Home and Homelessness in the United States: Changing Ideals and Realities

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Abstract
If meaningful change is to take place with regard to homelessness, future research must take on the difficult task of critically examining and evaluating the cultural ideal of home. For it is against that taken-for-granted, progress-driven idealization that our definition and management of homelessness begin. In this paper the historical contexts within which home and homelessness have been defined in the United States are traced, and the degree to which they are conceptually and functionally connected is shown, It is argued that we must examine the basic premises embedded in the home ideal, because this ideal is used as the standard against which homelessness is observed and treated. At root, the home ideal is found to be exclusive, arbitrary, ambiguous, and open to manipulation. Hence, contemporary homelessness must be understood within the culturally guided and historically contingent contexts that home and homelessness have been defined in the United States.

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