Do We Have the Knowledge to Address Homelessness?

Abstract

Various forms of housing exclusion are a reality for millions of people across the globe. For people who are homeless in advanced industrialized economies, housing exclusion often co-exists with social service engagement. This essay reviews three books about how homelessness is conceptualized and caused, and how we, as social service providers and social scientists, respond to homelessness:

Wicked Problems in Public Policy

“…Researchers largely agree that lack of income and the high costs of accommodation are the two overarching material factors that drive the rate of homelessness. However, the lack of access to adequate accommodation is often a symptom of other associated problems which serve to disempower the disadvantaged groups (Parsell, 2017;Snow & Bradford, 1994). These multi-layered causal factors include various forms of disability, poor physical or mental health, drugs/alcohol addiction, lack of work skills or employability, and the need to escape child abuse or family violence.…”

Understanding responses to homelessness during COVID-19: an examination of Australia

“…This policy review interrogates the nature and rationale for these sudden investments in homelessness responses during the pandemic. We are motivated by the fact that, prior to COVID-19, responses to homelessness were characterised by a "poverty of ambition" (Parsell, 2018), where governments remained largely unmoved by the weight of evidence demonstrating both the deleterious health consequences of homelessness and the interventions required to address it (Parsell, 2017). Taking this observation as our point of departure, we suggest that the potential impact of the disease on the health of the homeless is not the sole driver of these drastic interventions; rather, it is the risk that their heightened vulnerability to contracting and spreading the disease poses to the health of the housed population.…”

“…Researchers in the field agree that interventions and the characteristics of models need to be adapted to local policy and structural contexts, along with adaptions to reflect the heterogeneity that constitutes the homeless population. This notwithstanding, and acknowledging the argument that Housing First does not intervene to address structural causes (Parsell, 2017) or is supposedly a form of market discipline (Hennigan, 2017), there is consensus that homelessness policy should be driven by empirical evidence, and the evidence is strong for Housing First (Baxter et al, 2019;Mackie et al, 2017;Padgett et al, 2016).…”

Reimagining Homelessness

“…Recognising the drivers of homelessness as residential instability and economic precariousness would encourage policymakers to devise responses that make housing with supports available to those who will otherwise continue to traverse temporary but extraordinarily expensive responses to this instability. Our knowledge of the costs of maintaining people in homelessness via the provision of congregate emergency and temporary accommodation, as shown in Chapter Four, demonstrates that it is both fiscally responsible and ethically justifiable to provide evidence-based housing responses to people experiencing long-term homelessness, with supports where necessary (Parsell, 2017).…”