Homelessness
Authors: Takahashi Lois M. 
Published: September 2014

Homelessness has been defined along a spectrum of insufficient and inadequate shelter, from literal street sleeping to sleeping in temporary shelters to overcrowded housing circumstances; along a spectrum of time, from continuous to sporadic homeless episodes; and along a spectrum of space, from limited mobility to movement within and across geographic areas. In the United States and the Western industrialized world, homelessness was often framed as a crisis in the 1980s but has since become part of a larger narrative concerning entrenched poverty and income inequality. Research in the 1980s, primarily in sociology, psychology, social work, public policy, urban planning, public health, and geography, focused on defining homelessness, identifying the multiple and intersecting causes of homelessness, clarifying mental health issues faced by homeless persons, and recommending strategies, including emergency shelters, transitional housing, permanent housing with and without social services, and housing with and without prerequisites. Early-21st-century research on homelessness has deepened scholarly and policy understanding of the variety of homeless subpopulations and their specific needs and survival strategies and increasingly has framed homelessness as a particular aspect of the larger structural issues defining poverty and inequality in industrialized countries. Geographers in particular have emphasized the spatial dimensions of homelessness and have provided a countervailing explanation (usually based in social structures such as poverty and social exclusion) to the popular notion that homelessness is the result of individual counterproductive behavior or vulnerabilities. This review article includes both conceptual and empirical research, endeavoring to cover the myriad of conceptual frameworks explaining homelessness and the varied approaches researchers have tested to ameliorate homelessness. The article also summarizes resistant threads of scholarship on homelessness, from theories of revanchism to feminism, and includes both work in the United States and other industrialized countries (in particular, Canada and the United Kingdom). The article is organized into the following sections, which highlight in particular the contributions made by geographers and those with spatial lenses. First, two overview sections summarize publications that have led the field in conceptualizing homelessness for scholars and policymakers; one of the sections highlights specific geographical contributions. A section on reference resources, especially online, follows that and focuses on advocacy organizations. The next few sections show how scholars have described the needs and challenges faced by varying groups of homeless persons, centering on health, mental health, and substance abuse. Geographers and others have worked to reconceptualize homelessness, from descriptions of need and individual deficits to a focus on systems and politics; one section highlights these innovative works. The final four sections summarize alternatives to the population descriptions that comprise the mainstay of homelessness research to focus on stigma and identity, revanchism and resistance, and conceptual and empirical discussions of policies and programs that should be, and have been, developed and delivered to address homelessness. I thank Nathaniel Barlow for expert research assistance, and the editorial team and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. All errors or omissions remain my responsibility.