Homelessness and institutional settings: an overview and an odyssey

Stephen Metraux and Alexa Timmreck

Chapter 11 in Research Handbook on Homelessness, 2024, pp 154-162 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter demonstrates how institutional settings are bulwarks in societal responses to homelessness. We begin with an account of one man’s odyssey, spanning more than three decades, of homelessness and stints in an array of institutional settings: shelters, jails, prisons, drug treatment facilities, and veterans services. We then deconstruct this oral history to show how such institutions function as surrogates for housing rather than pathways for regaining housing, and how in doing so they incur considerable public expense in their sheltering and caring for the homeless population. We situate this reliance on institutions in the US in both an historical context and in current policy debate, where institutional primacy currently manifests itself as the centerpiece for a conservative constituency that is resistant to the idea that homelessness is best resolved through housing-oriented responses.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Geography; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy; Urban and Regional Studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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