Homelessness: How We Talk About It Matters
When we start organizing as a neighborhood and talking about challenging issues like homelessness, it is easy to dehumanize people experiencing homelessness by using generic terms like “the homeless” to describe them, without even realizing it.
For the purposes of this blog post’s argument, we’re drawing a distinction between disparate groups: people living without homes, people using substances, people in need of care for mental illness, and criminals.
Consider these examples:
Example A
“Homeless people are camping in the park.”
“People” is the subject of the sentence, and the word “homeless” is used to describe them.
Example B
“The homeless are camping in the park.”
“The homeless” is both the subject and descriptor of the sentence.
The people being discussed have been reduced to a single aspect of their life experience.
The idea is to emphasize the person you’re describing instead of a single aspect of their identity.
Other options include: people without housing, people without homes, or people experiencing homelessness.
Why It Matters
“Homeless” is a living situation, not an identity. Treating people with dignity, kindness, and basic respect is what being a good citizen and neighbor is all about. It costs us nothing to choose language consistent with those values when we talk about people going through challenging experiences.
They’re humans just like us, with hopes and dreams about what fortune could bring them or where life may take them. They have mothers and fathers who love them; brothers, sisters, and other family who worry about them; and friends who pray for their safety.
Aside from modeling good citizenship, the whole point of talking about these issues is that they’re problems in our community we want to solve. We can’t solve homelessness with drug treatment, and housing can’t treat drug addition or substance use disorder.
When we talk about people who are engaging in antisocial behavior in parks and on the street—open substance use, untreated mental illness, loitering or camping, trespassing on private property, littering, vandalism, etc.—we need to be specific about what the issues are, in order to get the right kind of resources and support from the city and different resource providers.
