# Homelessness

Homelessness also known as houselessness or being unhoused or unsheltered, is the condition of lacking housing.

## Quotes

* I've got economically zero unemployment in my city, and I've got thousands of homeless people that actually are working and just can't afford housing. There's nowhere for these folks to move to.
** Mike O'Brien in "Homeless explosion on West Coast pushing cities to the brink". CBS Sacramento. November 5, 2019.
* But getting back to low-cost housing, I think I might have solved this problem. I know just the place to build housing for the homeless: golf courses. It’s perfect. Plenty of good land in nice neighborhoods; land that is currently being squandered on a mindless activity engaged in by white, well-to-do business criminals who use the game to get together so they can make deals to carve this country up a little finer among themselves. [...] It’s time for real people to reclaim the golf courses from the wealthy and turn them over to the homeless. Golf is an arrogant, elitist game that takes up entirely too much space in this country.
** George Carlin, "Golf Courses for the Homeless," Jammin' in New York (1992)
* [H]omelessness is primarily a function of the broader housing-unaffordability crisis, which in turn is primarily a function of how difficult local governments have made building new housing in the places that need it the most.
** Demsas, Jerusalem (July 18, 2023). "The Root Cause of the Homelessness Crisis". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 19, 2023.
* There are already in existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy any real 'housing shortage,' given rational utilization of them. This can naturally only take place by the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses the homeless or those workers who are excessively overcrowded in their old houses.
** Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872)
* The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air — it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.
** Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879), Book VII, Ch. 1
* שָׂרַ֣יִךְ סֹורְרִ֗ים וְחַבְרֵי֙ גַּנָּבִ֔ים כֻּלֹּו֙ אֹהֵ֣ב שֹׁ֔חַד וְרֹדֵ֖ף שַׁלְמֹנִ֑ים יָתֹום֙ לֹ֣א יִשְׁפֹּ֔טוּ וְרִ֥יב אַלְמָנָ֖ה לֹֽא־יָבֹ֥וא אֲלֵיהֶֽם׃ פ
** Your leaders are turncoats who keep company with crooks. They sell themselves to the highest bidder and grab anything not nailed down. They never stand up for the homeless, never stick up for the defenseless.
** Isaiah 1:23 (Leningrad Codex; MSG)
* There is only one wall standing between you and homelessness.
** Eyran Katsenelenbogen, One Time (2019)
* We have no home—we have no friends, They said our home no more was ours ; Our cottage where the ash tree bends, The garden we had filled with flowers. . . . . Alas, it is a weary thing To sing our ballads o’er and o’er ; The songs we used at home to sing— Alas, we have a home no more!
** Letitia Elizabeth Landon, "The Orphan Ballad Singers" in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book (1835)
* Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.
** Abraham Lincoln, reply to New York Workingmen's Democratic Republican Association (March 21, 1864), Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 7, pp. 259–60
* Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just.
** William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act III, scene iv
* As we utter the word tramp there arises straightway before us the spectacle of a lazy, shiftless, sauntering or swaggering, ill-conditioned, irreclaimable, incorrigible, cowardly, utterly depraved savage.
** Francis Wayland, the dean of Yale Law School, in 1877; quoted in “Permanent Supportive Housing: Evaluating the Evidence for Improving Health Outcomes Among People Experiencing Chronic Homelessness”, NCBI (2018)

## See also

* Exile
* Natural disasters
* Outcast (person)
* Poverty

## External links

* Encyclopedic article on Homelessness on Wikipedia