Homelessness

In contemporary society, homelessness has sparked the modern imagination. It is the subject of psychoanalytical theories and modern and poststructural philosophies, as well as so-called hobo literature. It is also the bane of policy makers and urban planners. Theorists have treated homelessness philosophically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the mark of modernity, including views ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Gaston Bachelard and George Lukács, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Homi Bhaba, Edward Said, and many others. More concretely, Hannah Arendt famously declared the twentieth century to be the “century of the refugee,” a result from forced population movements caused by stricter enforcement of borders and from the mass displacement wrought by the world wars. A new modern phenomenon, statelessness, has linked the condition of domestic homeless people to that of internationally displaced peoples. As Simone Weil notes, the nation-state has produced a sort of uprootedness (déracinement) in the West experience.

In the United States, authors have seen homelessness as the paradigm of a frontier mentality, in hobo literature and the Beat generation's novels and poetry. Social scientists have used the paradigm of extreme social dislocation—the dark shadow behind the American dream—beginning with investigations spearheaded by the University of Chicago in the 1940s.

Definition of homelessness in the United States often rely on empirical observations. According to the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1986, 42 U.S.C. § 11301 (2000), which provides federal money for shelter programs, a homeless individual lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate night-time residence and… has a primary night-time residency that is: (A) a supervised publicly or privately operated shelter designed to provide temporary living accommodations… (B) an institution that provides a temporary residence for individuals intended to be institutionalized, or (C) a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings.

Other industrialized countries often define homelessness on three levels. First, unqualified homelessness includes those on the street, who are the most visible homeless people. Second, there are those in public shelters or temporarily living with other families or individuals (in the United States, the latter group is classified as at-risk homeless). Third, other homeless live in single room occupancy hotels (SROs) or boarding houses with no lease or other legally binding contract giving them the right to stay in the space. Perhaps the most succinct expression of today's definitions is the French term for the homeless,sans domicile fixe (without a regular home).

Other social divisions include the visible versus the invisible homeless. The former include homeless individuals on the street. These people are in the public eye or the government can count through their receipt of emergency shelter or other benefits. The invisible homeless include individuals who do not want to make their presence known to the government or other individuals, including women escaping domestic abuse; homeless women fearing rape or robbery; individuals staying in shantytowns, under bridges, or in abandoned buildings; unauthorized immigrants; runaway teenagers; and foster children. The complexity of the situation combined with the invisibility of some homeless people make the population difficult to count or serve.

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