Leigh Crowley is a candidate on the Professional Doctorate in Policy Research and Practice at the University of Bath. His thesis explores how policy and programs enacted in the city of Portland, Oregon have shaped the homeless experience. This piece was originally published on his blog which can be found through this link.
Begin to read about or discuss homelessness and it won’t take long before you encounter the term ‘unhoused’. Unhoused has increasingly become the term of choice by activists and some academics to describe the people we see living on the sidewalks of our cities. They reason that the term ‘homeless’ is an othering and dehumanizing label deployed as a noun to negatively describe the person and not the context in which the person lives. Unhoused is also intended to evoke a sense of belonging. Beverly Graham a Director of a non-profit that serves vulnerable communities in Seattle recalls a discussion with her business executive course classmates about the number of homeless people in the area where she interjected with: “they’re unhoused… They have a home: Seattle is their home”. The perspective that a given ‘place’ is a person’s home regardless of their immediate shelter conditions has gained widespread acceptance. Indeed, I have a great deal of sympathy for this perspective. Yet, I find this linguistic shift leaves me unsatisfied.
The unease I feel with the shift to the term ‘unhoused’ has prompted me to consider the question: what is the difference between a ‘home’ and a ‘house’? The reason this specific question is pressing concern for me is that as a doctoral researcher of homelessness policy I want to use the most compassionate terms to describe the people that find themselves homeless whilst using terms that accurately describe the issue. As you will read, this is not an easily resolved conundrum.
In a quest to answer the question what is the difference between a ‘home’ and a ‘house’? a sensible first step is to consult the etymologists. The word ‘house’ may have reached the English language from Old High German via French in form of hus, which seems to be related to the verb hide and noun hut. But the root from Germanic coinage is tenuous at best, most dictionaries label ‘house’ a word of uncertain etymology. How about the root of home? Well, etymologists perhaps know less about the word ‘home’ than they do about the word ‘house’. Etymological rabbit holes lead us to speculate that ‘home’ is of local Germanic development and may mean a collection of houses (i.e. a village).
Unfortunately, the etymologists are unable to supply the eureka moment. Though, if we take a closer look there might be something here – are we hiding in our huts or are we joining a collection of houses? To my mind this appears to be a question of ‘relationship to others’. I recently had a passing conversation with Charles Forster who’s book Being A Beast beautifully describes his experiences of living as a badger, an otter, a fox, a red deer, and last but not least a swift. Trust me, it’s worth a read! Leaning into Charles’ experience of burrowing a badger den in the Brecon Beacons I asked him “how might other species of animal think about house or home”? Charitably Charles took my question seriously and offered a thoughtful response. He said: “it would depend on the animal, but in generalised terms it would be the difference between the habitat and relationships to other animals”. The conception that your ‘home’ is founded on your relationships is common across human culture too. In Japan the emotional derivative of home kokoro no furusato refers to a place or person that gives a sense of belonging. It is not uncommon when you ask a Japanese person where is home that they might point to their spouse. In the literal sense, home is where the heart is.
Notice that advocates using the term ‘unhoused’ are attempting to make the connection between the person living on the sidewalk and the city. You live in this city so therefore you are home. But what does this mean relationally? In a romantic sense we can of course have a relationship with a city. We might admire the architecture, adore the culture, or fall in love with the food. Each of these connections might even feel like home to us. But what I think the ‘unhoused’ advocates are really pointing to is that a city can provide all the social relationships you need, so if we can just get you into a house all will be well.
At face value this makes sense, living life on the streets is characterised by a web of deep and complex relationships. Indeed, the relationships built on the street are of such significance they could be the difference between life and death. Yet, despite the complex web of relationships my gut tells me that people living on streets are metaphorically hiding in huts and do not possess the relationships of ‘home’.
Independent journalist and Social Worker, Kevin Dahlgren reports about life on the streets of Portland, Oregon via his X account and Substack Truth on the Streets by Kevin Dahlgren – warning, Kevin’s videos can be a distressing watch. Kevin’s reporting highlights the invisibility of people living on the streets, often the interviewees tell Kevin that they have never been approached by a social care outreach team or if they have been approached they have refused support even though the refusal will lead to their death. This strikes me as an absence - or at the very least a breakdown - of relationship. My own experiences of talking with people living on the streets of Portland leads me to believe that this vulnerable population lack relationships. I once spoke with a 19 year old man who had fled the most horrific family home circumstances at 15 and was self-medicating his trauma with fentanyl. He was visibly in very bad health. They young man described how he “tried to keep himself to himself because the wrong friendship could be dangerous on the streets”. The outreach worker I was with bluntly said that if he kept using fentanyl he would be dead very soon, to which the young man depressingly said “I know, and I am OK with dying”.
The tragic reality is that more and more people are dying on the streets of Portland. The 2022 ‘Domicile Unknown review’ reported that the number of deaths among people experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County grew to 315 deaths in 2022 up from 193 in 2021, a 63% increase.
Advocates for the term ‘unhoused’ would likely respond to my commentary by saying that if we can just get someone into a stable house we can mitigate some of the worst outcomes of life on the streets. Sadly this is not what the evidence suggests. Though study after study does indeed find a positive relationship between the Housing First model and accommodation tenure, there is a dramatic lack of evidence that this model improves drug dependencies, health outcomes, or even reduces mortality. A 2021 systematic review of 35 housing first studies found that the model had minimal effect on health and mortality outcomes. Though this is an under researched area, emerging evidence suggests that housing alone is not the silver bullet the ‘unhoused’ advocates would lead you to believe.
Which brings us back to the necessity of relationships. If we call people living on the streets ‘unhoused’ we might wrongly assume that their only need is housing. But if we compassionately use the term ‘homeless’ we bring a desire to build relationships with our neighbours. Of course housing is an important component, but housing alone can look like abandonment.
In my work I will continue to use the term ‘homeless’ because I believe this is the compassionate term.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.
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