Urban Homelessness and Community-Based Participatory Research

Introduction

Homelessness in urban areas, particularly among children, is a significant issue facing major U.S. cities. As reported in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Annual Homeless Assessment Report (2020), approximately 570,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2019 in the United States. Furthermore, homelessness has recently increased nationwide, although the temporal changes in homeless rates exhibit considerable sub-national variation. For example, while homelessness has increased dramatically in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco — known for their long-standing high rates of homelessness — cities such as Chicago have seen a general decrease in homelessness during the same period (Knowles, 2019).

Research has extensively investigated the geography of homelessness. Still, most studies have examined the distribution of homeless populations at a broad geographic level due to limited finer-grained spatial data on the locations of homeless populations (Parkinson et al., 2019). Homelessness is a spatially concentrated phenomenon within a city or metropolitan area, but our understanding of the factors determining this pattern remains limited. Additionally, little is known about the temporal changes in homelessness patterns at a finer geographic level, particularly at the neighborhood level. Given the potential social, economic, and public health effects of homelessness on neighborhoods, understanding where homeless populations grow or decline — and the factors influencing these changes — is essential. This knowledge is critical for informing policy decisions on providing supportive services and implementing homelessness prevention programs (Shin, 2021).

Urban homelessness has long served as an indicator of the prevailing socio-spatial order and its changes. Rising homelessness has accompanied industrialization, urban revitalization, and economic crises. Ethnographic accounts of the everyday lives of homeless people have depicted the socio-spatial mechanisms of societal transformation and their effects on urban life, particularly in Western metropolises, where homelessness was first studied at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since then, ethnographic research has explored homeless people's strategies for coping with a disadvantaging socio-spatial order, as well as the impacts of urban renewal and deindustrialization. In recent decades, ethnographic studies have highlighted the imprints of neoliberal policies on urban landscapes, public space politics, and patterns of displacement and resistance from the perspective of homeless people (Clarke & Parsell, 2019).

Ethnographic research has also revealed various ways and tools of homemaking, informal citizenship, and other forms of political agency related to housing precarity (McCarthy, 2020). Homelessness is a symptom of global and systemic changes (Giles, 2017, p. 332), with different stories from various cities interrelated and affected by the same shifts in the global economy. However, the geographical scope of places from which academic knowledge about homelessness has emerged remains relatively limited. Cities in the Global North and the West are mostly covered, with testimonials from American cities often serving as a reference for conceptualizing homelessness and the policies that address it in different contexts (Ferenčuhová & Vašát, 2021).

References

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