Understanding Contemporary Homelessness: Issues of Definition and Meaning

There is little agreement in the recent academic literature about how the concept of homelessness should be defined. This is more than just a theoretical problem, because it becomes difficult to urge governments to meet the needs of homeless people, if the parameters of the homeless population are unclear. This paper reviews ‘conservative’, ‘radical’ and ‘conventional’ perspectives on homelessness in modern society, and it argues that it is possible to adjudicate between them. The paper proposes a socially constructed definition of homelessness based on the notion of minimum community standards. It argues that this culturally relative position provides a theoretically meaningful framework for understanding homelessness in the 1990s.