No, you're right to think it's stupid.
Houselessness was a big item at our recent city council meeting, and since I don't know the reason for "homeless" vs "houseless", it just sounded like its purpose was to signal wokeness. Which isn't fair if there is a real reason.
But if there's not a good reason and it is just virtue signalling, well that would be obnoxious too.
"Apartmentlessness" is the clearer term.
Honestly, I always get annoying with real estate people using "home" for everything. That annoys me more.
"Apartment" is kind of a funny word, now that I look at it. "Here's your compartment whose main goal is apart-ness."
6: What word should they use as a better catch-all? (Car-hole?)
I guess if the context is houses, then okay. I thought you meant that they needed a single word for house/apartment/condo/lean-to.
I wasn't even aware of this until now, so I googled it and found this in Architectural Digest
The change is happening in part as governments move away from punitive measures amid a deepening housing crisis. Past efforts have not resolved the matter, and both policy and messaging are shifting. The word homeless has become inseparable from a "toxic narrative" that blames and demonizes people who are unhoused, according to Eve Garrow, homelessness policy analyst and advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. The term is increasingly used in a way where it implies someone is dangerous or devious, she said. As a result, a less charged term is more apt.
"We've seen this before, words like transient or hobo are retired and no longer acceptable to use," Garrow said. "Homeless has become intertwined with narratives that are toxic. It deserves to be retired."
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/homeless-unhoused
Lots of stuff hangs on the word "home". Maybe the idea is to remember the person is lacking a building to live in and not necessarily the place-centered sense of rootedness you get with "home."
A house is a house, of cowse of cowse, and no one can talk to a house, of cowse.
You could probably tell 12 was me by the lazy formatting.
The term is increasingly used in a way where it implies someone is dangerous or devious, she said. As a result, a less charged term is more apt.
Fair enough - I definitely have heard "homeless" used synonymously with "dangerous and mentally ill and drug-addled".
Wait. Never mind.
18: That's a person that only has high-heeled shoes.
Are people actually saying "houseless"? As in "the houseless" or "houseless people"? I am familiar with the shift to saying "unhoused", but not houseless.
That has a specific meaning. Someone who is wohnungslos has some kind of shelter, be it in a homeless shelter, at friends, something like that. They just don't have their own apartment or house.
Technically, I don't have my own house.
If we said "poor," we'd have to think a bit about our notional commitments.
6: oh me too. I want to buy a house or an apartment not a home. I might say I was at home or in my own home, but the building itself I'm not going to refer to as "the home"
Also people who don't understand that a townhouse can be a condo.
22: I've heard a doc who does a lot of substance abuse stuff refer to "unhorsed patients/people".
I do think there are categories of "homeless" that are somewhat different but not sure that this addresses them.
Around here, we have people who get put in short-term extended stay motel places, mostly women with kids who are classified as "homeless". If is not quite the same group as those on the street or in the generic shelters, but they are all described as homeless. Same with people who sleep on friends couches.
Maybe I should be here.
There's a cycle of euphemism (probably a better term for it that's not coming to mind) where neutral words intended to describe problems turn into epithets -- "idiot" and "moron" started out as medical diagnoses. Abandoning those words and moving on to arbitrary new ones that haven't accrued the insulting connotations feels artificial, but I don't think it's avoidable.
In my ideal world we would have an easy verbal distinction between situationally homeless meaning someone who got evicted but who has no major problems that would interfere with remaining housed if they could just find an income-appropriate living situation, and chronically homeless, meaning someone who needs a lot of other support services to stay living indoors. But I recognize that there's not going to be a bright-line distinction between the two groups.
battling the 90s homelessness crisis, British social workers developed the distinction between being homeless (i.e. you might be on someone's sofa but your problem is still real) and sleeping rough (i.e. you're literally under a bridge)
29: Sometimes people refer to street people when talking about the people who struggle chronically and need support to stay indoors.
Streetlight people, up and down the boulevard .
Disaccommodated?
Alex makes a good point. If the change of terminology serves to diminish the problems of people who might have a roof over their heads tonight, but are entirely dependent on the good will of others for it and have no idea how long it might last, then fuck it. Bad thing.
"Street people". I'd like more information on how the people it describes feel about the term.
29.last: I know Malcolm Gladwell is hated these days, but his New Yorker article on that point is pretty interesting. He says (and I haven't checked the references), is that 80% of people in shelters use them for a few days exactly once in their life, with 1 day the most common and 2 days next most common. Then there's a middle 10% of young people who are periodically homeless several times a year, and then 10% permanently homeless. The latter two categories are probably hard to distinguish on the margin (in particular, I think high housing costs pushes a lot of people from the 2nd category to the 3rd), but the first category really does seem pretty easily distinguishable. Gladwell's argument is that for the first category the usual shelter system roughly works, but that for the third category you have to do something radically different.
I also hear "unhoused" more than "houseless". I agree it's trying to diverge from "homeless" only because it's (sometimes) pejorative now, not because of any added meaning alternative words might have, but there's also been some of the "person-first language" concept in which case it's usually the even bigger mouthful "people experiencing homelessness". Hopefully no one ever moves to "PEH".
And of course when you don't fix the underlying issues the new word then becomes pejorative too.
An article investigating on what they actually want to be called. Predictably no easy answer.
I've been cautioned that "street people" is considered especially pejorative.
Anyway, I hate when people try to come up with bogus arguments for these linguistic shifts. Go ahead and change the language as a way of asserting power for powerless groups, but don't insult our intelligence by pretending that there's some objective argument for it. As long as the people in the actual group (and not just the activists!) support the language shift, then we should follow it. But I feel like more and more extremely online young liberals are coming up with language that's not actually supported by the people describing it. I have no idea whether that's going on in this case. Locally I'm pretty confident most of the homeless people are hardcore Trumpers and wouldn't want to be called unhoused or whatever.
36: There are also weird rules about prioritizing homeless people for housing, and staying in a shelter allows you to qualify as homeless. I used to see this with clients of the department of mental health who had friends or family who could take them in for a while but who could not provide permanent housing. If they were willing to stay overnight in a shelter - and some weren't - they would get certified as homeless and go higher up on the list. Mind you, these were people with a mental illness who were being served by DMH. Getting case management like that, itself requires a pretty significant wait, and these people certainly needed supported housing.
37.last: Am I misreading the article? It seems like there's a very very clear answer: "In fact, the majority of the people living on the streets who I know and have interviewed (both in this role and at my previous job at Berkeleyside) self-identify as 'homeless.'" So we should say homeless unless an actual homeless person asks us to use a different term and then politeness dictates you switch to what they ask.
On a personal note, my YIMBY credentials are being strengthened -- this project is going up literally in my back yard (to the extent an apartment dweller has one). I approve, but wow do I hope the loud parts of construction happen fast.
This project: https://newyorkyimby.com/2021/09/rendering-revealed-for-affordable-development-at-5055-broadway-in-inwood-manhattan.html
"Homeless" works well because the antonyms is "homely."
I've heard a doc who does a lot of substance abuse stuff refer to "unhorsed patients/people
Being unhorsed is surely a good thing in a substance abuse context.
I've heard 'unhoused', and that it's less more likely to be used as a noun as in 'the homeless.' But 'houseless' just sounds like the person didn't quite read the memo they got.
Zio yami, zio yami, nhliziyo yami
Nhliziyo yami amakhaza asengi bulele
Nhliziyo yami, nhliziyo yami
Nhliziyo yami, angibulele amakhaza
Something else that's going on, I think, is two different angles on advocacy around houseless people. There's poilcy around housing scarcity and shelters and provision of services that make it possible for people to live indoors, on the one hand. And then there's a strain of activism centered around respect and humane treatment for people who are living outdoors, which I recognize as important on some level given the current inadequacy of the first type of policy, but I do sometimes think of as slightly point-missing. The rhetoric coming from that strain sounds sometimes as if the choice to live on the street should be respected as a free choice, and I'm pretty convinced that very, very few people would ever make that choice if they had a remotely acceptable indoor option.
"Unhorsed" is just a euphemism for being vaccinated, no?
On 48.last, I think there may be a genuine California/NY difference on this point. In California and Hawaii I think you do sometimes get people who'd rather camp near the beach than live in a house in Riverside.
The context last week was a proposed ban on encampments and panhandling. So the sides were very much split between "homeless people are dangerous and need to be swept away" vs "homeless people are houseless people and deserve dignity and stop making it harder to get social services to these people, you cruel assholes."
To everyone's credit, the latter outnumbered the former 20:1, and the councilmember who put the item on the agenda backpedaled harder than a Roadrunner switching directions on Wile E. Coyote. Also the towns surrounding us (and also Austin) all have bans against encampments. I can't weigh in on Austin because big cities have big problems, but the little towns around us are all assholes who just want to sweep homeless people down the highway to the next town.
They used to literally drive people to other towns and drop them off. They probably still do.
Sometimes it was doing people a favor. If they are driving across county and they didn't have enough money for gas, buying a full tank makes it someone else's problem.
Some guy stabbed a guy in a small town and it got really awkward when people started asking how the guy with no car got to the town and the answer was "in the car of the sheriff of the next county over. "
Am I misreading the article? It seems like there's a very very clear answer: "In fact, the majority of the people living on the streets who I know and have interviewed (both in this role and at my previous job at Berkeleyside) self-identify as 'homeless.'" So we should say homeless unless an actual homeless person asks us to use a different term and then politeness dictates you switch to what they ask.
Yeah, it makes sense as default.
In California and Hawaii I think you do sometimes get people who'd rather camp near the beach than live in a house in Riverside.
Yes, but I imagine most of those willing campers would not be the ones economically forced to. They could get a gym membership and shower there, that kind of bohemian lifestyle.
We have a huge problem with being the magnet for homeless people from a pretty large region. I'm never sure how much of the stories about other town sending people here are true or not. The debate seems really frustrating because it's all around whether encampments should be removed or not, and not about where we want the homeless people to live and about safety. At least here you can't have a place that is both a major homeless encampment and is safe for women to walk in without being frequently harassed and occasionally assaulted, and the pro-homeless bloc doesn't seem to acknowledge that issue at all. We recently built a whole new park and now have private security to kick people out of it, when what I think we should have done was build some roofs in one corner of the park and told the homeless people they were allowed to set up permanent camp in that designated location instead of the current status quo of kicking people out of their tents and making them move every week or two.
The heroin epidemic weirdly decreased the amount of sexual harassment, but it seems to be back on an upswing now as some people are switching back to meth.
48: very, very few. But I met one. He was high on the list of people reviewed by the Department of Mental Health and genuinely seemed to prefer to sleep on Boston Common. I think you might be able to get him to live alone but not with a roommate. He had absolutely no tolerance for anyone imposing any rules and had been kicked out of housing. He got kicked out of a museum once b3cause he kept touching the art despite signs he clearly understood.
So he needs an apartment to himself, and a lot of support services generally. But he'd still probably prefer that to living outdoors, and it'd still be preferable for everyone else.
IAHPMHB, a few years ago I was at a fundraiser for a new cabin complex as a safe place for people to actually move to, and my city councilmember, who had been elected in 2012, described a recent process of "realizing" that when you kick homeless people off of one corner due to neighbor complaints they just move to a different corner. It made me want to bang my head against something - surely everyone has always known this, but it's not in their interests to acknowledge, I guess.
29: I've heard it called the euphemism treadmill.
I think in this case it's particularly a waste of time because lots of people just don't like the homeless as a group, so the new word will have the stigma of the old word almost instantly.
It also strikes as an example of "We need to do something. This is something. Therefore we need to do it." It will lead to pointless fights where people use the term to signal that they are in an activist in-group, and then it will eventually take over, and we'll be back to the status quo ante, or it won't, and it will have been pointlessly divisive. And it will achieve nothing to do anything about homelessness.
59: I think so, mostly, and I agree with your recommendation. I also think he might have been happy on the islands (Caribbean) living in a little hut and living in a building with shared spaces (hallways etc.) was too much for him.l
51: There's something really fucked up about the American system of local control. Other than the big cities, individual municipalities don't have the resources to actually provide housing and services to get people off the streets, that has to be funded at the state or federal level. What municipalities can do is be kind or cruel about how they manage encampments, and that turns into concentrating the problem in locations where the local authorities are kind. And then the public conversation starts sounding as if kindness causes homeless encampments.
What needs to happen is the provision of housing and services, so that the encampments aren't necessary at all. But one town can't afford to do that.
Or the goal is to produce assholes and the system is optimized.
I want to tattoo 62 on my forehead, but it's too long. Maybe just "Comment 62".
There's no problem that can't be solved by coining a new term, workshopping it in seminar, and feeling guilty. If it's an especially tricky problem then you need to use an acronym instead.
You know what's free and needs no consensus? Coining new terms.
13 is the explanation I've heard for use of "houseless" or "unhoused" in place of "homeless": basically, not having a physical house doesn't mean someone doesn't have the sense of belonging and support associated with the concept of "home." I think it's still pretty much limited to activist circles. My new job is very close to these issues and "homeless" is definitely still the default term in policy and service provision circles.
"Unhoused" makes some sense; a person can be housed in an apartment. Phrasing it this way emphasizes that what's missing here is the provision of housing (in apartments or other structures) for people who need it. In contrast, "homeless" tends to emphasize the individual person's lack of housing, and implies that this lack is the person's fault.
"Houseless" makes no sense because a person with a luxury apartment is houseless if they don't also happen to have a house.
"Unhoused" makes some sense; a person can be housed in an apartment. Phrasing it this way emphasizes that what's missing here is the provision of housing (in apartments or other structures) for people who need it. In contrast, "homeless" tends to emphasize the individual person's lack of housing, and implies that this lack is the person's fault.
"Houseless" makes no sense because a person with a luxury apartment is houseless if they don't also happen to have a house.
"Houseless" sounds like someone who got wiped out in the real estate collapse of '07. I don't argue about these things. I remember idiots arguing that "chairwoman" sounded unnatural even though "charwoman" was just fine. There are so many different kinds of people who don't have a regular place to stash there stuff and sleep. Some are a lot easier to help than others. Maybe we don't need just one generic term, but a set of terms for the unlucky, the precarious, the drug addled, the psychotic and so on. A friend of mine is a social worker who works with what she still calls the homeless, so I'll bet she knows a lot of the summary code words.
Changing the name only helps for a while. It's like "cretin" which was derived from Christian to remind people that severely mentally challenged people too were worthy of God's grace.
And, on the playground i England when the Spastics Society rebranded to "Scope", "Scope" became the insult of the moment. Similarly "Special needs" became "She's a bit ... special".
My son now uses "Karen" as an insult (I'm not clear on what he thinks it means), and when his classmates are annoying he says they're being "toxic". Words don't mean what we want them to, at least not for very long.
I must ask my niece Karen what she thinks about all this.
Only the Ayds diet plan had the ground cut from beneath them faster.
One must defer to the people who care most about language. I personally prefer "African American" to the capitalized "Black." I want a singular, gender-free third-person pronoun, rather than "they."
Doesn't matter. A consensus has developed around "Black" and "they." Nobody cares what I think about it, and nobody should care.
I don't like "houseless" or "unhoused" for reasons described above -- reasons that Walt elegantly summarizes in 62 -- but that language doesn't represent some kind of incipient tyranny. If I find myself around people who would be offended by "homeless," I won't use it. And if "houseless" enters into general usage, I'll drop "homeless" entirely.
In 12, anonymous peep links a serious-minded discussion from Architectural Digest. The people quoted (and the author of the piece) share one key characteristic: They are infinitely more involved in the relevant issues than I am. Yeah, I think they come up with the wrong answer here, but it isn't up to them and it isn't up to me. Ultimately, the matter will be decided by general usage.
(As your benevolent prescriptivist dictator, I could come up with a much better English language, but alas, we live in a descriptivist democracy.)
The problem with 79, which is basically right, is that we're again-and-again in the last 5 years seeing a split between general usage among those who are highly educated and those who are not. Taking a purely descriptivist viewpoint doesn't help when the description is "young college educated people say X, older people and non-college educated say Y."
I don't think I've ever seen a person holding a cardboard sign saying "Unhoused" or "Houseless".
I saw a person holding a sign about how one could find a very cheap mattress.
81 is a very good point. What do homeless people themselves use? In my experience, "homeless".
Well, words on cardboard signs are what elicits donations, not necessarily what people might best prefer as a label. But it seems they do broadly match up.
That's another aspect: people don't "self-identify" as homeless as they don't want to be homeless.
Well, they do self-identify as "homeless," it's just not a preferred identity or a source of pride.
But still in practice a preferred term, at least in a revealed preference way.
I see one-third of a nation ill-homed ill-clothed, ill-fed.
"words on cardboard signs are what elicits donations"
No, I mean what word do they actually use when I'm talking to them. In my experience, "homeless".
"words on cardboard signs are what elicits donations"
No, I mean what word do they actually use when I'm talking to them. In my experience, "homeless".
If I went by what they say to me it would be "needs $2.75 for the bus."