In this editorial, the editor reflects on the trend of the latest edition of the International Journal on Homelessness‘ articles to highlight structural factors as the cause, and therefore solution, of homelessness.
The question of who is responsible for homelessness threads through the majority of articles in this edition of IJOH. Two divergent answers are contested anywhere from public and political discourse, to research and other forms of scholarship.
One answer locates the cause in the person: their choices, their substance use, their failure to hold a job or keep a tenancy. The other locates it in the structures the person moves through or in: housing markets, labour markets, immigration regimes, child welfare systems, the design of the services meant to help.
I have written in a previous editorial about how evidence on rapid rehousing keeps colliding with a politics of deservedness, the long-standing conviction that public support should flow only to those who have proven themselves worthy of it. What strikes me about the articles collected here is how thoroughly, and from how many different angles, they document the machinery of that conviction and the cost of getting the answer to responsibility wrong.
