notably reductions in state benefits, deinstitutionalization, and a sharp decline in the supply of affordable public housing). The best work in this field has sought to trace the impact of broader structural changes operating at a variety of scales (from processes of global economic restructuring to changes in national welfare regimes) to changes in levels of homelessness, and to the groups most affected by homelessness, in different localities.

Second, during the mid-1990s, American geographer Lois Takahashi called for more attention to be paid to the ways in which homeless people are represented and become stigmatized, and she developed a useful model setting out the various “axes of stigma” through which different homeless people are positioned—as vulnerable and deserving of help, as a threat and in need of control, and so on. As a result, geographers have begun to examine the ways in which homeless people, and the problems of homelessness more generally, are constructed in a range of media, including newspapers, novels and films, academic textbooks, census materials, and legislative systems. Perhaps the most interesting such work is that examining the ways in which particular spaces and places (e.g., city streets, alleyways, underpasses) come to be seen as “spaces of homelessness,” whereas in other places and spaces (e.g., a “purified” rural “idyll”), even if problems of homelessness are evident, they tend to be ignored because homelessness there is literally “unimaginable.” Such work is crucial. As authors in this field have argued, the ways in which the problems of homelessness, homeless people, and the geographies of homelessness are represented and defined have a significant impact on responses to the problems of homelessness.

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