Editor's Introduction

• Date: 01 March 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12330
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Author: Clifford W. Cobb

Editor’s Introduction

Rethinking Homelessness

By Clifford W. Cobb

Most of us assume we know what homelessness is. We have seen

homeless people on the street and interacted with them. We may not

understand what causes people to live without secure housing, but

their condition is plain to see. But “plain to see” may be wrong. What

is obvious may grossly misrepresent reality. As a result, the way we

think about homelessness and how to respond to it is a bundle of

confused ideas.

Homelessness is a manifestation of a much larger condition. We

might call that condition “poverty” or “oppression” or “structural vio-

lence” or “extreme wealth inequality.” The concept of homelessness

is a term of convenience because it focuses on the one aspect of that

general condition that gets under the skin of the middle class: visibil-

ity. Tens of millions of stigmatized people who have been relegated

to the margins of society experience the stunting of hope, the feeling

of shame, and a stream of indignities, but their suffering cannot be

seen in the way that a tent near the street can be. Homelessness is a

visible reminder that malignant forces preserve gross inequities in a

society. The cracks in the system through which people fall may be

hidden from view, but when a person ends up on the street, there is

no hiding that.

Thus, we might define homelessness as the most visible manifesta-

tion of poverty in any society. The efforts to segregate the homeless

so they are no longer visible may one day be realized by oppressive

forces. But the underlying problem of extreme wealth inequality will

still be present. As long as that is the case, there will be a continuing

stream of people cycling in and out of extreme conditions, including

homelessness.

To illustrate the relationship between homelessness and poverty, I

offer a simple diagram that depicts different ways of counting. From

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 2 (March, 2020).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12330

© 2020 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

328 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

the perspective of positivist social science, there is nothing more basic

than counting what is observed or recorded. But counting is actually

full of ambiguities that throw our assumptions into question. When

the government counts the homeless one day each year, the result is

a snapshot that completely misrepresents the scope of the problem.

Figure 1 is a circle, the area of which represents all households in

poverty—everyone with less than half the median income: around 58

million people in the United States (OECD 2015). Relative, not abso-

lute, poverty is the right measure here because housing poverty is tied

to housing costs, which are largely determined by relative incomes

in an area. The “bullseye” or small circle at the center represents the

550,000 people who have been categorized as homeless by an offi-

cial point-in-time count (Henry et al. 2018: 22). This implies that only

around 1 percent of people in poverty suffer homelessness. (The di-

agram is not drawn precisely to scale, but we will soon see why that

does not matter.)

The number who suffer from homelessness is far greater than offi-

cial statistics reveal. Link et al. (1994: 1909) found that 7.4 percent of

Americans living in metropolitan areas had been homeless at some

point in their lives. (Around twice that number—14 percent—were

homeless in the broader sense of having to stay with a friend or rela-

tive temporarily.) Since people of all income levels were included in

the survey, it is reasonable to assume that temporary homelessness

was several times as prevalent among poor people. If 7.4 percent of

the general population has been homeless, it is safe to say that 20 to

25 percent of poor people have experienced homelessness, perhaps

even 40 percent by a broad definition. If so, that means the lifetime

prevalence of homelessness may be 20 to 40 times higher than the 1

percent who are measured by the point-in-time count. Here we begin

to see the ambiguity of precise estimates of the homeless population

based on a one-day head count. If 550,000 are homeless on a given

day, it is likely that 2,000,0000 are homeless at some point in a given

year and many more over a five-year period.

Just as homelessness is an occasional and recurrent event in the

lives of poor people, poverty is also episodic for much of the U.S.

population. More than 50 percent of Americans experience at least