Homelessness isn't really about housing

As we’ve noted over the years we’re generally not told the entire and whole truth about homelessness. The usual numbers we see - say, claims that 130,000 families were made homeless in a year - are in fact the numbers of people rehoused. That is, the number of people not-homeless as a result of the existence of the welfare state.

This can be viewed either way of course, how terrible that so many need such saving, or phew, isn’t it good that they were so saved? What it isn’t though is a proof that homelessness isn’t being addressed.

Then there’s the other part of the problem:

Ela Sozeri felt hopeful when she was sent to a privately owned hostel in Birmingham, where support staff promised to help get her life back on track. She dreams of one day setting up her own craft business but has been held back by mental health problems and spells of homelessness. Yet her stay soon turned into a terrifying ordeal, which left her and her boyfriend cowering in their rooms in fear.

“When they showed us around, they told us we would get daily contact and support. But we actually didn’t get any [proper support],” she said. “We’ve only had problems here because the other tenants were heroin and crack users. We’re here because of emotional difficulties and having nowhere to live – not for drugs or anything like that.”

Sozeri and her boyfriend were targeted by another couple after they made complaints about prostitution and drug taking in the hostel,

That’s all a problem, entirely so. It’s also not a problem about housing. It’s a problem about drugs, or booze, or mental health.

Which is largely where we are overall about homelessness. There are those sleeping rough, 4,000 to 5,000 on any one night, perhaps 8,000 over the course of a year. There are those at risk, the 130,000, who do get rehoused. But the problem of that rough sleeping, of that last edge of the larger problem, isn’t in fact a problem about housing at all. The existence of more houses wouldn’t solve it - it’s not therefore a problem about houses.

Unlike the US the UK’s remnant homelessness problem is one about addictions and mental health problems, not things solved by buildings.