omelessness describes the condition of people without a regular dwelling. People who are homeless are unable or unwilling to acquire and maintain regular, safe, and adequate housing, or lack “fixed, regular, and adequate night-time residence.” The legal definition of “homeless” varies from country to country, or among different entities or institutions in the same country or region. The term homeless may also include people whose primary night-time residence is in a homeless shelter, a warming center, a domestic violence shelter or other ad hoc housing situation. American Government homeless enumeration studies also include persons who sleep in a public or private place not designed for use as a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings. In western countries the large majority of homeless are men (75-80%), with single males particularly over represented. The “unsheltered” are that segment of a homeless community who do not have ordinary lawful access to buildings in which to sleep. Such persons frequently prefer the term “houseless” to the term “homeless”. Others may use the term street people which does not fully encompass all unsheltered in that many such persons do not spend their time on urban “street” environments, and to the contrary shun such locales and prefer to convert unoccupied buildings, or to inhabit mountains or, more often, lowland meadows, creeks and beaches.
A portion of them are generally in transit, but there is no generally accepted terminology to describe them; some nomenclature is frequently associated with derogatory connotations, and thus the professional and vernacular lingo to describe these persons is both evolving and not lacking in controversy. Much of the concern stems from the European situation, where “homeless” persons of Roma, Sinti and other ethnic descent have rejected the term “gypsy”. Other terms which some use regarding in-transit persons are: transient, vagabond, tramp or “railroad tramp”. Occasionally these terms are interchanged with terms not necessarily implying that the person is a traveler, i.e. hobo. The term “bum” is used for persons lacking a work ethic, or ethics generally[citation needed], but its application to persons purely on the basis of homelessness is strictly a form of prejudicial labeling.
The term “transient” is frequently used in police reports, without any precise definitions across jurisdictions. Many jurisdictions have developed programs to locate such persons in short term emergency shelter, often in churches or other institutional real property, during particularly cold spells. These are referred to as warming centers, and are credited by their advocates as life saving. The United Nations, either via one of its agencies or via a vote in the General Assembly has agreed upon various minimum conditions for a person to be countable as homeless. It is understood that these legal definitions for homelessness may date back to the beginnings of the UN in the late 1940s.
The definition of a person being a refugee is at least partly linked to the definition of homelessness as many refugees may have been or are homeless. In 2004, The United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, defined a homeless household as: Homeless households are those households without a shelter that would fall within the scope of living quarters. They carry their few possessions with them, sleeping in the streets, in doorways or on piers, or in another space, on a more or less random basis. In its Recommendations for the Censuses of Population and Housing, the CES identifies homeless people under two broad groups:
1) Primary homelessness (or rooflessness). This category includes persons living in the streets without a shelter that would fall within the scope of living quarters;
2) Secondary homelessness. This category may include persons with no place of usual residence who move frequently between various types of accommodations (including dwellings, shelters and institutions for the homeless or other living quarters). This category includes persons living in private dwellings but reporting ‘no usual address’ on their census form.
The CES acknowledges that the above approach does not provide a full definition of the ‘homeless’. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted 10 December 1948 by the UN General Assembly, contains this text regarding housing and quality of living: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Homelessness in the United States is addressed by United States Department of Housing and Urban Development which promulgates best practices and definitions which are highly influential. HUD defines homeless as pertinent to an individual who: lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate night-time residence; and has a primary night-time residence that is – a supervised publicly or privately operated shelter designed to provide temporary living accommodations (including welfare hotels, congregate shelters, and transitional housing for the mentally ill); an institution that provides a temporary residence for individuals intended to be institutionalized; or a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings.
HUD defines a “chronically homeless” person as “an unaccompanied homeless individual with a disabling condition who has either been continuously homeless for a year or more, or has had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years.” Much of the current literature takes note that such persons often account for a disproportionately large percent of the public and private expenditures related to homelessness. In response to this perception, there is as of early 2011 an increased momentum, particularly on both US coasts, to “target” the chronically homeless utilizing a vulnerability index system. These “VI’s” code for conditions such as advance kidney or liver disease, HIV-AIDS or multiple hospitalization as well as factors such as age. Criticism has been relatively muted as parties often critical of conventional homeless service systems recognize a window of opportunity for innovations.
Common Ground is an effort which originated in NYC, claiming high success in the Times Square area, and now proliferating its model in other areas such as Los Angeles. The “unhoused” are that segment of a homeless community who do not have ordinary lawful access to buildings in which to sleep, as referred to in the HUD definition as persons occupying “place not designed for … sleeping accommodation for human beings. Such persons frequently prefer the term “houseless” to the term “homeless”. Recent homeless enumeration survey documentation utilizes the term “unsheltered homeless.” HUD requires jurisdictions which participate in Continuum of Care grant programs to count their homeless every two years. These counts have led to a variety of creative measures to avoid undercounting. Thus teams of counters, often numbering in the hundreds in logistically complex volunteer efforts, seek out the unsheltered in various nooks and crannies. There has been a significant number of unsheltered persons dying of hypothermia, adding impetus to the trend of establishing warming centers as well as extending the enumeration surveys with vulnerability indexes.
In USA, following the Peasants’ Revolt, English constables were authorised under a 1383 statute to collar vagabonds and force them to show support; if they could not, the penalty was gaol. Vagabonds could be sentenced to the stocks for three days and nights; in 1530, whipping was added. The presumption was that vagabonds were unlicensed beggars. In 1547, a bill was passed that subjected vagrants to some of the more extreme provisions of the criminal law, namely two years servitude and branding with a “V” as the penalty for the first offense and death for the second. Large numbers of vagabonds were among the convicts transported to the American colonies in the 18th century. During the 16th century in England, the state first tried to give housing to vagrants instead of punishing them, by introducing bridewells to take vagrants and train them for a profession. In the 17th and 18th centuries, these were replaced by workhouses but these were intended to discourage too much reliance on state help. The growing movement toward social concern sparked the development of rescue missions, such as America’s first rescue mission, the New York City Rescue Mission, founded in 1872 by Jerry and Maria McAuley.
In smaller towns, there were hobos, who temporarily lived near train tracks and hopped onto trains to various destinations. Especially following the American Civil War, a large number of homeless men formed part of a counterculture known as “hobohemia” all over America. This phenomenon re-surged in the 1930s during and after the Great Depression. How the Other Half Lives later inspired Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903). This raised public awareness, causing some changes in building codes and some social conditions. These were later replaced by dormitory housing “spikes” provided by local boroughs, and these were researched by the writer George Orwell. By the 1930s in England, there were 30,000 people living in these facilities. In 1933, George Orwell wrote about poverty in London and Paris, in his book Down and Out in Paris and London. In general, in most countries, many towns and cities had an area which contained the poor, transients, and afflicted, such as a “skid row”. In New York City, for example, there was an area known as “the Bowery”, traditionally, where alcoholics were to be found sleeping on the streets, bottle in hand.
The Great Depression of the 1930s caused a devastating epidemic of poverty, hunger, and homelessness. There were two million homeless people migrating across the United States. Although The Bowery once was synonymous with homelessness, it has since become an avenue of high-priced luxury condominiums that jockey for space with its past. In the 1960s, the nature and growing problem of homelessness changed in England as public concern grew. The number of people living “rough” in the streets had increased dramatically. However, beginning with the Conservative administration’s Rough Sleeper Initiative, the number of people sleeping rough in London fell dramatically. This initiative was supported further by the incoming Labour administration from 2009 onwards with the publication of the ‘Coming in from the Cold’ strategy published by the Rough Sleepers Unit, which proposed and delivered a massive increase in the number of hostel bed spaces in the capital and an increase in funding for street outreach teams, who work with rough sleepers to enable them to access services.
Modern homelessness started as a result of economic stresses in society and reductions in the availability of affordable housing such as single room occupancies (SROs) for poorer people. In the United States, in the 1970s, the deinstitutionalisation of patients from state psychiatric hospitals was a precipitating factor which seeded the homeless population, especially in urban areas such as New York City. The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 was a predisposing factor in setting the stage for homelessness in the United States. Long term psychiatric patients were released from state hospitals into SROs and supposed to be sent to community mental health centers for treatment and follow-up. It never quite worked out properly, the community mental health centers mostly did not materialize, and this population largely was found living in the streets soon thereafter with no sustainable support system. Also, as real estate prices and neighborhood pressure increased to move these people out of their areas, the SROs diminished in number, putting most of their residents in the streets. Other populations were mixed in later, such as people losing their homes for economic reasons, and those with addictions (although alcoholic hobos had been visible as homeless people since the 1890s, and those stereotypes fueled public perceptions of homeless people in general), the elderly, and others. Many places where people were once allowed freely to loiter, or purposefully be present, such as churches, public libraries and atriums, became stricter as the homeless population grew larger and increasingly congregated in these places.
As a result, many churches closed their doors when services were not being held, libraries began enforcing “no eyes shut” and sometimes dress codes, and most places hired private security guards to carry out these policies, creating a social tension. Many public toilets were closed. This banished the homeless population to sidewalks, parks, under bridges, and the like. They also lived in the subway and railroad tunnels in New York City. They seemingly became socially invisible, which was the apparent effect of many of the enforcement policies. The homeless shelters, which were generally night shelters, made people leave in the morning to whatever they could manage and return in the evening when the beds in the shelters opened up again for sleeping. There were some daytime shelters where people could go, instead of being stranded on the streets, and they could be helped, get counseling, avail themselves of resources, meals, and otherwise spend their day until returning to their overnight sleeping arrangements. An example of such a day center shelter model is Saint Francis House in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in the early 1980s, which opens for homeless people all year long during the daytime hours and was originally based on the settlement house model. Many homeless keep all their possessions with them because they have no access to storage. There was also the reality of the “bag” people, the shopping cart people, and the soda can collectors (known as binners or dumpster divers) who sort through garbage to find items to sell, trade and eat.
These people carry around all of their possessions with them all the time because they have no place to store them. If they had no access to or capability to get to a shelter and possible bathing, or access to toilets and laundry facilities, their hygiene was lacking. This again created social tensions in public places. These conditions created an upsurge in tuberculosis and other diseases in urban areas. In 1974, Kip Tiernan founded Rosie’s Place in Boston, the first drop-in and emergency shelter for women in the United States, in response to the increasing numbers of needy women throughout the country. In 1979, a New York City lawyer, Robert Hayes, brought a class action suit before the courts, Callahan v. Carey, against the City and State, arguing for a person’s state constitutional “right to shelter”. It was settled as a consent decree in August 1981. The City and State agreed to provide board and shelter to all homeless men who met the need standard for welfare or who were homeless by certain other standards. By 1983 this right was extended to homeless women. By the mid-1980s, there was also a dramatic increase in family homelessness.
Tied into this was an increasing number of impoverished and runaway children, teenagers, and young adults, which created a new sub-stratum of the homeless population (street children or street youth). Also, in the 1980s, in the United States, some federal legislation was introduced on homelessness as a result of the work of Congressman Stewart B. McKinney. In 1987, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act was enacted. Several organizations in some cities, such as New York and Boston, tried to be inventive about help to the swelling number of homeless people. In New York City, for example, in 1989, a street newspaper was created called “Street News” which put some homeless to work, some writing, producing, and mostly selling the paper on streets and trains. It was written pro bono by a combination of homeless, celebrities, and established writers. In 1991, in England, a street newspaper, following on the New York model was established, called The Big Issue and was published weekly. Its circulation grew to 300,000.
Chicago has StreetWise which has the largest circulation of its kind in the United States, thirty thousand. Boston has a Spare Change News newspaper, founded in 1992 by a small group of homeless people in Boston, built on the same model as the others: homeless helping themselves. Seattle has Real Change, a $1 newsletter that aims to directly benefits homeless people and also reports on economic issues in the area. Portland, Oregon has Street Roots, with articles and poetry by homeless writers, sold on the street for a dollar. More recently, Street Sense, in Washington, D.C. has gained a lot of popularity and helped many make the move out of homelessness. Students in Baltimore, MD have opened a satellite office for that street paper as well. Trends in homelessness are closely tied to neighborhood conditions according to a report by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in 1990. Sleeping homeless person in the corner of Cologne Cathedral, Germany, 2010.
In 2002, research showed that children and families were the largest growing segment of the homeless population in the United States, and this has presented new challenges, especially in services, to agencies. Some trends involving the plight of homeless people have provoked some thought, reflection and debate. One such phenomenon is paid physical advertising, colloquially known as “sandwich board men” and another specific type as “Bumvertising”. Another trend is the side-effect of unpaid free advertising of companies and organizations on shirts, clothing and bags, to be worn by homeless and poor people, given out and donated by companies to homeless shelters and charitable organizations for otherwise altruistic purposes. These trends are reminiscent of the “sandwich board signs” carried by poor people in the time of Charles Dickens in the Victorian 19th century in England and later during the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s. In the USA, the government asked many major cities to come up with a ten year plan to end homelessness.
One of the results of this was a “Housing first” solution, rather than to have a homeless person remain in an emergency homeless shelter it was thought to be better to quickly get the person permanent housing of some sort and the necessary support services to sustain a new home. But there are many complications of this kind of program and these must be dealt with to make such an initiative work successfully in the middle to long term. Some formerly homeless people, who were finally able to obtain housing and other assets which helped to return to a normal lifestyle, have donated money and volunteer services to the organizations that provided aid to them during their homelessness. Alternatively, some social service entities that help homeless people now employ formerly homeless individuals to assist in the care process. Homelessness has migrated toward rural and suburban areas.
The number of homeless people has not changed dramatically but the number of homeless families has increased according to a report of HUD. The United States Congress appropriated $25 million in the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants for 2008 to show the effectiveness of Rapid Re-housing programs in reducing family homelessness. In February 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, part of which addressed homelessness prevention, allocating $1.5 billion for a Homeless Prevention Fund. The funding for it was called the “Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program” (HPRP), and was distributed using the formula for the Emergency Shelter Grants (ESG) program.
President Obama signed the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing (HEARTH) Act into Public Law, reauthorizing HUD’s Homeless Assistance programs. It was part of the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009. The HEARTH act allows for the prevention of homelessness, rapid re-housing, consolidation of housing programs, and new homeless categories. In the eighteen months after the bill’s signing, HUD must make regulations implementing this new McKinney program. In late 2009, some homeless advocacy organizations, such as the National Coalition for the Homeless, reported and published perceived problems with the HEARTH Act of 2009 as a HUD McKinney-Vento Reauthorization bill, especially with regard to privacy, definitional ineligibility, community roles, and restrictions on eligible activities.
In Russia, after the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861, major cities experienced a large influx of former peasants who sought jobs as industrial workers in rapidly developing Russian industry. These people often lived in harsh conditions, sometimes renting a room, shared between several families. There also was a large number of shelterless homeless. Immediately after the October Revolution a special program of “compression” (“уплотнение”) was enabled: people who had no shelter were settled in flats of those who had large (4,5 or 6 room) flats with only one room left to previous owners.
The flat was declared state property. This led to a large number of shared flats where several families lived simultaneously. Nevertheless the problem of complete homelessness was mostly solved as anybody could apply for a room or a place in dormitory (the number of shared flats steadily decreased after large-scale residential building program was implemented starting in 1960s). By 1922 there were at least 7 million homeless children in Russia as a result of nearly a decade of devastation from World War I and the Russian Civil War. This led to the creation of a large number of orphanages. By 1930s the USSR declared the abolition of homelessness and any citizen was obliged to have a propiska – a place of permanent residency. Nobody could be stripped of propiska without substitution or refuse it without a confirmed permission (called “order”) to register in another place. If someone wanted to move to another city or expand their living area, he had to find a partner who wanted to mutually exchange the flats. The right for shelter was secured in the Soviet constitution.
Not having permanent residency was legally considered a crime. There were also virtually no empty and unused apartments in the cities: any flat where nobody was registered was immediately lent by the state at symbolic price to others who needed better living conditions. If a person who had permanent registration could not pay for shelter, nobody had right to evict them, only to demand money through a court. After the breakup of the USSR the problem of homelessness sharpened dramatically, partially because of the legal vacuum of early 1990s with some laws contradicting each other and partially because of a high rate of frauds in the realty market. In 1991 articles 198 and 209 of Russian criminal code which instituted criminal penalty for not having permanent residence were abolished.
Because most flats had been privatized and many people sold their last shelter without successfully buying another, there was a sharp increase of homeless. Renting apartments from a private owner became widespread (which usually only gives temporary registration and apartment owner could evict the leaser after the contract is over, or if the money was not paid). In Moscow, the first overnight shelter for homeless was opened in 1992. In late 1990s certain amendments in law were implemented to reduce the rise in homelessness, such as prohibition of selling last flat with registered children.
Nevertheless, the state is still obliged to give permanent shelter for free to anybody who needs better living conditions or has no permanent registration, because the right to shelter is still included in the constitution. This may take many years, though. Nobody still has the right to strip a person of permanent residency without their will, even the owner of the apartment. This creates problems for banks because mortgage loans became increasingly popular. Banks obliged to provide a new, cheaper flat for a person instead of the old one if the person fails to repay the loan, or wait until all people who live in the flat are dead. Several projects of special cheap ‘social’ flats for those who failed to repay mortgages were proposed to facilitate mortgage market.
