Top Research Papers on Homelessness

Rates of past-year suicide attempts and past- year homelessness were strongly associated, suggesting that homelessness and suicidality strongly co-occur, but among adults with recent homelessness and a suicide attempt history, suicidal behavior began decades ago and likely preceded homelessness.

The central argument of this report is that homelessness should be conceptualised as a 'career process'. Social scientists use the term 'career' to refer to the transitional stages involved in the development of any form of biographical identity (Goffman 1961; Becker 1963; Snow and Anderson 1993; Hutson and Liddiard 1994). The notion of a 'homeless career' draws attention to the process of becoming homeless as people pass through various phases before they develop a self-identity as a homeless person. The homeless career also highlights the factors that influence how people move from one stage...

Federal spending on homelessness has increased significantly in recent years. I estimate the relationship between federal homelessness funding and homeless counts in 2011, 2013, and 2015 cross sections. I instrument for funding using a community's pre‐1940 housing share, a key variable in an originally unrelated funding formula borrowed for homelessness grants. Funding increases sheltered homelessness; meanwhile, funding is unrelated to unsheltered homelessness. Lower bound estimates suggest that the minimum cost of reducing unsheltered homelessness has increased over time, from $16,400 in 201...

It is demonstrated that the volatile nature of funding availability leads to good-as-random variation in the allocation of resources to individuals seeking assistance, and temporary financial assistance can be used successfully to prevent homelessness, is affordable, and helps individuals and families.

Using in-depth face-to-face interviews, this study explored 34 homeless shelter workers' perceptions of homelessness and working with the homeless. We asked the following questions: 1) What were the barriers that homeless shelter residents faced in combating homelessness, from the perspective of the homeless shelter workers? 2) What were the challenges that homeless shelter workers encountered in working with this at-risk population? Our findings shared the realities that the homeless population faced from the lens of shelter workers with different job responsibilities (ranging from customer s...

Differences in causal attributions of homelessness based on gender, age, nationality, educational background, perceived social class, evolution of personal economic situation, and future expectations between the members of 2 groups are analyzed.

There is a lot of negative stigma tied to homelessness and a lot of misconceptions on how people end up in those situations in the first place. This podcast not only shares the assumptions made by the housed, but also the personal story of Sean Adams who experienced homelessness in his past. This podcast works towards bringing awareness to the fact that homelessness looks different to all individuals and that it is not only a means of the common stereotypes: drug addiction, alcoholism, laziness, and more. Sources: Adams, Sean. Personal Interview. 8 April 2023. Boyland, Robyn. Personal intervie...

How HUG takes a multi-pronged approach to address the variety of policies and practices that target homeless people, particularly people of color, recognizing that systems change requires a multifaceted approach that adapts to dynamic social and political contexts.

The causes of homelessness or barriers to escaping homelessness for people with/without mental illness/cognitive disability are compared; problems with the Japanese homeless policy are revealed; and an effective and necessary support system is proposed.

This paper analyses changes in the conceptualization of "homelessness" in Australian policies, programmes and services from the 1970s to 2006. Research and commentary confirm a shift away from an understanding of homelessness in terms of "structural", social and economic factors to an understanding in terms of "individual" issues. Research reflects this dichotomy, but attempts to reconcile the two explanations have failed in practice. Using Foucault's work on governmentality, historical official statements and in-depth interviews, I show how changing policies and programmes, involving an exten...

The enrollment phase of the Family Options Study provides information about the mismatch of the homeless service system and the needs and desires of families experiencing homelessness in 12 communities.

"It must be some kind of experiment or something, to see how long people can live without food, without shelter, without security."-Homeless woman in Grand Central StationKim Hopper has dedicated his career to trying to address the problem of homelessness in the United States. In this powerful book, he draws upon his dual strengths as anthropologist and advocate to provide a deeper understanding of the roots of homelessness. He also investigates the complex attitudes brought to bear on the issue since his pioneering fieldwork with Ellen Baxter twenty years ago helped put homelessness on the pu...

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. The number of people experiencing homelessness is rising in the majority of advanced western economies. Bringing to light the most contemporary research, policy and practice, this book presents stark evidence from Irish experience to argue that we need to urgently reimagine homelessness as a pattern of residential instability and economic precariousness regularly experienced by marginal households.

A summary on the state of the literature on homelessness and health since the onset of Housing First initiatives is presented, which indicates that homelessness continues to threaten the health of the urban population and will continue to do so as long as it is allowed to persist.

Cities throughout the United States are experiencing a dramatic rise in the number of homeless persons. Who are the homeless? How many homeless persons are there in America? What policies and programs for the homeless have and should be implemented at the federal, state and local levels? This collection of articles, reports and case studies brings together a vari-ety of perspectives to help answer these questions. The materials include discussions on the political ramifications of the issue, the changing mass media images, and the many sources of homelessness. Estimates by the De-partment of H...

Rather than the streets, the focus of this article will be upon other spaces in the city that homeless individuals occupy. Within a context of the purported punitive or revanchist city, the paper examines a seemingly more accommodating, social welfare response to homelessness—“spaces of care”—enacted by frontline workers who interact with homeless individuals in one mostly volunteer-run day center in Brighton, United Kingdom (Cloke et al, 2010: 10). The research focused on how the organization is financed because of a shift in model of funding—from a reliance on smaller donations to relationsh...

Despite an extensive literature on homelessness there is surprisingly little work that investigates the roots of homelessness by tracking homeless people over time. In this fascinating and much-needed ethnographic study, Megan Ravenhill presents the results of ten years' research on the streets and in the hostels and day-centres of the UK, incorporating intensive interviews with 150 homeless and formerly homeless people as well as policy makers and professionals working with homeless people. Ravenhill discusses the biographical, structural and behavioural factors that lead to homelessness. Amo...

In this immersive virtual reality experience, spend days in the life of someone who can no longer afford a home as you walk in another's shoes, facing the adversity of living with diminishing resources.

The major theme in this book is that people are homeless because of structural arrangements and trends that result in extreme impoverishment and a shortage of affordable housing in U.S. cities. It explains the economic and historical causes of homelessness with accounts of individuals and families.

Homeless Heritage describes the process of using archaeological methodologies to collaboratively document how contemporary homeless people use and experience the city. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in Bristol and York, the book first describes the way in which archaeological methods and theory have come to be usefully applied to the contemporary world, before exploring the historical development of the concept of homelessness. Working with homeless people, the author undertook surveys and two excavations of contemporary homeless sites, and the team co-curated two public heritage exhibitions ...

This article discusses three kinds of mobility among early stage researchers: geographical mobility, mobility between disciplines – or interdisciplinarity – and cross-sectoral mobility. It focuses on how PhD fellows engage with and negotiate experiences of mobility. These types of mobility have largely been presented as inherently beneficial in mainstream policy discourse, but this article presents a more nuanced picture of mobility, showing the challenges of mobility, as experienced and articulated by PhD fellows and some of their supervisors. The research is based on twenty-six interviews wi...

Abstract It is an easy assumption that social service programs and social scientific studies respond to homelessness after the fact, attempting to understand and prevent it. This book, however, argues that homelessness is an effect of social services and sciences, which shape not only what counts as homelessness, but also what will be done about it. Drawing from many years of work experience in homeless advocacy and activist settings, as well as interviews conducted with program managers, counselors, and staff at homeless services organizations in New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco...

Abstract Homelessness is often conceptualised as an urban problem. However, significant numbers of people experiencing homelessness live in regional, rural and remote areas, where distances can be considerable and there are fewer housing options and services available to assist them. Drawing on the perspectives of service providers, this paper discusses contested understandings of home and homelessness as well as housing and service provision in two remote Western Australian mining towns. The key findings were that normative policy definitions of homelessness that focused on ‘living in a house...

Trauma among homeless men was examined using structured interviews with day shelter clients to assess for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and those with positive PTSD screens had been homeless longer and were more likely to have met time criteria for chronic homelessness.

The number of K–12 students experiencing homelessness is increasing across the country. Schools may serve as sources of support and stability for homeless children, but little is known about the types of schools that homeless students attend or about the communities in which they live. We investigate the context of student homelessness in Los Angeles by analyzing student-level administrative data from the Los Angeles Unified School District and publicly available data on neighborhoods and schools from school years 2008–2009 to 2016–2017. Our findings suggest that homeless students tend to be c...

There is currently a little observational work exploring homeless peoples’ digital networking behaviors, with previous research relying on limited self-report data. This study fills this gap through a qualitative thematic analysis of the public subreddit r/homeless. We analyzed the 30 most commented posts on the subreddit from each month of 2019, examining a total of 360 posts. We find that r/homeless contributions primarily center around (a) commentary on social issues, (b) communication of needs and concerns, (c) offering of care and support, and (d) online community management and engagemen...

Many women become homeless each year, both women who are alone and women with children. Both groups face substantial risks to their physical and mental health, as do the children of homeless mothers. Little is known about the similarities and differences between these two groups in terms of their demographic characteristics, their circumstances on presentation to specialist homelessness services, and the factors that have contributed to their homelessness. The current study analysed data from 163 single mothers with children and 126 lone women who presented to a specialist homelessness service...

Criminal trespassing (CT) is an understudied misdemeanor offense often enforced to maintain control over contested spaces and, in practice, often disproportionately used against disenfranchised populations such as the homeless and mentally ill. This study uses the CT case files of a county criminal district attorney’s office to investigate how cases involving defendants experiencing homelessness are handled compared with other defendants. Results show that homeless defendants make up a substantial portion of all CT cases, are more likely to be repeat CT defendants, and account for most jail se...

This article explores existing evidence concerning the causes and experience of homelessness among lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people. A total of 88 sources, published after 2000, were included in the review. This represents the most comprehensive evidence review to date on the issue, mapping out what is known about LGBT homelessness and identifying gaps in knowledge for future research. With a few notable exceptions, the experiences of homeless LGBT people have been neglected in UK housing and homelessness literature. Despite this caveat, we found clear evidence that LGBT people a...

Unprecedented numbers of people are seeking safety and a better life in the European Union. This research explores the consequences for homelessness services as existing systems for processing asylum seekers and refugees have attempted to process a new level of mass migration and have come under sometimes unprecedented strain. Looking at 12 countries, including Greece, Italy and Germany, the research explores the use of homelessness systems to support migrants and considers the risks of increased homelessness among migrant groups in the European Union. This comparative report is the sixth in a...

Being Black, a current traveler, and history of injection drug use were all significantly associated with a decreased likelihood in identifying as homeless, but having fair/poor health, accessing shelter services, and reporting one’s own substance use as a reason for homelessness were not significantly associated.

The results show that there was no “actor-observer bias” in causal attributions for homelessness in Madrid and a higher percentage of members of the homeless group and domiciled service-users group attributed homelessness to individualistic causes and they blamed homeless people for their situation to a greater extent.

A high proportion of uncorrected refractive error in this sample and therefore a need for regular eye examinations and provision of refractive correction for homeless people is identified.

A high proportion of injuries involved the extremities and pose significant barriers to functional recovery in this vulnerable population and strategies to prevent these injuries are paramount.

Government agencies use varying criteria in defining homelessness. While scholars debate over and use different definitions of homelessness, little research has explored the impacts the definition has on perceived problem severity and the types of communities receiving aid. I first explore four definitions of child and youth homelessness used by United States’ federal agencies. I then use panel data for school districts, which report homelessness by subgroup, to analyze how the definition of homelessness changes its prevalence and leads to disparate impacts. I find the definition of homelessne...

People of color or mixed race account for more than half of all people experiencing homelessness, despite comprising less than a quarter of the total population in the United States. What are the primary drivers of this severe racial concentration of homelessness? Through a literature review of historical and contemporary research, this article highlights the extensive history of homelessness among Black, Latinx, and Native American communities and finds evidence for racialized pathways into homelessness. The literature points to three primary systems of stratification that drive racial dispar...

The value of clinical interventions that address factors associated with exiting supported housing are suggested—for example, motivational interviewing or social skills training—adapted to the setting and context of supported housing.

The difficulties defining homelessness are shown and the necessary criteria for who will be deemed a homeless person in a developing country are examined, which showed a mean age of 47 years for these individuals.

Papers dedicated solely to research methods are rare within housing studies. This is despite the importance of ensuring methodological rigour within studies that may go on to influence further research, practice and policy. Likewise ethnographic housing research is relatively uncommon even though this approach captures data at a greater level of depth than other methods. Building upon the work of prominent housing researchers who advocate the use of ethnography, this paper highlights the benefits of this approach for housing and homelessness studies, as well as discussing some of its challenge...

Although research has been sporadic, the available evidence indicates that gender is consistently associated with differentiated trajectories through homelessness in Europe. Women’s pathways through homelessness have been linked to domestic violence, women being ‘protected’ by welfare systems when dependent children are living with them and an apparently greater tendency for women to use and exhaust informal support, rather than homelessness or welfare services. This evidence is frequently disregarded in current European homelessness research, which often uses conceptualisa- tions, definitions...