One might be forgiven for thinking that homelessness is a fairly random, even unfathomable, event. Politicians of all stripes, in their supportive and well-meaning contributions, repeatedly emphasise that homelessness results from many different causes and is hugely complex. The claim that homelessness could happen to any of us has frequently been made, along with periodic eruptions of concern in the mainstream media about stories of middle-class homelessness.
But the fact of the matter is that for some systematically disadvantaged groups, the probability of homelessness is so high that it comes close to constituting a norm.
Our research indicates that a mixed-ethnicity lone mother who was poor as a child, renting at age 26, who has experienced unemployment, has a predicted probability of homelessness of 71.2% by age 30. Contrast this with a white male university graduate from a relatively affluent background in the rural south of England, living with his parents at age 26, where it is a mere 0.6% by the same age, and you’ll see that we aren’t all equally vulnerable to homelessness.
The much fuller picture given by national household surveys confirms that being younger, single or a lone parent heightens your vulnerability to homelessness and so too, in England, does being from a black or mixed-ethnic minority group. What comes out even more strongly in our research is the overwhelming association with poverty. In fact, once you set aside poverty as a factor, our research shows that the excess representation of these groups in the homeless population diminishes or disappears. In other words, it is not so much being young, single, a lone parent or black per se that makes you vulnerable to homelessness, but rather the fact that you are more likely to be poor [pdf].
Digging deeper into longitudinal data provided by the British Cohort Study, our research indicates that childhood poverty is the most powerful predictor of homelessness in young adulthood. Factors like serious drug use in adulthood also contribute to homelessness risks and to some extent having a strong social support network protects from homelessness, but are much less important than poverty. The official statistics tell us that lone parents (usually mothers with young children) account for 47% of households accepted as homeless by English local authorities, despite making up only 6.3% of all households. Couples with and without children, and older people – both much commoner in the general population – are significantly under-represented among statutorily homeless households. Black and other minority ethnic groups, on the other hand, are over-represented. In Scotland, single homeless people are (uniquely) entitled to rehousing on the same basis as homeless families, and account for two-thirds of the total, most of them under 35 [pdf].
Any serious debate about homelessness policy needs to focus on this deeply unfair distribution of risks rather than trite homilies about “complexity” which depoliticise what is, fundamentally, a structural problem. What’s more, compassion and social justice should not rely on the probability that you or I will be affected by it. Homelessness is wrong, and entirely preventable in this country, which is one of the richest in the world. If you’re middle class, it probably won’t happen to you – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care.
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