Homelessness isn’t just about housing – it’s about who gets to belong

I first began thinking about homelessness as a teenager growing up in the United States.

Riding home with my mom from the supermarket, I saw a woman with a weather-worn face holding a cardboard sign that read “anything helps”. I asked my mom to stop the car, got out, and gave her a super-sized box of crackers. This was the first time the issue really struck me.

When we got home, I asked: How can we live like this? How can we live in our nice house with air conditioning and nice yard while people in our own town sleep on the streets?

An argument broke out. My parents insisted that homeless people were “lazy” and “just needed to get jobs”. That explanation never satisfied me and since that moment, the question of why homelessness exists and what we should do about it has followed me.

Now, having spent the last few months studying homelessness in Oxfordshire as part of my summer Policy Report placement, I have a better answer than I did when I was 15. It begins with acknowledging that homelessness is not only a housing problem, but one of belonging.

Is homelessness a housing problem?

In policy circles, the prevailing assessment is that homelessness is primarily caused by an acute shortage of affordable housing. This explanation makes a lot of sense – in the US,  full time minimum wage workers can no longer afford rent in any jurisdiction. When families can no longer afford rent, they get pushed into homelessness – a relationship clearly shown in research linking the average cost of housing and the amount of homelessness in US cities. Similar patterns can be seen in England. Median house prices are over 5 times median incomes in most local authorities and ending private tenancies is a leading cause of homelessness.

Restrictive zoning laws – rules that limit the type or density of housing that can be built –along with bureaucratic planning systems and insufficient investment, are often blamed for the affordable housing shortage. These policies certainly don’t help but we must ask: why are restrictive zoning laws in the US so widespread to begin with? Why are UK local planning systems so slow at producing affordable homes?

“I only realised I was homeless when I lost my friends and family.”

Homelessness is as much a problem with social structures as it is a lack of physical structures. Losing the accommodation of family and friends is another leading cause of homelessness in England. It’s not a coincidence. Around 85% percent of people experiencing complex homelessness in England endured childhood trauma, and only 1% of this group said they could count on their parents in a crisis. Homelessness must therefore be understood in the context of social dislocation.

Explaining homelessness only as a housing affordability problem also ignores how its prevalence varies across cultural contexts. It is less common to see people sleeping on the streets in many low-income countries compared with places like London and Los Angeles. How can it be that places with dramatically lower GDP per capita have less visible homelessness than these centres of prosperity? One answer is that in many non-Western contexts, stronger kinship and social networks prevent people from ending up on the streets.

Who belongs?

Beginning in the 1930s, exclusionary zoning kept out people of colour and poor people from predominantly white and wealthy communities in the US. In the UK, Black and Asian communities were excluded from council homes by residency rules and routinely denied bank mortgages. This systemic discrimination concentrated and relegated minorities to the most undesirable housing.

While such explicitly unfair practices were outlawed in the 1960s by the US Fair Housing Act and UK Race Relations Act, many modern regulations – such as single-family zoning – achieve similar effects today. These exclusionary policy frameworks are fundamental expressions of who we believe to belong in our communities. The implicit drive to create belonging for some by excluding others is essential to understanding modern homelessness.

Public attitudes reinforce this exclusion. When we walk by people sleeping on the streets, we often feel sympathy or helplessness. Political responses from across the spectrum often frame people experiencing homelessness as fundamentally different: either irresponsible or helpless. The UK home secretary in 2023 described homelessness as a “lifestyle choice.” These attitudes can often lead to criminalisation or paternalism. Neither approach will end homelessness. Both positions deny agency and treat homeless people as outsiders rather than equals.

This exclusion leads to a vicious downward spiral. Belonging is a fundamental human need. When people experience deep social exclusion, they can be cut off from the very services, like healthcare, they need to belong in mainstream society.

The truth is that we can live like this because we’ve defined homeless people outside the bounds of our communities: “they do not belong. They are not our problem. We can ignore them”.

We have enough evidence to know how to end homelessness. Housing First, which provides people with unconditional accommodation, outperforms approaches that offer housing as a reward for employment or sobriety. It is also more cost-effective; a UK pilot found that the financial benefits were roughly two times the costs.  Yet in Oxfordshire, only around 40 of the 400 beds for people experiencing homelessness are Housing First. Housing providers hesitate to expand Housing First, fearing backlash against bringing “undesirable” residents into Oxfordshire neighbourhoods.

The gulf between what we know about how to end homelessness and its persistence is not the number of missing affordable homes. It’s not lacking evidence or funding shortages. It’s the distance between us and the people we walk by on the streets.

People are unlikely to support more diverse neighbourhoods or greater affordable housing investment for people they don’t feel belong in their communities. We will continue to paternalise and deliver ineffective services so long as we view people experiencing homelessness as fundamentally distinct from us.

Ending homelessness requires more than increasing housing supply. It requires fundamentally reimagining the social structures that define who belongs in our communities. Until then, our efforts to build more affordable housing and deliver better services will fail to fully solve the housing crisis.