Louise, a woman of 42, lost her house in the divorce several years back. Having limited financial resources, she’s been sleeping often in her car, sometimes at a shelter, and occasionally on the street. She’d like help securing a home, and her caseworker tells her there’s a viable path to becoming housed. There will be conditions, however—she must seek employment, undergo job training, budget prudently, and remain sober. Only then, she’s told, might she qualify for housing.
Louise’s experience is typical. The dominant model for addressing homelessness requires unhoused persons to exhibit some responsibility before they’re deemed “housing ready.” While such requirements are sometimes motivated by hostility, they needn’t always be. The moral ideal of reciprocity, in which all take on some responsibility for contributing to society, is recognized by conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike. And someone who refuses to work, accept vocational training, or attend to their finances, might seem uncooperative, thereby undermining their claim to be provided with a large resource—such as a home.
This whole line of thinking is misguided, and badly so, I believe. But it’s also pervasive, influential, and espoused often in good faith. So, it’s worth examining where exactly it goes wrong.
Rather than argue that housing should be provided only if one can prove themselves to be responsible, my contention is that housing is necessary for taking on normal social responsibilities. For this reason, a person who finds themselves homeless can’t be held responsible in the ways it’s normally reasonable to. To put this provocatively: housing ought to be thought of as a precondition for being an accountable person, not as a reward for being one. To deny Louise housing is to deny her the opportunity to be socially responsible, and to meet the very conditions being imposed upon her. She can’t be a good community member, or a good citizen, if she’s excluded from society, and homelessness amounts to exclusion.
Thus, I’ll argue everyone should be guaranteed a home—a stable, sanitary, and secure place to live—without having to prove themselves worthy or deserving. Such a guarantee ought to be seen as a basic requirement for a minimally decent society. And although this might at first seem unrealistic or far-fetched, I hope to show that the view is in fact remarkably plausible.
I.
To appreciate why housing should be guaranteed, and guaranteed unconditionally, it’s helpful to consider what life is like for those forced to make do without it. Here, I’ll describe some aspects of homelessness, highlighting how they block a person from discharging some of the most minimal social responsibilities.
Stability and Location
To lack a home is to lack a place where one can count upon being allowed to be—a base from which one may reliably operate, safe in the knowledge of one’s entitlement to be there. One might, of course, seek refuge in an emergency shelter. But while shelters provide temporary protection from the elements, a bed is typically not guaranteed, and permission is not typically granted to remain throughout the day. Betty, a fifty-year-old woman whose shelter empties out at 7:00 a.m., describes the implications of this: “I walk the streets. Twelve hours and fifteen minutes a day, every day, I walk the streets.” If she attempts to rest in a coffee shop, or on a bench, or in a storefront, she’s liable to be told to move along at any moment. And if she isn’t back to the shelter before 7:00 p.m. (but not too long before that, because there are rules about when you can begin lining up), she’ll risk losing her bed for the night.
Lacking a guaranteed place to be affects drastically a person’s ability to participate in the workforce, complete job training, receive education, or follow through with any sort of treatment regimen. These activities require that a person appear at a certain place at a certain time with regularity, and the lack of a stable home can make this practically impossible. If denied a bed at the shelter, Betty will have to seek refuge elsewhere. This can require travelling miles across town without a car—a physically taxing and time-consuming ordeal. And if she’s fortunate enough to find a bed, she’ll be a long distance from wherever she might need to work, take classes, or receive treatment the next day.
If she’s lucky enough to secure a bed, her troubles aren’t over, however. Those who make use of the shelter often complain of having nowhere to go in the time between the shelter’s emptying out and when the workday begins. If it’s raining and cold, standing outside for several hours isn’t a reasonable option. But where is a person supposed to go? What if there’s nowhere near her workplace that allows her to rest inside? What if there’s nowhere outside even to sit?
Employers are well aware of these difficulties, which is why they try to screen out job applicants who they suspect are homeless. Ron, a young man who’d travelled across the country looking for work in Texas, laments the fact that his job offer at Arby’s has been revoked. He’s been told, despite the initial offer, that they were looking for someone with more “Arby’s experience.” But Ron is suspicious. “She must have figured out that I’m a transient,” he says, noting that he’d not given the manager any contact information. “[O]therwise, why would the ‘Help Wanted’ sign still be in the window?”
Without a place that one is entitled to be, one is not guaranteed to be able to be in any particular place. Without a guarantee of being able to be in any particular place, one cannot commit to taking on responsibilities. Certainly, one cannot commit to arriving at a job in good shape, rested, clean, and presentable. As such, employers are hesitant even to give someone a chance. Under such conditions, how much sense does it make to hold a person responsible for their employment status?
At the Mercy of Others
Homelessness puts a person at the mercy of others, in a way that’s hard to square with assigning them much responsibility. If I’m homeless, I need permission from some property owner in order to be anywhere at all, or in order to do anything at all. And this means it’s really not up to me whether I can discharge basic responsibilities. It’s up to someone else. If I’m going to be rested, dressed, and ready for school, work, counseling, training, or anything else, someone needs to give me the space to do these things. If no one does, I’m out of luck, irrespective of my good intentions.
One might think that streets, sidewalks, and public parks dissolve the problem, giving homeless persons a right to be in a particular location. But these are collectivized resources, owned, controlled, and regulated by public authorities who themselves determine how the spaces may be used. And these authorities are wont to use their power to ban the very sorts of life-sustaining activities that homeless people need a place to engage in.
Sleeping on the street is often disallowed, if not de jure then de facto, and municipalities increasingly place rocks and spikes in doorways and under bridges in order to make it impossible for people to rest. Urinating and defecating in public is prohibited, of course. People who appear homeless are typically told by the police, or by business owners protecting the sidewalk outside their storefront, not to loiter. Bathing in public areas, too, is frequently prohibited and met with punishment. Thus, a homeless person’s ability to sit down, lay down, rest, bathe, and relieve themselves, will all depend upon the sympathy of the (often hostile) public, and upon the (often arbitrary) wills of police and public officials tasked with regulating public spaces.
What this means is that any responsibility that a homeless person might wish to take on, or any steps they might wish to take in order to facilitate taking it on, will require various permissions from others. To maintain a job, one must sleep, and without a home, one requires the permission of others to sleep in some particular place. One must also bathe, and brush one’s teeth, and if this is disallowed in any public space, then one will be unable to perform these bits of minimal hygiene. A person needs to urinate and to defecate in order to live. If no public bathrooms are made available, if the bathrooms are locked for large portions of the day, or if they are so filthy as to be unusable, a person will have to relieve themselves in public. If they do, they’ll be in violation of the law, and will risk detention at the hands of the authorities. And if they’re arrested, they’ll miss work, class, training, or treatment, and will be saddled with a criminal record that will make securing work and housing in the future even more difficult.
How, then, can we hold a person without a home responsible for their contribution (or lack thereof) to the social order, or for bettering themselves in any way? What they do or don’t do, or what they can or can’t do, will always, ultimately, be a reflection of others’ wills and the sorts of control they choose, or choose not, to exercise. It’s just not up to the unhoused person whether they can do what’s being asked of them, so it’s perverse to ask it in the first place.
Relationships and Community
Humans are social creatures. They require sustained relationships in order to function and it’s unreasonable and unrealistic to expect them to operate without them. But homelessness is so often destructive of these relationships. Couples are broken apart. Children are removed from their parents. Friendships are often impossible to sustain. And while it’s easy to take this for granted, these sorts of bonds are essential to forming and maintaining each of us as persons able to live in community.
Consider Dasani, a young girl living in a Brooklyn shelter, who learns that she and her family will be relocated immediately to another of New York’s boroughs. The family doesn’t yet know where they’re going, but they are told to pack their things, and they realize they’ll now be separated from the already limited support structures in their community—neighbors, teachers, counselors, and so on. This is bad enough. But eventually, the family itself will be broken apart when social services deems the parents unfit. The children are sent to live in different homes, apart from each other, and away from the adults. This story is told in Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child, and whatever the merits of the decision to break up the family might have been, Elliott describes a situation in which each family member, including the adults, begin struggling mightily without the support of the others. They run into trouble with the law, they relapse, they experience emotional difficulties, and they initiate conflict with others.
It’s not hard to imagine why they’d all struggle. People count on one another to tell them how they are coming across, how their ideas or plans sound, what they’re missing or overlooking. People count on one another to tell them how they appear (physically), how they seem (emotionally), how they sound, and how they smell. Real basic stuff. Monitoring such things, and making strategic decisions about them, is all part of what’s needed to take on social roles, to act as a community member, and to be a citizen. Other persons—even very flawed ones—can be essential to this monitoring. But the material conditions of homelessness are such that they are destructive of the very sorts of relationships that enable this basic form of human functioning.
* * *
I’ve identified features of homelessness that apply quite generally to those who experience it, emphasizing those that serve to marginalize persons and exclude them from social participation. The point is not that any of these is necessary or sufficient for exclusion. Rather, the idea has been to paint a picture in which these features work in concert to marginalize a person so extensively that it is unreasonable to expect or to demand their cooperation. A person who is homeless lacks a home base from which to operate. They cannot count on being, and cannot plan to be, in any particular place for any significant duration. They are cut free of familial and social support, from loved ones, and from friends—the very people who would normally help to constitute and maintain their personality are denied to them. And there is no place that they are allowed to be without the permission of another, placing them always at the mercy of others, subject to their whims, counting upon their sympathy and grace.
At this extreme, or anywhere near it, such a person seems to lack all the prerequisites for participating in the system of social cooperation. And they seem to lack them precisely because they’re homeless.
II.
Most discussions of injustice in contemporary philosophy—especially those concerned with class, poverty, wealth, or resources—focus on distributive fairness. In other words, the focus is on whether each participant is given a proper share of the resources that society cooperates to produce. One could imagine an account that analyzed homelessness through this exact lens, framing the victims as members whose participation yields spoils so meager that they cannot even afford a place to live.
But the picture I’ve painted suggests a different approach. Those who are unhoused, it seems to me, aren’t simply given less than they’re entitled to, but are denied the status of participants in the first place. They are quite literally marginalized.
To spell this out a bit: A cooperative society characterized by reciprocity is a moral ideal. But there are two ways to run afoul of this ideal. First, society might withhold benefits owed to individuals by virtue of their being members. Second, it might exclude individuals from participating as members at all. The wrong of homelessness seems most aptly captured by the latter. To be homeless is not simply to be denied a fair share, to be given too few resources, or to have one’s interests afforded insufficient weight. It is to be excluded from the opportunity to do the things and to take on the responsibilities that count as participation in the first place.
Thus, the wrong done to persons who are homeless is not simply an instance of economic injustice, distinguished by the degree of unfairness. It is an injustice of a distinctive kind, consisting in undemocratic and illiberal exclusion. People without a home don’t just find themselves in a more difficult circumstance than others find themselves in, or find themselves less well off than they’re entitled to be. They find themselves unable to act as a citizen, employee, or community member, and, indeed, their very right to exist seems relatively anemic.
If this is correct, then the fact that homelessness is allowed to persist amounts to a kind of foundational wrong that calls into question our society’s liberal and democratic credentials. As with other forms of exclusion, homelessness cannot be countenanced by a society that claims to embrace liberal and democratic values, and the question cannot be about whether to eliminate it, but only how.
III.
But are we really going to put people into housing, no strings attached? Isn’t this just some unworkable fantasy dreamed up in the philosopher’s armchair, admirable in its ambition but divorced entirely from the practicalities of the real world?
In fact, it is not. That persons needn’t prove themselves in order to be entitled to housing is the premise of an influential approach to the problem of homelessness. Instead of requiring homeless individuals to refrain from drugs and alcohol, maintain employment, avoid all legal troubles, undergo counseling, and complete job training if they’re to claim title to a home, Housing First supposes that they should be afforded one unconditionally. Here is how the National Alliance to End Homelessness describes it:
Housing First is a homeless assistance approach that prioritizes providing permanent housing to people experiencing homelessness, thus ending their homelessness and serving as a platform from which they can pursue personal goals and improve their quality of life. This approach is guided by the belief that people need basic necessities like food and a place to live before attending to anything less critical, such as getting a job, budgeting properly, or attending to substance use issues. Additionally, Housing First is based on the theory that client choice is valuable in housing selection and supportive service participation, and that exercising that choice is likely to make a client more successful in remaining housed and improving their life.
The approach has enjoyed real-world implementation and has boasted real-world success. Evidence suggests that those who are guaranteed housing are more likely to maintain stable residence, participate in substance-abuse treatment, and carry out and complete programs of mental health treatment, all without experiencing an increase in substance-abuse or psychiatric episodes. And at a purely economic level, providing homeless persons with housing saves money by reducing interactions with law enforcement, decreasing emergency room visits, and lessening reliance on social services. As such, Housing First has drawn support from both liberals and conservatives—from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration, and sometimes from the Trump Administration—precipitating a paradigm shift of sorts among shelters and municipalities across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as they confront homelessness and its fallout.
There are debates to be had about how to structure Housing First programs so as to make them more effective, how to scale them, and what to do with the minority of the homeless population that, for whatever reason, really cannot take on the responsibility of maintaining a home. Nevertheless, this is not some untested, pie-in-the-sky proposal, and I think the basic model should serve as the backbone of any policy program designed to address homelessness.
That there exist persons in wealthy nations who are without a home, and are therefore largely excluded from societal participation, is one of the great moral wrongs of our time. To hold such people responsible for failing to contribute to the society from which they are largely excluded is as absurd as it is appalling. People should be held socially accountable. Reciprocity is important, as it is an essential part of what it is to be a coequal partner in one’s community. But in order to be socially accountable, and thus a coequal partner, a person needs, first, a home.
Paul Schofield
Paul Schofield is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bates College. He writes on ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of film. His book Duty to Self: Moral, Political, and Legal Self-Relation is available from Oxford University Press.
But in order to be socially accountable, and thus a coequal partner, a person needs, first, a home.