The experience of homeless women: An exploration of housing histories and the meaning of home

The exploratory study with homeless women presented in this paper aims to highlight two shortcomings in the current literature on homelessness, which accompany the predominant conceptualisation of ‘home’ as a place of safety and security, and homelessness as a primarily structural issue characterised by ‘residential instability’. The first is the paucity of research on homeless women in their own right and the second the lack of studies which examine underlying reasons for residential instability from homeless women's own perspectives. An intensive, small sample interview study was carried out with 12 regular women users of a day centre for homeless people (Brighton, south of England). They were asked about their patterns of residence, reasons for moving, definitions of ‘house’, ‘home’, and ‘ideal home’, and they gave their housing histories in some detail. In a quantitative analysis, their patterns of moving and definitions of ‘home’ were compared to those of a group of securely housed women. Number of moves was comparable in both groups, but for the homeless women the majority of moves had been made to avoid abuse and social services relocations. Whilst all of the securely housed women could confidently define a difference in meaning between a ‘house’ and a ‘home’, only 3 of the 12 homeless women did. They equated ‘home’ with safety and security, the same terms used in the literature to define what housing means, and the two most salient features largely absent in homeless women's experience of housing. The meaning of home is further explored in a qualitative analysis, where the themes of safety and security—or rather their absence in abusive relationships—are traced through the homeless women's childhood, adolescence and adulthood. These exploratory findings question an easy equation between ‘residential instability’ and homelessness, and highlight the need to investigate further the reasons why women leave housing, and the relationship this has to an understanding of what ‘home’ means. Whilst current formulations suggest that the homelessness of women is a problem, and housing the solution, this study suggests that housing is the problem—homelessness may well be a solution.     

Young People Exiting Homelessness: An Exploration of Process,Meaning and Definition

In the past decade in particular, research attention has shifted from an almost exclusive focus on routes or pathways into homelessness towards the investigation of exits from homelessness. As well as demonstrating the multiple paths possible for young people who become homeless, recent research, and longitudinal studies in particular, has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of the homeless pathways of young people. Nonetheless, knowledge and understanding of the nature of homeless exits, and of the mechanisms that facilitate the transition out of homelessness, is far from complete. This paper explores the processes surrounding the exit routes taken by young people out of homelessness and the meanings attached by them to these housing transitions based on selected findings from an ongoing qualitative longitudinal study of homeless youth in Dublin, Ireland. More broadly, the paper considers the utility of distinguishing between the types of routes that young people take out of homelessness, with particular attention to the notions of ‘independent’ and ‘dependent’ exits. The paper aims to further the discussion and debate on the conceptualisation of homeless exits and also discusses a number of policy implications arising from the study's findings.     

Indigenous relational understandings of the house-as-home: embodied co-becoming with Jerrinja Country

Abstract

The paper considers what housing studies can learn from Indigenous understandings of the house-as-home. Explored through Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies of the house-as-home, the objective of the paper is to offer nuanced understandings of the social and material work of the house itself in the making and unmaking of home. We draw on an Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaborative research, led by Jerrinja elders. The research design included veranda yarning sessions and Indigenous talking circles. Three dimensions emerged strongly from Jerrinja people’s understandings of the making and unmaking of house-as-home: home as an objective capacity, an aesthetic sensibility, and an affective experience of Country. These dimensions are discussed through a relational framework that combines Panelli’s discussion of ‘Country-as-home’, Prout’s idea of ‘kinship-as-home’ and Bissell’s thinking around materiality in achieving comfort. The paper concludes by reflecting on the importance of including Indigenous knowledge if housing studies as a field is to go beyond a Western cultural politics of the house-as-home.     

Immigrants and home in the making: thresholds of domesticity,commonality and publicness

The search for home as a material and symbolic space is an increasingly salient social question across contemporary multiethnic cities. The boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic are increasingly contested and yet remain a crucial issue, especially for minority groups such as immigrant and ethnic communities. The domestication of everyday living spaces carried out by immigrant and ethnic groups entails a variety of ways of ‘cultivating home’. In a context characterized by transnational mobility, ethnic segregation and social marginality, domesticity—understood as the potential to enact a domestic dimension in meaningful places—is an important asset to resist present hardships, cultivate memory and lay out projects for the future. In this Editorial, we seek to untangle the multiple stakes entailed by the practices of ‘making home’ and ‘feeling at home’. We invite scholars to observe how, even in minute and mundane details, dwelling places and the built environment come to be imbued with social and cultural meanings, which are pivotal to survival and social recognition. The articulation of domesticity, commonality and publicness can be fruitfully mapped through the concept of ‘thresholds’, which brings together the case studies that follow. By doing so, this Special Issue as a whole lays out a new research agenda at the intersection of housing, urban and migration studies.     

Homeless women,material objects and home (un)making

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature that attests that self-articulation is carried out through the building, decorating and arranging of home. This, for the most part, has tended to overly focus on inhabitants of private, secure and permanent housing. Addressing a gap in literature and theory, this article explores the possibilities of homemaking for the growing sections of society in insecure housing or homelessness situations—for whom housing is neither stable, secure nor a necessarily positive entity. It does so by drawing on in-depth interviews and participant-produced photographs from women accessing homelessness services in the North of England. Of interest here is how homeless women relate to, engage with and use material culture (objects, possessions and the physical dwelling) to simultaneously make and unmake home. The article subsequently offers a new empirical focus for material culture studies which has so far largely neglected the experiences of marginalized groups.     

The Trappings of Home: Young Homeless People's Transitions Towards Independent Living

This paper describes the experiences of young homeless people in Western Australia during their transitions to more permanent accommodation and independent living. For these young homeless people, permanent accommodation provided an opportunity for ‘feeling at home’ and having a sense of control and stability associated with ‘home’. Within this space, these young people wanted to be considered ‘normal’ home occupiers. In this context, the paper discusses how young homeless people experience and negotiate the social and cultural understandings of home outside socially accepted pathways of leaving the parental home and becoming ‘normal’ home occupiers themselves. The paper shows how this experience of home, and the potential it offers previously homeless young people, is interrupted by discourses of youth workers, neighbours and society at large, which serve to (re)position them outside the community of ‘normal’ home occupiers. The findings have implications for both policy and the delivery of services to young homeless people.     

The role of housing policy in perpetuating conditional forms of homelessness support in the era of housing first: Evidence from Australia

Abstract

Despite widespread enthusiasm for Housing First approaches to addressing homelessness, conditional models of support that require ‘housing readiness’ persist in many jurisdictions. Existing research cites an ongoing commitment to conditionality amongst homelessness services providers as a key reason for its persistence. In this paper, we argue that State housing policies also play an important role in perpetuating conditionality in the homelessness sector. Drawing on research carried out in an Australian jurisdiction, we show how policies regarding the supply and allocation of social housing compel homelessness service providers—including Housing First services—to employ conditionality practices. We also demonstrate the detrimental impact this has on the housing outcomes of homelessness people with complex needs. We conclude that our findings challenge the claim made by some that Housing First constitutes a ‘paradigm shift’, and instead highlight the complex processes of policy translation and assemblage that shape the adaptation of Housing First in different contexts.     

Privacy in the private sphere

This article examines the issue of privacy within the home as a way of exploring the contradiction between feminist views that women and men experience the home differently ‐ and indeed that women may find the home oppressive ‐ and Saunders’ recent (1990) evidence that men and women express similar and equally strong positive sentiments about their home. We conclude that privacy within the home is negotiated within the wider framework of familial ideology and the ideals of ‘home’ and the companionate marriage’, so that within the home there is typically differential access to privacy for adults and children, and men and women.     

‘It's just like we're going around in circles and going back to the same thing …’: The Dynamics of Women's Unresolved Homelessness

The condition of long-term homelessness has been demonstrated to affect a far smaller number of individuals compared with those who exit and become housed. It is nonetheless a pressing policy concern because of the high social and economic costs associated with prolonged homelessness. As with much homelessness research generally, gender is not adequately addressed, and frequently ignored, within analyses of ‘long-term’ or ‘chronic’ homelessness. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance and examines the experiences of women who have lengthy homeless histories based on the accounts of 34 women who are participants in a larger biographical study of homeless women in Ireland. Women's movements into and out of homeless service settings are examined in some detail, as are their accounts of the lived experience of prolonged homelessness. Their narratives reveal their mothering roles and identities, intimate relationships and intimate partner violence, and their ongoing interactions with institutional settings, including homeless hostels, as key dynamics influencing their movements and the strategies used by them as they attempt to manage their homelessness. We conclude by highlighting several gender-specific forces driving the women's experiences of unresolved homelessness. A number of key messages for policy are also discussed.     

The promotion of women's cooperatives in Mexico: Is feminist technical assistance an Oxymoron?

This article examines one of the fundamental dilemmas in grass roots planning practice—how to provide planning expertise to disenfranchised clients while not creating systems of dependence among those clients on that expertise. Specifically, the article investigates attempts to provide feminist technical assistance to women in rural production cooperatives in three communities in central Mexico. The three cases provide both positive and negative insights into how to provide empowering, and feminist, technical assistance. The cases raise questions about two issues in local development planning for women: why is it that a ‘cult of expertise’ tends to develop in technical assistance agencies, and how can we develop alternative approaches that respect women's ‘local knowledge'?; and how can cooperatives construct a feminist labour process’ that integrates domestic and market relations.     

Senses of Place,Senses of Time: Landscape History from a British Perspective

Abstract

A vast and varied literature exists on the history and archaeology of vernacular landscapes, yet still heritage ‘value’ is often weighted towards the extravagant landscapes created by powerful elites. This article is concerned to bring the wealth of historic landscape and archival research closer together with recent theoretical writing on landscape and dwelling, by focusing on the early modern period in particular. Recent theoretical approaches open up creative space for thinking through the archival material and invites landscape historians to think in terms of movement and dwelling as essential to understanding landscape at the human scale. As this article attempts to show, this is by no means a one-sided dialogue; rather historical landscape research can inform theoretical work in new and productive ways. Bridging the gaps between research areas has the potential to enrich our understanding of everyday landscapes as heritage, created by ordinary people going about their day-to-day activities. The paper argues for the importance of recasting mundane, commonplace features of the landscape—roads, fields and boundaries—as an essential part of our social and cultural landscape heritage. Read in this light, the archival sources suggest that the meanings afforded to the extant remains of the past in the landscape were made through intangible heritage practices, customs, memories, naming, rituals and performances by ‘ordinary’ people.     

“They say this is a home”: the challenge of “home” in residential care settings for old and young

In this article, we want to bolster a critical discussion of how the “home” is used in research on residential care, and additionally make sense of young and old residents’ feelings of resistance, through the lens of a critical geography of home. We illustrate how the home ideal might be provocative and frustrating for the residents, although previous studies point out that the ideal is used by staff and in policy to reassure residents of a sense of belonging and mastery. Examples from interviews with young unaccompanied boys as well as older residents living in residential care have been used and the analysis resulted in two themes: “Residents’ conflicting experiences of space” (shared space, restricted space and regulated space, and “Residents’ feelings of homelessness” (transitional space and encroached space). How the residents themselves understand the space that is called their home and why their home can stir ambivalent or negative feelings of isolation, exclusion, and homelessness, is relevant in order to avoid romanticizing home. Residents’ understanding of home can be different from the staff, a reminder that home is a much more complex notion than the rosy ideal.

     

From encampments to hotspots: the changing policing of homelessness in New York City

Abstract

This article examines a shift in language and enforcement around homeless dwellings in New York City that occurred in 2015. Amidst a rising tide of anti-homeless sentiment, city officials and police department administrators switched from calling such dwellings ‘encampments’ to ‘homeless hotspots’, which were defined as anywhere with two or more homeless people in public space. Using data from city policy memos, interviews with homeless people, ethnographic fieldwork with a homeless-led organization, and data from the city’s 311 user-driven complaint system, this article argues that in practice, the shift to hotspots demonstrates the relational geography of homelessness. Selective enforcement of the visible ‘homeless hotspot’ took place in recently-gentrified neighbourhoods, suggesting that the idea of a homeless hotspot itself and the financialized home are co-produced and co-dependent, created through one another. This relational geography, in turn, sheds light on the pervasiveness of anti-homelessness, force that changes with political winds but retains its power in producing borders and boundaries of urban space.     

Homelessness and social control: a typology

Abstract

The use of ‘social control’ interventions in housing and welfare policy often courts intense controversy, and never more so than when attempts are made to bring about change in the conduct of street homeless people. To date, academic scrutiny has focused on the so-called ‘regulation’ or ‘criminalisation’ of rough sleepers occupying public space, but a range of ‘softer’ control mechanisms are also now in evidence within homelessness support services. This paper explicates the relationship between the distinct forms of social control that have been used in this field – force, coercion, bargaining, influence and tolerance – and compares the perspectives of policy makers, frontline practitioners and homeless people regarding the appropriateness of their deployment in England. It emphasizes that the use of every one of these modes of social control, and indeed the absence of such controls, raises moral and practical dilemmas, the nuance of which is often unacknowledged in academic accounts.     

New Labour,Street Homelessness and Social Exclusion: A Defaulted Promissory Note?

This article offers a critical appraisal of the ‘New Labour' governments’ (1997–2010) much vaunted commitment to confronting and combating the spectre of visible rough sleeping and its associated street culture. It reviews the trajectory of policy initiatives and welfare practices concerned with engendering the social inclusion of homeless people. It subsequently interrogates attempts to shape the behaviour of people experiencing homelessness through the imposition of greater conditionality and invocation of an ethic of self-responsibility. It stresses the importance of considering the role of actively engaged local communities in governing homeless people and regulating homeless service providers. It does this using an ethnographic case study of homelessness and housing need in a small market town in the south-west of England.     

Common Ground in Australia: An Object Lesson in Evidence Hierarchies and Policy Transfer

Developed in New York City in 1990, the Common Ground model of supportive housing has recently been embraced in Australia as a high-profile solution to chronic homelessness. Combining on-site support services with a congregate housing form accommodating ex-homeless people and low-income adults, Common Ground is presented as an innovative model which permanently ends homelessness, enhances wellbeing, and strengthens communities. This article critically examines the process of transferring the model into Australia's social housing sector, drawing on the perspectives of the high-level stakeholders closely involved. It argues that, despite official commitments to evidence-based policy, the ‘advocacy coalition’ driving this international policy transfer employed a ‘knowledge hierarchy’ wherein professional intuition and personal experience were afforded a higher status than formal evaluative evidence. The article provides an example of the contested nature of what ‘counts as evidence’ in housing and homelessness policy, and considers what role academic research – as well as other knowledge sources – should play in the policy development process.     

Asset-based Welfare,Equity Release and the Meaning of the Owned Home

The advantages of ownership—both financial and personal—were a prominent theme in UK government policies promoting owner-occupation in the latter half of the twentieth century. More recently, the liberal discourses of the ‘ownership society’ have been conflated with the neo-liberalisation of welfare to restructure the socio-political ideology of ownership around accumulation and decumulation of housing wealth. This paper analyses findings from a new qualitative study to explore the tensions that this shift has created for owner-identities. Equity release transactions provide a prime context to explore the role of homeownership ideologies on participation in asset-based welfare: these are conceived as products that enable older owners to de-cumulate housing equity while continuing to occupy their homes and retaining the ‘badge’ of ownership. This paper focuses on the impact of housing wealth decumulation through equity release on the meanings of the owned home and to reflect on the role of feelings about ownership on participation in asset-based welfare.     

Mediated Architecture in China

This article argues that contemporary Chinese architecture is profoundly shaped by a ‘culture of figuration’ that appears to be grounded in the way in which the Chinese square words manipulate images and meanings in relation to reality. This culture of figuration reconstitutes the image culture—as it has been constructed by the consumer society—and allies with the electronic media to produce a mediated architecture in China. As twentieth-century modernity articulated a critique of the image culture through the notion of authenticity, the culture of figuration anticipates a ‘figurative modernity,’ which suggests a possible space for a more reflexive architectural culture in China.     

Australian housing,technological change and the Fordist regime of accumulation

Although the concept of Fordism has been used to explain a range of phenomena in Australian post‐war political economy, there have been few attempts to assess its utility within the field of housing provision. This paper is a preliminary attempt to ‘test’ the Fordist model. It distinguishes between two uses of the concept—a narrow ‘productivist’ approach which focuses on the ‘backwardness’ of the housing industry, and a broader ‘societal’ approach which focuses on the interrelationship between dominant production techniques, patterns of consumption and urban form. The first section examines the fate of post‐war visions of Fordist housing. Following this, the paper suggests that the broader use of the concept—derived from the regulation school of political economy—is useful for explaining the coincidence between suburbanisation, mass consumption, mass production and state intervention after the Second World War.     

Do house prices rise that much? A dissenting view

The debate over the social significance of home ownership partly rests on the ‘house price assumption’ — the notion that house prices rise consistently above general inflation rates and benefit all owners. However, these theoretical claims rest on sparse empirical evidence and are beset by measurement difficulties. This article attempts to measure real house prices (ie adjusted for inflation) and pure house prices (ie adjusted also for quality and quantity changes) for Britain since the mid 1960s. Comparisons are also made with high and low price regions in Britain and with four other north European countries. Results suggest that real and, even more, pure price gains are not assured, that price falls are as significant as price rises, and that over the long term gains may be low and even ephemeral. Short term booms and slumps may distribute gains and corresponding losses between owner occupiers, but this redistribution is likely to be socially random. These results therefore support criticism of the ‘housing sector cleavage’ model.