Myths About Homelessness

A.J. Withers has done a great service for people who have questions about using point-in-time counts of people who are homeless. Withers reviewed and analysed 165 reports of homeless...

A graduate thesis by Barbara Erin Gaede, who is studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides a useful reminder that rural homelessness is different from urban homelessness. The housed population...

Let's set aside convenient fallacies that all cops are sadistic brutes. And that all the unhoused are crazoid drug fiends. Let's take a much broader view of the participants in...

On any given day, a search on Google Scholar for articles about homelessness can bury you with results. With so many studies to choose from, why select an undergraduate...

It's hard to imagine there is anybody on earth who has not experienced a WASHWASH:     WAter Sanitation Hygiene event at least once in their life. We...

Camp Resolution, a homeless encampment in Sacramento, was closed on August 27, 2024. About 50 people were living there when trespassing notices were issued. Residents were offered space in...

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on the case of Grants Pass v Johnson, what’s next? This post is the final one in a four-part series about...

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on the case of Grants Pass v Johnson, what’s next? This post is the third in a four-part series about post-decision...

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on the case of Grants Pass v Johnson, what’s next? This post is the second in a four-part series about post-decision...

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on the case of Grants Pass v Johnson, what’s next? This post is the first in a four-part series about post-decision...

Private health care insurers have steered clear of enrolling people who are homeless as plan members. Most of the health care for people who are homeless is paid for...

Here in Canada, sleeping beside the United States, we are sometimes cautious in our departures from the latest loony tunes that trickle north across the border. Canada seems sensibly committed...

If Shakespeare lived in a modern multimedia universe and wrote about extreme poverty instead of kings, would a part of his work product look anything like "Sandwiches?" Sandwiches is one of...

Fingers in the ears, mouthing 'la. . . la . . .la. . . la',  head in the sand. It all adds up to low calorie, high roughage lunch...

More than year ago, the UK's Prince of Wales discussed his special interest in ending homelessnessTry: Prince William: The Next Proud Meddler In United Kingdom Politics? . His Homewards...

Three academics who are based in Canada have written a thoughtful article about preventing homelessness as it is practised in the global north. The authors are strong advocates for prevention....

Perth, the largest city in Western Australia, acts professionally toward people who are homeless. There is no grab by the scruff of the neck and transport to the city...

Recent good news for the comfortably housed in Singapore, with its world class housing care for its population. After 35 years(!) of trying, residents will be allowed to house...

Columbia, the capital city of South Carolina, is in a climate region often visited by temperatures both uncomfortable and potentially dangerous. That is a particular threat to those with...

Have you found yourself studying a sleek motor home that has appeared in your field of view? Are you tantalized, imagining yourself in the cozy comfort of a home...

From an individual point of view, the above picture reflects something that is practiced regularly in order to maintain good health. From a broader community point of view, it...

Imperfect data collection, difficult to implement, dependant on volunteer labour, not necessarily welcomed by those who are meant to benefit from it, a compulsory practice in order to be...

So let's be honest here. How frightening are unhoused people? Sure, everyone has discomfort, even fear, when some person screams a loud and crazy litany of nonsense from (with...

There is a debate about why people become homeless in the United States. Some people see the rental market as the issue. Others think that personal factors, such as...

A disabled pet, a homeless encampment, well-meaning animal rescue workers, an activist intervention, an overwhelmed new pet owner. Result: two deaths to date, one by euthanasia. These events are...

When the UN's special rapporteur on housing published a report about housing in the Netherlands, he was clear that problems facing the country were the result of policy choices...

In a recent publication, The Harvard Political Review details two forms pernicious ill-health that is killing increasing numbers of global citizens including Americans. Climate change is one. The other...

Reading the article attached to this post might put you in mind of banging your head against a brick wall. The article is about a project to calculate mortality rates...

City councils bring their own values and concerns to their decision-making. When it comes to the homeless, do those values, well-meaning or no, tend to mirror the opinions of...

Unhoused people are using the margins of California's waterways for temporary accommodation. Those familiar with historic settlement and land use patterns in North America will appreciate the use of...

"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot . . ." Joanie Mitchell's famous words featured 'paradise' destroyed by car culture. Times have changed, and parking lots have earned...

Yes, it gets cold in the Mile-High-City, Denver Colorado. And yes, in Denver, like many American cities, the number of people who have no home is growing. It's not...

Here are some images, with accompanying comments, taken during an encampment demolition in Halifax. The next steps, rendered inevitably off-camera, reflect the displacement of former encampment residents towards literally...

Here's something that may come as a shock to supporters of a universal human right to adequate housing. In a certain large American city, when it comes to to...

Homelessness counts are an increasingly commonplace means by which cities and nations attempt to determine the costs to handling growing numbers of people who pursuing a precarious existence on...

The unhoused! Would you be more accepting of them if they weren't so horrible? But then, perhaps you should pat yourself on the back. You are already cool, calm...

In a world of self-reliance, the Baby Boom (postwar) generation is aging out self-care. The future has arrived. Your retirement planning, if it even exists, was locked in during an...

Modern Western countries are slipping rapidly towards a housing crisis unmatched since the Great Depression in the 1930's. How might we take heart from this circumstance, particularly those less...

54-year-old Tracy Bennett's story plays out from the other side of the road in San Diego, courtesy of a Tucson Sentinel article. Tracy munches Cheez-Its with a couple of...

An event is taking place in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia, which is quite extraordinary in North America. That community is largely one of single family homes — a suburb...

Some believe that tents are a last resort for those trying to survive inclement weather in the flimsiest possible form of shelter from the elements — all they can...

Portugal is undergoing an exercise familiar to Americans who followed recent events by West Coast activists: illegal(?) squatting in unoccupied housing. That story focused on the actions of moms...

The National Alliance to End Homelessness (The Alliance) is thinking about the data it collects about homelessness in the United States. The Alliance's data feeds into annual reports to...

In July this year, we published a story about trauma informed architecture. Now we have another. Why so soon? This time, there is another linked article that adds new information...

When your country needs housing, it is both conventional as well as common to build houses for people who need them. A substantial number of the world's countries are...

According to a US report from the Center For Public Integrity, "The federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which protects the educational rights of homeless students, requires schools to identify and...

Affordablehousingaction.org clings to an underlying notion that financialization, no matter how honourable the motives that can be assigned to those who practice it, nonetheless impacts a country's population with...

Of late, affordablehousingaction.org has been making the case that homelessness merely lives in communities. It is born, however, as a national disease that infects entire nations in all its...

With nearly a third of America's homeless crowded into the state, California's major league homeless problems are more likely to receive experimentation than any other region on the continent....

A combination of events makes New York City an excellent example of why every mayor and council of every town and city in every world democracy should think seriously...

What possible use is a dog when you're penniless without a roof over your head? It hints of a self-inflicted wound when a homeless person has been turned away...

The majority of women who experience homelessness in Los Angeles County have experienced violence during their current episode of homelessness. And one third of women experiencing homelessness in Los...

At affordablehousingaction.org we consider The Guardian one of the world's great papers, with well-written world-wide in-depth stories about social housing and homelessness. When The Guardian picks up a story, we...

30% of all people who are homeless in the United States live in California. That state has a to-die-for climate (a good deal of the time anyway). It's easy...

Affordablehousingaction.org recently highlighted two articles about homeless outreach teams operated by local governments in North America. One was based on a research from the United States, which found that...

Housing ultimately solves homelessness. Outreach doesn't. Particularly when the outreach is accidentally or deliberately punitive. Next City has published an article that explores cities where the official intention is...

Affordable housing activists everywhere are faced with an exasperating truth: only they, as well as people experiencing homelessness, understand that harassment solves no problems. Predictable cause and effect works...

So, are government politicians and bureaucrats invariably duplicitous (as in: I say this all the time but I never really mean it)? Or is government work a wonderful career opportunity...

Four researchers from Trent University in Peterborough Ontario, kick off a report on the benefits of technology with a warning published a century ago. Even that far back, some...

This post is about medical residentsResidents are fully qualified doctors who are completing post-graduate training. in Windsor, Ontario, who are rotating through a one month posting to a clinic...

You have to hand it to capitalists! They are indeed the gods of profit, and can find the narrowest niche market in which to make a few bucks. But...

"Advocates say. . . " Are those unnamed advocates real or imaginary? Advocates of the facts? Or advocates of "alternative facts?" Pursuing a viewpoint, or running away from one? A...

Olivier M. reports that Toronto had a golden age of homelessness, from 2009 to 2013. He speaks from personal experience. In the golden age, he could find a bed in...

The ultimate small-c, lift-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps conservative has a supposedly bullet-proof sneer at those unfortunates sleeping on the sidewalk. "Don't ask me to solve their problems if they don't have jobs." But...

The whopper: 1.3 billion dollars. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appears to be committed to telling homelessness like it is. For example, in a recent speech aimed partly at the...

As the bloom comes off the COVID 'Everybody In!' rose, a nation's most vulnerable have largely returned from their moments of motel and hotel room pandemic safety to life...

During its short life, affordablehousingaction.org has published 2,700 posts. The purpose of reporting this is not to puff out our chests, but to highlight a gap in our content....

The COVID pandemic resulted in a profound change — temporarily at least — in the way that homeless citizens were treated world-wide. Was it because communities were overwhelmed by...

Around the world, tent encampments have been a sensible, practical alternative to more permanent housing when none other is available. Search Wikimedia Commons for 'tents' to reveal some of...

The Women's National Housing and Homelessness Network (WNHHN) is drawing attention to the issue of how gender-diverse peopleThe research discussed in this post uses the term “gender-diverse” as a...

There are some awfully ugly human behaviours out there in the real world. There are also bad habits that foolhardy local councils of one stripe of another can stumble...

First there were the fingers. That got society counting all the way to ten. At which point counting-persons, with breathtaking audacity, added in the toes. Actually, this analogy for the...

Very few of us have the chance to work at an emergency shelter. If we did, we'd have a much better idea of what it is like to work...

An article in THE GEORGIA Straight explains the supposedly practical reasons that Homelessness Point In Time (PIT) counts are undertaken. The efforts are not necessarily backed by the bullet-proof...

There's a hint that author Tracy Kidder is worth a read, regardless of the subject. His name on the cover of his new book is as prominent as the...

The homeless are: unable to afford housing for their family afraid of being beaten to death on the street, or in a homeless shelter too lazy to work ...

The human right to adequate housing is a noble aspiration. And if communism and socialism have contributed nothing else to humanity, they have at least proven that determined governments...

Is it a case of America doing everything bigger and better, or is it a problem of Hawaii running out of road to send the homeless out of town...

Myths about homelessness are regularly featured in our posts. There are a set of these myths that are remarkably persistent. It seems important to us at affordablehousingaction.org to debunk...

The importance of pets to people who are homeless is well understood by some, and dismissed as an undeserved indulgence by others. Affordablehousingaction.org has voiced support for pets with...

"Here's a great idea, fellow council members. We can cure homelessness by making it a crime. Then we simply threaten the homeless with a suitable criminal behaviour, say 'illegal...

Lived Experience? Some decision-makers need more of it. Recently, there has been a considerable push for lived experience to back up government and homeless/housing support agencies by those advocated...

What's to know about unaffordable housing, homelessness, and the link between the two? A great deal, as we've been discovering ourselves at affordablehousingaction.org. With the cost of living soaring along...

AAHA! Fooled us with that name, didn't they? We were expecting a rabbit pulled from a hat and have instead latched on to a group of Canadian architects, designers and...

There's well-known a French expression that seems to sum up California's Homeless experience: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." The more things change, the more they stay...

Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada ended Chronic Homelessness in the city in 2021. There was national and international fanfare. What's to be learned from knowing that 'ending Chronic Homelessness'...

Worldwide, the endless stories of failed anti-homeless initiatives make us wonder at affordablehousingaction.org. Just what does it take to make self-righteous citizens and their accommodating city councils realize what a...

The harsh reality we all face in civilized countries: you can't opt out of the census — often not legally, anyway. And why should you want to? It's the...

What's the point-in-time count in your particular district? Conveniently, whatever it suits you to say it is. That's one possible answer to a necessarily haphazard, volunteer-rich process of lifting...

It is so convenient to adopt the conventional neighbourhood attitude to the homeless: they are all druggies with mental disorders and criminal habits. Not only that, they poop, too....

The hand that feeds our blog is, needless to say, the media outlets where we find many of the stories that we pass on to our readers. So why...

How quickly civilization fades in a deteriorating empire. Only a few decades ago, arguably the greatest country in the world could imagine a civilization without slums. To achieve it,...

Young and homeless because of substance use mental health aging out of care mistreatment at home pure adventurism financial mismanagement relationship breakdown . . . . The list of possible...

The New Yorker Magazine is providing some free reads at the moment. Hopefully, you'll catch one before they close the window, because what follows is a fascinating story of...

A hopefully balanced opinion piece (if such a thing can exist) from Ohio's Akron Beacon Journal helps unscramble some thoughts about 'hands on' private activism as a means of...

For cities world-wide considering their options for dealing with persistent homelessness, the article linked below offers some useful comparative insights. It describes the efforts in two medium-large cities in...

In 2021, a famous international agency, UNICEF, stepped in to provide emergency food for students at a school in England. Why did this become necessary? At the time, the UK...

The John Howard Society of Ontario provides support to people who are affected by the criminal justice system. Their mandate also includes research and public education. The Society's report...

So what's the homeless score in Murderland? How many upstanding citizens have been done to death by homeless people — angry, drug-fueled and/or otherwise crazed? How many hapless homeless people have...

" . . . up there, coming to save the homeless! Is it a bird? A plane? No! It's a . . . word salad?" When it comes to solving...