Actually "homeless" is not really current — it's 'unhoused' now.
"Undocumented" is also a bit passe, the current trend is to drop the "undocumented" part entirely, and just refer to all immigrants (legal or illegal) as "immigrants".
Totally depends on definition of "homeless". Some use a definition based on whether someone has a roof over their head most nights, the narrowest definition possible. I prefer a definition based on legal rights: Does the person have property rights (owners/renters/housing benefits etc) in a stable domicile. That means those couch surfing, in shelters and illegal residences are counted as homeless alongside the people literally sleeping in the open air.
Few would doubt the rise of the "working homeless" across the western world. The concept of someone having a fulltime job and still not able to afford rent is new. It is today's sharecropping imho.
And then there is the other modern phenomena: the legally mandated homeless. Every large city in the US now seems to have a bridge or overpass filled with people who are not legally allowed to live anywhere else. Stringent limitations on where certain convicts may live is also new.
Why does “unhoused” connote a temporary state and “homeless” an intrinsic one? Why is it any more people-first? Both are combinations of two roots that are respectively synonyms - “house” and “home” have essentially the same meaning in this context, as do “un-” and “-less”.
I think the far more likely explanation is the typical euphemism treadmill: “homeless”, a neutral description, is perceived as a slur precisely because the people it describes are social outcasts, and so people wanted to stop saying it. Then stretched justifications for why “unhoused” is inherently less offensive were come up with after the fact.
There’s a big crosstalk that happens because almost everyone is referring to the chronically homeless (or whatever the technical term is) whereas the vast majority are homeless for 6 months or less.
It sounds like a definition/data-collection issue.
What are we calling 'unsheltered' versus 'homeless'?
America is full of oddballs who live #vanlife or couch surf or bounce between motels. Is that what we are calling 'unsheltered'?
> Every time I've seen statistics comparing, they disagree with your anecdote.
We both know the Churchill saying. Hard to parse the statistics you provided but what I am talking about is bona-fide homeless on the street that you walk past in the city. Not some Barista who is technically not on a lease but lives at her boyfriends house.
Homeless is such a broad term. It includes people that most people don’t even know exist.
When people say homeless they are referring to the visible ones on the street.
Most studies and statistics like to use the ones who are homeless on paper. They are the ones who don’t have place to live other than publicly provided facilities. There are entire apartments of people you would otherwise not know are “homeless”, simply because they are not the one paying for their own room and board.
We need a new term. Something to call the people that when somebody says homeless, we invasion in our head.
Homeless is to broad. Nobody thinks you are differently because you got kicked out of your apartment or lost a job and fell behind on mortgage.
In the other hand. The people clogging intersections. Spitting on others, taking shots in public, doing drugs and fuxking on the street, nobody thinks and no study shows 7500 would do anything other than make it worse. Ans that is why this study excluded these people from the study.
Recently homeless is very different from chronically homeless. Recently homeless likely means "fell on hard times" instead of mentally ill and addicted to various drugs.
The point of this wording is that "homeless" is not an identity, not a classification that permanently groups people into one category or another. Rather, it's a condition that people can experience, whether chronic or transient.
Point taken and appreciated. I agree that homeless is a bit of a catch-all, but I'm not sure that we have any equivalent phrase to rough sleeping in the US (at least on the East Coast). When I hear the word homeless, I first think of people living on the streets.
Defining what you mean by the term 'homeless' is actually very important to having productive discussions about homelessness. The vast majority of people are referring to people living on the streets when they take issue with the homeless. They are not referring to people who are living in their cars or whatever.
Since we are on a tangent anyway I've just realised that the current British PM just this week appeared to be using the non-standard definition when talking with a "homeless" man at a soup kitchen over Xmas. I think I'm this case the PM was corrected fairly quickly but the assumption that homeless means having fewer homes explains a lot of government policy
The last time I looked into these numbers, the definition of "homeless" between the countries was so wildly different that the numbers were impossible to compare
I think I actually made a comment to this effect recently (although perhaps not on HN? Can't recall now). I think your idea of phrase overloading is an interesting one; often it seems that words lose their severity / intended effect, so new words are adopted. To the point of a sibling comment, homeless has now become "unhoused," to infer a different connotation or slight nuance over what is traditionally or stereotypically thought of the homeless population, perhaps. "Dire" and "manipulative" drive attention, and that is indeed the goal for better (to drive change) or worse (to profit from attention).
"Undocumented" is also a bit passe, the current trend is to drop the "undocumented" part entirely, and just refer to all immigrants (legal or illegal) as "immigrants".
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