Abstract
Analytic philosophy has largely neglected the topic of homelessness. The few notable exceptions, including work by Jeremy Waldron and Christopher Essert, focus on our interests in shelter, housing, and property rights, but ignore the key social functions that a home performs as a place in which we are welcomed, accepted, and respected. This paper identifies a ladder of home-related concepts which begins with the minimal notion of temporary shelter, then moves to persistent shelter and housing, and finally to the rich notion of a home which focuses on meeting our social needs including, specifically, our needs to belong and to have meaningful control over our social environment. This concept-ladder enables us to distinguish the shelterless from the sheltered; the unhoused from the housed; and the unhomed from the homed. It also enables us to decouple the concept of a home from property rights, which reveals potential complications in people’s living arrangements. For instance, a person could be sheltered but unhoused, housed but homeless, or, indeed, unhoused but homed. We show that we should reserve the concept of home to capture the rich idea of a place of belonging in which our core social needs are met.
Highlights
To describe someone as ‘homeless’ is not to describe any one kind of experience
The few notable exceptions, including work by Jeremy Waldron and Christopher Essert, focus on our interests in shelter, housing, and property rights, but ignore the key social functions that a home performs as a place in which we are welcomed, accepted, and respected
This paper identifies a ladder of home-related concepts which begins with the minimal notion of temporary shelter, moves to persistent shelter and housing, and to the rich notion of a home which focuses on meeting our social needs including, our needs to belong and to have meaningful control over our social environment
Summary
To describe someone as ‘homeless’ is not to describe any one kind of experience. Itinerant couch-surfers, victims of domestic abuse, residents whose dwellings are utterly dilapidated, people who squat illegally, and those who sleep in the open air might all be considered homeless, even though their experiences differ dramatically. A key contribution of this paper is that it articulates a ladder of home-related concepts beginning with the most minimal notion of temporary shelter, and moving up to persistent shelter and housing, and up to the rich notion of a home which focuses on meeting our social needs including, our needs to belong and to have meaningful control over our social environment. This concept-ladder enables us to distinguish the shelterless from the sheltered; the unhoused from the housed; and the homeless from the homed. An exclusive focus on property rights can only ever incompletely describe the functions served by a home
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