The Nature of Homelessness - Defining Homelessness

A Legislative Definition

During a period of growing concern about homelessness in the mid-1980s, the first major piece of federal legislation aimed specifically at helping the homeless was adopted: the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 (PL 100-77), today known as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. Part of the act officially defined a homeless person as:

1. An individual who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence; and
2. An individual who has a primary nighttime residence that is:
   1. A supervised publicly or privately operated shelter designed to provide temporary living accommodations (including welfare hotels, congregate shelters, and transitional housing for the mentally ill);
   2. An institution that provides a temporary residence for individuals intended to be institutionalized; or
   3. A public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings.

A Broader Definition

The government's definition of a homeless person focuses on whether a person is housed. Broader definitions of homelessness take into account whether a person has a home. Martha Burt and her colleagues at the Urban Institute reported in Helping America's Homeless: Emergency Shelter or Affordable Housing? (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 2001) that as late as 1980, the Census Bureau identified people who lived alone and did not have a "usual home elsewhere"—in other words, a larger family—as homeless. Home in this sense describes living within a family, rather than having a roof over one's head.

The Urban Institute researchers also stated that homeless people themselves, when interviewed in the 1980s and 1990s, drew a distinction between having a "house" and having a "home." Even when homeless people had spent significant periods of time in a traditional shelter, like an apartment or rented room, if they felt those houses were transitional or insecure, they identified themselves as having been homeless while living there. These answers, according to the authors of Helping America's Homeless, "reflect how long they have been without significant attachments to people."

Burt and other homeless advocates have disagreed with the narrow government definition of a homeless person, which focuses on a person's sleeping arrangements. They assert that the definition should be broadened to include groups of people who, while they may have somewhere to live, do not really have a home in the conventional sense. Considerable debate has resulted over expanding the classification to include people in situations such as the following:

• People engaging in prostitution who spend each night in a different hotel room, paid for by clients
• Children in foster or relative care
• People living in stable but inadequate housing (having no plumbing or heating, for example)
• People doubled up in conventional dwellings for the short term
• People in hotels paid for by vouchers to the needy
• Elderly people living with family members because they cannot afford to live elsewhere

Official definitions are important because total counts of the homeless influence levels of funding authorized by Congress for homeless programs. With the availability of federal funds since the passage of the McKinney Act, institutional constituencies have formed that advocate for additional funding, an effort in which more expansive definitions are helpful.

TABLE 1.1
Main causes of homelessness, as reported by big city mayors, 2004
SOURCE: Adapted from Eugene T. Lowe, "Main Causes of Homelessness," in Hunger and Homelessness Survey: A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America's Cities, 2004, U.S. Conference of Mayors-Sodexho USA, December 2004, http://www.usmayors.org/uscm/hungersurvey/2004/onlinereport/HungerAndHomelessnessReport2004.pdf (accessed February 2, 2005)