Figure 4.1 According to Voices of Youth Count, Each year, an estimated 4.2 million youth and young adults experience homelessness, of which 700,000 are unaccompanied minors, meaning they are not part of a family or accompanied by a parent or guardian. On any given night, approximately 41,000 unaccompanied youth ages 13-25 experience homelessness.

Kandi (her street name) was 12 the first time she ran away from home. She had read about running away in books like My Side of the Mountain. These stories were supposed to be cautionary tales, but they showed Kandi a path out of an abusive home. She just wanted out. Rather than stay in one place for very long, she hitchhiked cross-country. She spent a lot of time in truck stops and bars. She used a lot of drugs. Every once in a while she got arrested, and there were close calls with dangerous people. She experienced sexual harassment daily and was sexually assaulted and exploited many times.

As she got older and tougher, she learned how to make people respect her no and pay for her yes, at least most of the time. She got her first bartending job at the age of 15. It was easy to find work, but she never stayed anywhere for long. She told people that she chose “the road.” Given the options, it seemed like a rational choice.

People she met shared spare pieces of their lives. She encountered art, music, and big ideas. She went to a lot of parties and listened to many stories around many fires. Sometimes, she had fun—once she got picked up because a group of whitewater rafters needed one more person to paddle. She learned how to survive, but dreamed of more, and spent long hours constructing a better life in her imagination. Eventually, in fits and starts, she began to move towards a life that was safer and softer.

It took years to get stable, but eventually, in her 20s she landed in a small coastal town and fell in love. She stayed put long enough to find a chosen family and make a home. Home was hard for Kandi to hold on to, and she continued to experience housing insecurity into her 40s until she went back to school for a better-paying career. Kandi is in her 50s now, stable and happy with her family and work. She knows how lucky she is.

Kandi is one of an estimated 26 million people in the United States who have been unhoused during their lifetimes (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine et al. 2018). While Kandi now maintains stable housing, an estimated 11.4 million people in the United States reported housing insecurity in the summer of 2021, meaning they were behind on rent and/or likely to be evicted in the next month (Pagduan 2021). Check out this chart of Homelessness Statistics by State to learn more.

Kandi’s story is common. As the cost of housing increases and wages overall stay the same, more and more people find themselves losing their housing or at risk of losing their housing. Stable housing also becomes one of the factors that can help to resolve some of the other social problems that we discuss throughout this book.

 We will define homelessness, houselessness and housing insecurity and consider the individual and collective impacts of the current housing crisis. Then we will apply an intersectional lens to discover how social location can increase risks for housing insecurity and houselessness.We will also consider older theories of houselessness that look at the characteristics of individuals to explain the problem. These theories don’t hold much explanatory value today, but we see these ideas arise in how we talk about problems of houselessness. Finally, we look at community-based solutions that prioritize the wellbeing of unhoused folks and communities at risk for housing instability.

You may notice that we use the words houseless, unhoused, or housing insecure instead of homeless in most cases. As you’ll remember from Chapter 1, a characteristic of a social problem is that it is socially constructed. One way that we can recognize that a social problem is socially constructed is that the language used to define a problem changes over time. Sociologists and community advocates currently prefer the terms houseless, unhoused, or housing insecure to define the social problem. This language helps emphasize structural problems that may cause someone to be without a home, rather than the stigma associated with the word homeless.

4.1.1 Focusing Questions

As we explore what it means to have a stable home, the following questions will guide us:

1. How is housing a social problem according to one of the elements in chapter 1?
2. Who is housing insecure and houseless?
3. How have explanations of housing insecurity changed over time?
4. How does the sociological concept of social stratification help sociologists explain the causes and consequences of houselessness?
5. Which interdependent solutions to houselessness can create housing stability?

As you consider these questions, you might start by thinking about what home means to you. Does your vision match any of those from the people in this video, What Does Home Mean to You?

Let’s learn more!