Posted 11 Jan 2023 New research from
There were 271,000 households recorded as homeless in England only at the start of 2023, according to charity Shelter. But the scale of homelessness is a notoriously difficult thing to quantify — it's a moving target and often hidden from view. There are many different types of homelessness, for starters.
You can't solve homelessness without homes. Across the country, there is a chronic shortage of social housing because, for decades, successive governments have failed to build enough. This has left millions of people and countless communities without access to secure, long-term homes with rent they can afford.
In terms of street homelessness, official rough sleeping statistics show an estimated 3,069 people sleeping rough across England on a single night in autumn 2022. That's the first time the count has shown a rise since 2017.
Nigeria has the world's highest number of homeless people Although there appears to be a precise number of homeless people, it is impossible to track and quantify those who change their state of “homelessness”. Nigerians frequently migrate from rural areas to large cities in search of shelter, money and opportunity.
While there is no definitive answer, some reports have claimed that Japan has a homelessness rate of 0%. We can't state with absolute certainty that those numbers are true and accurate, but if they are, then Japan stands alone in that feat.
Realistically in Australia, most people experiencing homelessness are hidden from sight. They could be sleeping in a car, couch surfing or enduring the night on public buses. They may have shelter but no permanent place to make a home. These are the “hidden homeless”.
The research gives a sense that the importance of ending homelessness is steadily building at a time when other causes have stayed static. 74% of respondents feel that reducing homelessness is extremely or very important up from 71% in October 2020.
London has had the biggest rise of rough sleepers in England according to government figures, with an increase of 34% across a 12-month period. There were an estimated 858 people sleeping rough in the capital on a single night in autumn 2022, compared to 640 the year before.
Newham in east London is ranked as England's number one homelessness hotspot, with at least one in every 24 people in housing insecurity. More than 14,500 people were in temporary accommodation in the borough, and 76 were sleeping rough.
Personal experiences. Many homeless people have experienced traumatic life experiences, which continue to negatively impact on their lives in harmful ways. St Mungo's says: “Many of the people we see have mental or physical health problems or have issues with drug or alcohol use.
Rough sleeping is one of the most visible types of homelessness. Rough sleeping includes sleeping outside or in places that aren't designed for people to live in, including cars, doorways and abandoned buildings.
The main cause of homelessness for British citizens is a lack of affordable housing and not being able to afford it. However, this isn't the case for everyone. Some people don't have citizenship in the UK or any other country; these are called “foreign nationals”.
In 2022/23, 32.1 percent of people seen to be sleeping rough in London were aged between 36 and 45 years old, the most common age group in that year. In this same year, just 8.4 percent of people seen to be homeless were under the aged between 18 and 24, and a further 12 percent were aged over 55.
You may be legally homeless if: you've no legal right to live in accommodation anywhere in the world. you cannot get into your home, for example your landlord has locked you out. it's not reasonable to stay in your home, for example you're at risk of violence or abuse.
However, the cost-of-living crisis, along with a significant shortage of afforable housing and insufficient funding for homelessness services, means the number of people sleeping rough has increased sharply in recent years. Projects often struggle to find the funding they need to do this vital work.
The greater Paris region alone accounts for 44% of homeless people. 38% of the homeless are women.
More people are recorded sleeping rough in central London than they are in the outer boroughs. By far, Westminster is the borough with the most people recorded sleeping rough, with 1,698 people known to outreach workers there, more than three times the number in Camden, the next highest borough.
Essential to the notion of a hobo is vagrancy. Though the OED is not explicit on the matter, the term has been far less used in Britain. Throughout most of the time that it existed in the United States, the equivalent British term would have been 'tramp'.
Some people are more at risk of being pushed into homelessness than others. People in low paid jobs, living in poverty and poor quality or insecure housing are more likely to experience homelessness.
A Cornell-led study is the first to report national, annual rates of sheltered homelessness over time across race and ethnicity and finds “staggering” disparities, showing Black and Indigenous Americans are far more likely to experience homelessness than other groups.
Homelessness is an extremely complex social issue that can have multiple social factors. Social disadvantages such as living in poverty or being born into poverty, a lack of education and experiencing racial, social and cultural discrimination or inequality can all result in homelessness.
A majority of people experiencing homelessness long-term in Australia are found in the large cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. It is estimated that on any given night approximately 116,000 people will be homeless and many more are living in insecure housing, "one step away from being homeless".
Homelessness can be caused by poverty, unemployment or by a shortage of affordable housing, or it can be triggered by family breakdown, mental illness, sexual assault, addiction, financial difficulty, gambling or social isolation. Domestic violence is the single biggest cause of homelessness in Australia.
Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows homelessness is surging. New figures show nearly 123,000 people were without a home on Census night 2021 - around 6,000 more than at the previous count in 2016. It represents a 5.2 per cent lift in homelessness over five years.