I spent a few years working on a clear answer for this. There are many answers and many reasons and they range from broad to specific, from abstract to concrete, to relative to objective and everything in between.
What I’ve found is that there are many, many secondary reasons but mainly only one primary reason. And the cause of homelessness changes depending on this one condition. There are a few prior ideas you will want to know about first.
That is the state of nature with natural rules and civilized state with man made rules. In other words, a person living in nature from nature versus what we have today.
There are many secondary causes and they are not listed in this post at this time but they can also be broken down into two groups mentioned above; causes in a natural state and causes in a society; and yes, there is some overlap.
In the most basic terms we have a description below in what I believe 100% to be the cause of homelessness.
Homelessness is caused primarily by a closed commons and secondarily by other reasons like scarcity of resources or inflated land monopolies.
Remember, there was no homelessness in the Americas before the Europeans arrived.
It didn’t occur in native and indigenous communities nor was it observed because if you needed a home you found a spot and built it from the resources around you. If you needed a home, you built it.
As soon as the commons were deliberately closed by state governments, homelessness occurred. And from that other causes descend.
What are the commons?
The term “commons” derives from the traditional English legal term for common land, which are also known as “commons”. The use of “commons” for natural resources has its roots in European intellectual history, where it referred to shared agricultural fields, grazing lands and forests that were, over a period of several hundred years, enclosed, claimed as private property for private use. — Wikipedia
As soon as a person, a group of people decide that it is themselves who have exclusive access to the Earth and no one else, then they make a condition that excluded others from the space and resources necessary for housing. Like the Berlin Wall that was raised in a day, homelessness occurred instantly.
Note: The process of closing the commons is sometimes called enclosure.
What is enclosure?
Enclosure or Inclosure is a term, used in English landownership, that refers to the appropriation or theft of common land often by violence, sometimes by law by enclosing it for exclusive use and thus depriving and dispossessing others of it’s use.
The following section is taken from Agrarian Justice written in 1790. Thomas Paine who traveled back and forth between Europe and the Americas observed the Americas as it was being settled and colonized.
He describes this:
To understand what the state of society ought to be it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America.
There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe.
Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It does not exist in the natural state.
The life of an Indian is a continual holiday, compared with the poor of Europe.
— Agrarian Justice by Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine says that poverty is caused by that which is called civilized life. But what part of civilized life does he mean? What was different between European life and life in the Americas?
What are the secondary causes of homelessness?
All of the items listed in the table below have been claimed to be causes of homelessness.
But if you look at those causes or claims in the condition of an open or closed commons you’ll see that nearly all secondary causes occur in a closed commons and none occur before that.
It is primarily a closed commons that causes homelessness and not other reasons. It’s not the scarcity of space. There’s homelessness now in the US where there’s more than 640 million acres of public land.
It is primarily a closed commons that causes homelessness and not scarcity of resources. In the US there’s more than half a billion acres of public land and more that contain raw materials to be used for housing. It costs nothing to build homes from the resources of nature (that can be reproduced) and yet homelessness still occurs.
Consider the common metaphor of blocking people from air.
Imagine if you had a group of people in a room and then someone closed off the vents and thus closed off the supply of air. Then, as people are suffocating, someone asks, “Why are people suffocating?” and then people replied with the following:
“People suffocating because of mental illness”
“No, suffocation is caused by addictions”
“No, it’s because people aren’t breathing hard enough!”
“No, it’s because they are lazy”
“No, the suffocators want to suffocate”
“No, it’s because the air lords are charging too much for air”
“No, it’s because there’s of shortage of affordable oxygen tanks!”
None of those reasons are why people would be suffocating.
It’s because the supply of air has been intentionally cut off.
Remember, there was no homelessness in all of the Americas before the Europeans arrived and brought enclosure and forms of feudalism while at the same time millions upon millions were homeless and in destitute misery in Europe.
There was not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe.
Homelessness, therefore, comes from the European way of life. It does not exist in the natural state.
The life of an Indian is a continual holiday, compared with the poor of Europe.
The native Americans did not have homelessness because they didn’t claim exclusive ownership over the land.
What do you mean we have modern day feudalism?
We still use the term landlord; a lord of the land. A person who is still extracting what others produce. How is it different than a serf?
Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which developed during the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century.
Serfs who occupied a plot of land that was originally stolen from them were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. — Wikipedia
Today, those without land, are physiologically required to work, not specifically for the land lord, but for someone to get proceeds for the land lord.
If an extra-terrestrial visited Earth every few hundred years, and he arrived in the Americas today and he saw a homeless person or family sleeping outside in dangerous conditions, he might ask why they were homeless.
They might first list numerous reasons, high costs of housing or loss of income or low income. He might say medical bills and debts. Many of the things he listed would almost always break down to not having the amount of money that the housing is priced at. Not having housing money or housing income.
The extra-terrestrial, let’s call him Xanthar, then might ask why they didn’t build a home like their ancestors did.
The cause, they would say, is that it didn’t occur to them, but when they asked about it they were told they were not permitted to and when they tried to build a place for themselves anyway, city personnel stopped them or tore down their place of safety. In other words, another person or persons physically prevented them.
Xanthar would deduce that the every other claim was abstract but the accessing the commons was concrete.
Upon further inquiry, he would learn that this condition was intentionally imposed. It would be discovered that sometime in the past a small group of humans had decided for everyone to exclude other humans and animals born on Earth, from the Earth, from the resources that had, up to that point, been available to all and that they had introduced a set of rules and requirements to housing to be determined by another group of humans, and banking institutions who set their own requirements and prices.
He would see that housing was gate kept socially by society through a closed commons and privately by land owners who had a monopoly on land and it’s distribution and pricing.
If an extraterrestrial took that homeless person back in time to the same spot to a time before enclosure, a time before the process of closing the commons, there’s no one that would stop them from building housing. There might be other reasons that might prevent them from housing.
How is it a closed commons that causes homelessness and not other reasons? Because, if you reversed it, if you opened the commons, that would solve it. And no one is claiming one action that would solve all problems in life.
If you opened the commons, then anyone homeless would then be able to build a home. It would go from a condition where society blocked or gate-kept people from building housing to a society that allowed the building of housing.
Then, if a person didn’t have a house or a home it would not be caused by society but other reasons. With access to space and materials (the commons) they would have a choice.
It is primarily a closed commons that causes homelessness and not lack of work. There is the phrase, “Get work” that some people retort when they encounter someone who is homeless. The implied suggestion is that work would allow someone to obtain housing.
Work gets you income not housing. And often that income does not match housing prices and can’t match housing prices because much of society doesn’t place bounds on housing prices. In those places that do put bounds on pricing it is called rent control.
Rent regulation is a system of laws, administered by a court or a public authority, which aims to ensure the affordability of housing and tenancies on the rental market for dwellings.
The loose term “rent control” covers a spectrum of regulation which can vary from setting the absolute amount of rent that can be charged, with no allowed increases, to placing different limits on the amount that rent can increase; these restrictions may continue between tenancies, or may be applied only within the duration of a tenancy. — Wikipedia
Again, it the social systems that has introduced complicated processes, rules and requirements to housing and at the same time prevent someone from obtaining the space and resources for housing themselves.
“But you can’t open the commons or give people land”
Yes you can. The United States claims to be the land of the free but over time it has gone from free to not free.
On May 20, 1862 President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law. This legislation allowed settlers to acquire 160 acres of federal land in the west, provided that they pay a filing fee and maintain residence on the parcel for five continuous years. This was intended to encourage western expansion and settlement into the interior. Between its passage in 1862 and 1900, 80 million acres of federal land had been claimed through the Homestead Act. — Wikipedia
It’s not their right to control who owns the Earth. The state didn’t create the Earth. Having said that many countries give land or share land with their citizens.
To those claims that modern societies are free but have a closed commons we see the following. How free are you if these conditions exist.
If you don’t have a choice in the matter that means you are a prisoner or a slave. If you are presented with a choice and one is life threatening then you aren’t free.
If someone else determines what you have to do to survive you aren’t free and do not have self determination.
If your work does not advance your position in life but you work out of self preservation that’s a slave condition.
Your survival should not depend on if someone else needs work done. If it does then you are being exploited, indentured or enslaved.
If a society imposes a set of rules or conditions on you that you didn’t agree to that is an oppressive society.
All of these conditions, including poverty, flow out of a closed commons.
Modern societies have grown not unlike a slightly modified game of Monopoly.
The first state of monopoly the board is open. As the character moves across the land they settle and claim the land. It is in its natural state.
The last state of monopoly the board is mostly occupied. It’s in it’s cultivated or civilized state.
In modern societies, similar to the game, this is a state where the properties are all occupied and all at their highest costs. The income from passing the start spot is not enough to cover the living expenses of the properties. Sound familiar?
Because we live in societies that operate like the game Monopoly, people end up in poverty and homelessness not because of anything they did but simply because they arrived after the game board was already occupied.
So when societies don’t address the fact that people born in the past had benefits that people in the present don’t have, they create poverty and homelessness and misery. Societies cause this, not individuals.
Having said that, there is no place in all of my travels that didn’t have infrastructure or plots of land in the city and much more outside of it that could be used to reduce poverty and homelessness. In fact, in the US there are hundreds of millions of acres of public land managed by the land offices.
But yet, in the Monopoly board, the center area is often ignored. That area is the commons. That is available, and as a society that claims to be democratic, that claims to be a society of the people, for the people, and by the people, the commons would be open for use by the people.
What right does one person have to over another person to say you can’t have the resources you need to survive? We don’t even do that to animals. Animals are given nature preserves. Animals are given sanctuaries.
In dense urban areas we see the inflated land value of Monopoly causing homelessness. In the rural areas and public lands we see a closed commons causing homelessness.
Imagine if you lived in the past in a rich, fertile land that produces 5 to 10 times of the food naturally without agriculture and then someone cuts people off from that land and people start starving. Then someone asks, “Why are people starving?”
Consider how bizarre it would be to get these answers:
- It’s because they are lazy and don’t want to eat
- It’s because of mental illness
- It’s because of addictions
- Wrong! it’s because the lords of food are charging too much for food!
- No, it’s because there’s an food shortage!
Now, consider again, blocking people from building homes and then asking why is there homelessness.
The primary cause of homelessness is a closed commons and not other reasons. How can you say this?
It was intentional for both the rural poor and during reconstruction.
The people who closed the commons came from a different time. They slandered people because they were poor. They called other people savage and killed many of them on purpose to take their land. They enslaved another group of people and when that was made illegal and unpopular they used enclosure to starve the poor and freed people into servitude causing not only wage slavery but homelessness.
Quote above from this article.
Many other conversations have discussed the causes such greed, fear, selfishness and so on. I believe those might answer why the causes of homelessness exist at all more than what.
If you look at history, at times where homelessness occurred instantly, it’s when dispossession occurred.
The closing of the commons is the primary cause of homelessness.
