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Indigenous Homelessness Report

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3. HOMELESSNESS AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM

Homelessness is defined as a social problem by a social process of claims-making about the needs of ‘homeless’ people.  How homelessness is defined and conceived significantly shapes the range of social policy responses to the problem.  Most social problems, including homelessness, involve a degree of social stigma.  Community values and political agendas also condition the nature and limitations of policy and programs.  Different weighting may be given to factors such as poverty, appropriate and affordable housing, unemployment, family discord and breakdown and individual deficiencies.  Thus, the concept of homelessness is not  a fixed idea but something that changes over time and may vary from one culture to another. The way homelessness is defined will determine how policy is formed and what is being done to help homeless people and, to some extent, how that help is delivered.

Two hundred years ago the very concept of ‘homelessness’, if used by European colonists in Sydney Town, would not have been meaningful to Indigenous people leading traditional nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyles on traditional lands. One group lived in wooden or stone dwellings and farmed the land around fixed settlements with market oriented ideas about land ownership; the other occupied a homeland to which they were deeply connected, culturally and religiously, and lived a traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle.

Definitions of homelessness will always be argued about in public debate because the scope of a definition directly determines who might be included in or excluded from the homeless population, and therefore from the support services and accommodation provided for homeless people.

Narrow or literal definitions recognise as homeless only those on the street or staying in shelters, but such definitions ignore the mobility of homeless people as they move between various forms of temporary accommodation -- refuge (homeless), on the streets (homeless), in a friend’s flat (not homeless), in a hotel (not homeless), on the street again (homeless), sharing with a partner for a while (not homeless), etc -- and such definitions seriously underestimate the size of the population in need. In Australia, broader definitions have generally been used.

However in Australia, there is a broad consensus that is not helpful to impose a single definition of homelessness. Homelessness is seen not as just rooflessness, but the absence of secure accommodation.  Homeless people typically move around various forms of temporary accommodation.  The narrow ‘literal’ definition is seen widely by researchers, workers, policy and program administrators, as well as most informed politicians, as too limited.  Broader definitions more adequately capture peoples’ experiences of homelessness.  Some of the confusion is clarified once it is realised that the different definitions have often been devised for different purposes such as broad policy discussion, research or eligibility for a particular benefit and so on.

There has also been a lot of political argument about the causes of homelessness.  The debate divides between explanations emphasising social structural causes, such as the restructuring of labour markets or employment/unemployment and individual level explanations attributing homelessness to the deficiencies of particular people.  A more complex approach incorporates both structural change factors and individual dispositions and choice, and recognises the different patterns of causation for different groups.

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