Is it time to redefine homelessness once again (Jan 2021)?

Few of us these days have failed to notice just how dramatically homelessness is changing.

Not so long ago, everyone just assumed that it was only ever about misfits, dropouts and runaways. Nowadays we all have more than an inkling that it’s not just about rough sleepers, or (as the tabloids love to characterise them) ‘opportunist scroungers’ begging for change on street corners. Instead, we’ve been hearing for some time that the term ‘homeless’ now also applies to ‘the invisible homeless’.

Mostly this outbreak of ‘novel homelessness phenomena’ is portrayed as being a worrying epidemic of individuals and sometimes even entire families trapped in an endless cycle of sofa-surfing and car-dwelling, in many cases involving the ‘working homeless’ where, despite toiling away in whatever low-paid regular jobs they can get (and often taking more than one job) rapidly growing numbers are finding that their employers just aren’t paying them enough to afford the rent for any accommodation situated even remotely near to their workplace, even when their wages have been supplemented by any benefits they might be able to claim.

Even as we struggle to find new ways to tackle these ‘affordability-driven homelessness escalations’, (resulting from a combination of a long term disdain for and derogation from social housing construction, exploitative wage constraints such as zero-hours contracts and benefits which fail to close the accommodation affordability gap) a new question that we need to face is this one:

Is this new category of ‘hidden homelessness’ still far too narrowly defined to create a realistic picture of the sheer scale of the problem?

Part Two....

We need to ask ourselves whether there are an even broader range of challenging situations that very significant numbers of people are finding themselves trapped in situations we currently don’t consider to be ‘examples of homelessness’ (hidden or otherwise) but that might just turn out to need to be ‘put under the same umbrella’ in order to be seen as part of the very same problem:

“ ...nobody in Britain today should be expected to stay in conditions where applying the term ‘home’ to where and how they are having to live would not be deemed acceptable to the general public... ”

Such conditions could include the following:

Overcrowding (too many people having no choice but to sleep in a single room with no provision whatsoever for any kind of personal or private space, nowhere to sit but on a bed, too many individuals sharing facilities that shouldn’t ever need to be shared by too many).

Having no choice but to ‘go back and live with parents/family’ when you don’t want to (or they don’t want you to) especially where this raises fresh concerns about limited space, friction and acrimony arising from a legacy of unresolved differences, exacerbated care burdens and lifestyle disruption.

Just keeping a roof over your head when it isn’t a car roof, or even being able to regularly sleep in a bed rather than on a sofa?

Part Three....

Surely these aren’t the be-all and end-all of ‘not being a victim of the causes of homelessness’, especially when your bed is in a room that is ridiculously cramped or crowded, or between walls that are dangerously crumbling or unbearably crummy.

If the ‘right to buy’ and the demise of the council house and flat in the 80s was meant to bring ‘choice’ to the council house tenant because it gave them the opportunity to own their own home, then what do we see today? Nothing in any way resembling a ‘broadening of choice’ for most of us.

Ever-growing numbers of us who, as prospects of ever owning our own home have long since faded into the unaffordability of spiralling deposit requirements, now face the hitherto unthinkable possibility that, despite having a regular job, we won’t even be able to afford to ‘choose’ to rent a decent home for ourselves either.

People whose ‘homes’ are so bad that any reasonable person would say that whoever was living in such conditions was actually experiencing homelessness in all but name, who was enduring living arrangements that are at the very least no better than sofa surfing or living in a car: just how happy are we to exclude anyone living under those kinds of conditions from the homelessness statistics?

At Housed4Good we get the feeling that if we somehow managed to put together a survey which included all the people and conditions that genuinely need to be included in the homelessness statistics, including those whose current ‘home’ was not really anywhere that anyone would want to call home, the resulting numbers would be absolutely staggering, revealing a problem far more difficult for policymakers to kick into the long grass.