Homeless

Homelessness or transience is a situation in which a person does not have a long term residence, a stable residence, or any residence at all. While such groups as nomadic cultures, Irish travellers and migrant workers are also transient, this is through choice and some of these people may have a permanent residence somewhere to which they ultimately can return. Homeless people may be found in all parts of the world in varying situations sometimes due to natural disaster, political unrest, war, famine, personal misfortune, despair, or illness. Some people choose to live a homeless lifestyle, typically they have an underlying mental illness or substance abuse problem. There are also some cases where a person freely chooses to live in a homeless or transient style. But in most popular and statistical senses of the word for a categorical homeless population, it refers to unwilling or otherwise uncontrollable homelessness.

History of homelessness
Transience, vagrancy, and the poor have been with society a long time.

In the sixteenth 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 eighteenth century, these were replaced by workhouses but these were intended to discourage too much reliance on state help. 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 the 1960s, the nature and growing problem of homelessness changed for the worse in England, with public concern growing. 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 has fallen from over 1,000 in 1990 to less than 200 in 2006. This initiative was supported further by the incoming Labour administration from 1997 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.

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. This resulted in rescue missions, such as the oldest homeless shelter in New York City, The Bowery Mission, founded in 1879 by the Rev. and Mrs. A.G. Ruliffson.

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.

Although not specifically about the homeless, Jacob Riis wrote about, documented, and photographed the poor and destitute in New York City tenements in the late 1800s. He wrote a ground-breaking book including such material in "How the Other Half Lives" in 1890. Public awareness was raised by this, causing some changes in building codes and some social conditions.

However, modern homelessness as we know it, started as a result of the economic stresses in society, reduction in the availabilty of affordable housing, such as Single Room Occupancy s, for poorer people. In the United States, in the late 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 pre-disposing factor in setting the stage for homelessness in the United States. Long term psychiatric patients were released from state hospitals into SROs and sent to community health centers for treatment and follow-up. It never quite worked out properly 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, the elderly, and others.

Many places where people were once allowed freely to loiter, or purposefully be present, such as churches, public libraries and public atriums, became more strict as the homeless population grew larger and congregated in these place more than ever. As a result, many churches closed their doors when services were not being held, libraries enforced a "no eyes shut" and sometimes a dress policy, 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 intention of many of the enforcement policies.

The homeless shelters, which were generally night shelters, made the homeless 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 the homeless 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 the homeless all year long during the daytime hours.

There was also the reality of the "bag" people, the shopping cart people, and the soda can collectors. These people carried around all their possessions with them all the time since they had 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 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.

Also, in the 1980s, in the United States, some federal legislation was introduced for the homeless as a result of the work of Congressman Stewart B. McKinney. In 1987, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act was enacted.

Several organisations 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, the first 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" newspaper built on the same model as the others: homeless helping themselves.

In 2002, research showed that children and families were the largest growing segment of the homeless in America, and this has presented new challenges, especially in services, to agencies. Back in the 1990s, a teenager from New York, Liz Murray, was homeless at fifteen years old, and overcame that and went on to study at Harvard University. Her story was made into an Emmy-winning film in 2003, "Homeless to Harvard".

Some trends involving the plight of the homeless 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 organisations on shirts, clothing and bags, to be worn by the homeless and poor, given out and donated by companies to homeless shelters and charitable organisations 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 1800s in England and later during the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s.

Increasingly, it has become hard for the non-homeless population to understand the homeless. There are, on the street, many looks of homelessness. Some are hustlers masquerading as homeless, simply to make money, some are substance-abusing people who live in flop-houses or on the street whose main incentive to panhandle is to get their liquor or drugs, whilst others are the hard-core homeless, for the most part destitute and without a home address and telephone, and likely mentally confused or simply downtrodden in life and spirit and living on the street or in a public emergency shelter. These images confound most working people and make the situation for the truly homeless a much more difficult one. There is also some concern that being homeless might be considered a criminal offense.

The problem in developed countries
Homelessness in developed countries can produce a vicious circle. With no phone number, permanent address, or place to get changed and washed, it can be difficult to find or maintain a job; and without a job it can be difficult to raise the money or gain the references needed to acquire accommodation.

With no accommodation or income the homeless may become dependent on assistance from friends, family, the local community, charities or the state. Organisations such as Shelter and Crisis assist those who are homeless. However, according to the NCH and the NLCHP some cities in the U.S. have laws such as "anti-lodging" (preventing camping outdoors), "anti-panhandling" (preventing begging) and "loitering and vagrancy laws" which "allow for arbitrary enforcement by law enforcement officials." The constitutionality of these laws is under dispute.

Putting a homeless person in jail will give them a criminal record, making it more difficult to secure a job. This trend of arresting people for committing crimes is referred to as the criminalization of homelessness.

While subsidized housing makes it easier to gain access to housing, government funding cuts can easily narrow the scope of people who may benefit from it.

Terms for homelessness
The term most often used in the late twentieth century is "homeless". However, other terms include: vagrant, tramp, hobo (U.S.), bum (U.S.), bagman/bagwoman, sturdy beggar, or the wandering poor. The term '(of) No Fixed Abode' (NFA) is used in legal circumstances.

More recently, many advocates and individuals who have experienced homelessness prefer using the term “houseless” to reflect more accurately the fact that the problem resides not with the lack of a home, which carries with it connotations including propinquity to family and other meta-physical notions, but with the more concrete problem of not having a house or apartment in which to live.

Causes
Most researchers attempt to make a distinction between: 1) why homelessness exists, in general, and 2) who is at-risk of homelessness, in specific. Homelessness has always existed since urbanization and industrialization.

Factors placing an individual at high-risk of homelessness include:
 * Poverty: People living in poverty are at a higher risk of becoming homeless.
 * Civilian during war: Civilians during war or any armed conflict are also are at a higher risk for homelessness, because of possible military attacks on their property, and even after the war rebuilding their homes is often costly, and most commonly the government is overthrowned or defeated which is then unable to help it's citzens.
 * Genocide Survivors: e.g. Holocaust survivors
 * School dropouts: Students who drop out of school are 10 times as likely to end up homeless than those who have graduated.
 * Serious Mental Illness and Disability: It has been estimated that approximately one-third of all adult homeless persons have some form of mental illness and/or disability. In previous eras, these individuals were institutionalized in state mental hospitals. According to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), there are 50,000 mentally ill homeless people in California alone because of deinstitutionalization between 1957 and 1988 and a lack of adequate local service systems. Various assertive outreach approaches, including a mental health treatment approach known as Assertive Community Treatment, have shown promise in the prevention of homelessness among people with serious mental illness.
 * Foster Care background: This population experienced rates of homelessness nearly 8 times higher than the non-foster care population.
 * Escaping domestic abuse, including sexual, physical and mental abuse: Victims who flee from abuse often find themselves without a home. Abused children also have a higher chance of succumbing to a drug addiction, which contributes to difficulties in establishing a residence. In 1990 a study found that half of homeless women and children were fleeing abuse.
 * Prison discharge: Often the formerly incarcerated are socially isolated from friends and family and have few resources. Employment is often difficult for those with a criminal record. Untreated substance abuse and mental illness also may put them at high risk for homelessness onced discharged.
 * Drug or alcohol misuse: An estimated 38% of homeless suffer from a substance abuse problem. Debate exists about whether drug use is a cause or consequence of homelessness. However, regardless when it arises, an untreated addiction "makes moving beyond homelessness extremely difficult."
 * Military veterans: e.g. Vietnam veteran

Reasons/Causes for homelessness:
 * Income inequality: Increased wealth and income inequality caused distortions in the housing market and pushes rent burdens higher and thereby decreasing general housing affordability.
 * High cost of housing: A by-product of the general distribution of wealth and income. Also impact by the reduction of household size witnessed in the last half of the 20th century.
 * Lack of living wage jobs
 * Natural disaster, such as in the case of thousands of New Orleans, Louisiana residents losing their homes to Hurricane Katrina.
 * Personal choice. Some make a choice not to have a permanent residence, including travelers and those who have personal spiritual/religious convictions (as yogis in India). Most researchers feel this population is negligible. Many people who respond that they "prefer" the homeless lifestyle suffer from mental illness, trauma or have adapted to the lifestyle and the response reflects a socially-desirable response or justification rather than having no real desire for stable shelter.

Types of homelessness
There are many places where a homeless person might seek refuge.
 * Sleeping outdoors: Exposed or in a tent
 * Sleeping in a vehicle: such as a car or a motorhome. Some people who live nomadically in a motorhome or trailer are people of means who do so by choice and do not think of themselves as "homeless" in the sense it is usually used.  For others a vehicle might serve as a temporary living refuge, for example those recently evicted from a home.
 * Sleeping in a public place: parks, bus or train stations, airports
 * Sleeping in a derelict structure: abandoned buildings, ruined cars, beached boats
 * Shelters
 * Boarding houses, or more specifically, flophouses which offer cheap temporary lodging and are often used by those trying to pull themselves out of homelessness or who are one step above homelessness.
 * Friends or family: This is distinguished from living with friends or family in that it is temporary. This is occasionally referred to as "couch surfing".
 * Hobo jungles: Ad hoc campsites usually near rail yards.
 * Hotels: Gaining temporary shelter by staying in hotels is common among the houseless. Though many lack the money to rent a room so they do not literally "stay" in a hotel, they rather sleep in the lobby.

Services
Homeless shelters operated by government, churches, or charities work to provide temporary housing to the homeless.

Types of shelters include overnight shelters, warming shelters, transitional shelters, and subsidized housing. There are also day shelters which give basic services during the daytime hours when many of the overnight shelters for sleeping are closed.

In England, the majority of services for single homeless people and couples are provided by the voluntary sector, usually through contracts paid for by local government through Supporting People. Services available to homeless people include night shelters, day centres, hostels, resettlement services and floating support.

While some shelters also provide food, others require people to turn to food banks and soup kitchens for nutrition. In England, these services are usually paid for by homeless people themselves in service charges in addition to the housing benefit which pays the rent.

Auxiliary services provided by some shelters include:
 * Health clinics
 * Clothing and personal items
 * Employment assistance
 * Counseling and other social services: such as addiction control, trauma counseling, and depression and autism treatment.

However, there are a number of complaints about the safety and quality of homeless shelters. Subsidized housing is a more expensive solution that some believe might end the cycle of homelessness. Homeless Link in the UK provides minimum standards and best practice advice on how agencies can best deal with their clients to ensure permanent change and solutions to homelessness.

An "outreach program" is a group that may include police officers, formerly homeless civilian outreach workers, or counselors. This team makes contact with homeless people and can provide assistance, or guide them to shelters for assistance. This can avoid unnecessary and costly arrests intended to displace the homeless.

Health care for the homeless
In general, health care for the homeless is a very important charitable issue and a public health issue. The homeless are under-served for medical problems. State medical insurance is one possibility, but many homeless can't get access to it. Free-care clinics, especially for the homeless, exist and are usually over-burdened with patients.

The actual medical conditions affecting the homeless are somewhat specialised and has opened a newer area of medicine catering to this population. Skin diseases and conditions abound, as well as dental, personal hygiene and the like. Specialised medical textbooks have been written to address this for providers.

The effects of poor nutrition, substance abuse, and unmitigated exposure to the severe elements of weather are important considerations.

There are many organisations providing free care all over the world for the homeless, but the services are in great demand given the limited number of medical practitioners helping. For example, it might take months to get a minimal dental appointment in a free-care clinic.

Communicable diseases are of great concern, especially Tuberculosis in high density urban populations.

Income opportunities
Many non-profit organizations such as Goodwill Industries maintain a mission to "provide skill development and work opportunities to people with barriers to employment", though most of these organizations are not primarily geared toward homeless individuals. Many cities also have street newspapers or magazines: publications designed to provide employment opportunity to homeless people or others in need by their sale on the streets of their respective cities.

While some homeless have paying jobs, some must seek other methods to make money. Begging or panhandling is one option, but is becoming increasingly illegal in many cities. Despite the stereotype, not all homeless people panhandle, and not all panhandlers are homeless. Another option is busking: performing tricks, playing music, drawing on the sidewalk, or offering some other form of entertainment in exchange for donations. In cities where pharmaceutical companies still collect paid blood plasma, homeless people may generate income through frequent visits to these centers.

Homeless people have been known to purposely commit crimes in order to be sent to jail or prison for food and shelter. In police lingo, this is called "three hots and a cot." Similarly a homeless person may approach a hospital's emergency department and fake a mental illness in order to receive food and shelter.

Statistics for developed countries
The following statistics indicate the approximate average number of homeless people at any one time. Each country has a different approach to counting homeless people, and estimates of homelessness made by different organisations vary wildly, so comparisons should be made with caution.


 * European Union: 3,000,000 (UN-HABITAT 2004)
 * England: 459 rough sleepers, 98,750 households in temporary accommodation (Department for Communities and Local Government 2005)
 * United States: 842,000 (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration 1999)
 * United States: 3,500,000 including 0.9 to 1.4 million children (UN-HABITAT 2004)
 * Canada: 150,000 (National Homelessness Initiative - Government of Canada)
 * Australia: 99,000 (ABS: 2001 Census)
 * United States:Chronically homeless people (those with repeated episodes or who have been homeless for long periods) 150,000-200,000

Developing and undeveloped countries
The number of homeless people worldwide has grown steadily in recent years. In some Third World nations such as Brazil, India, Nigeria, and South Africa, homelessness is rampant, with millions of children living and working on the streets. Homelessness has become a problem in the cities of China, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines despite their growing prosperity, mainly due to migrant workers who have trouble finding permanent homes and to rising income inequality between social classes.

Homelessness in the popular media
Popular Films
 * 1966  - An influential film by Ken Loach which raised the profile of homelessness in the UK and led indirectly to the formation of several charities and changes in legislation.
 * 1991.
 * 1994.
 * 2003. -- see Liz Murray

Documentary Films
 * 1997. -- about the Canadian homeless in Montreal.  New York Times Review,
 * 2000  -- A film following the lifes of homeless adults living in the Amtrak tunnels in New York.
 * 2001  -- Following the lifes of homeless children in Bucharest, Romania.
 * 2003. -- about the homeless in São Paulo, Brazil. Its English title is "On the Fringes of São Paulo: Homeless".
 * 2004.
 * 2005  -- About homeless children in Moscow.

TV Documentaries
 * 1988.

Homelessness in other language Wikipedias

 * Homeless ("Persona sin hogar") in the Spanish Wikipedia
 * Homeless ("Sans domicile fixe") in the French Wikipedia
 * Homelessness ("Obdachlosigkeit") in the German Wikipedia
 * Homeless ("Senzatetto") in the Italian Wikipedia