Houseless
Houseless[edit]
Houseless is the term used to describe the state of not having adequate, affordable, decent housing. According to Collins Dictionary, "the condition of being without a house or home 'We understand homelessness - not in the absence of safe and secure shelter, which is houselessness, but rather in the condition of emotional emptiness and isolation,' said Father MacAnally."[1] Houseless is often confused with homeless, but in fact, homeless is only a segment of houseless as whole. The houseless population includes any individual who lacks shelter and is cost-burdened by housing, which is determined by the “30 percent rule” – spending over 30 percent of annual income on housing costs.[2] This metric is the standard for evaluating the relative burden of housing expenditures.
The term houseless is often associated with the Affordable Housing Crisis, which in 2010 affected 980 million urban households. With rising urbanization, this number is expected to rise to 1.8 billion by 2030.[3]
According to the UN Rights Office of the Commissioner, adequate housing is defined as having legal security of tenure, affordability, habitability, availability of services, materials, facilities, and infrastructure, accessibility, location, and cultural adequacy.[4]
History[edit]
The term houseless has mainly been used in recent years to replace the use of the word “homeless” in an attempt to provide a more dignified term for those affected populations. As mentioned above, homeless populations are, in fact, a subset of the main houseless population. However, houseless individuals do not necessarily lack shelter. They instead lack adequate, affordable, and decent housing.
In the summer of 1995, Jim Burklo, Associate Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California, wrote in his essay "Houselessness and Homelessness" that there are two types of homeless: the individual living on the street who lacks a home due to unemployment, psychological condition, or other and the individual who has a good paying job but lacks a traditional home. He continues to coin the phrase that these individuals are not homeless, but rather are houseless. Burklo pointed out an important distinction that has since been adopted and adapted over time.
In July 2016, the Bosa Properties X Prize Foundation Visioneers Team adopted the term to refer to all populations affected by the Affordable Housing Crisis.[5] Yaron Schwarcz, leader of the Visioneers Team, determined there needed to be another way to classify people that lacked access to an adequate, affordable, decent home.
Factors Contributing to the Houselessness[edit]
Initiatives to Address the Houseless Crisis[edit]
The Bosa Properties Affordable Housing X Prize Foundation seeks to begin the process of eliminating houseless by incentivizing radical leaps in innovation in the construction industry. Furthermore, the Bosa Properties Visioneers Team proposed a comprehensive XPRIZE Housing Roadmap that creates prizes to solve for the mechanisms of the Housing Crisis – construction, land, regulation hurdles, barriers to entry, and a failed public-private partnership that has resulted in a general lack of private incentive to build affordable housing.
References[edit]
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