Homelessness - poverty (individual)

Sociology 498: Homelessness

Does Poverty Cause Homelessness?

Is there anybody who doesn't believe that poverty is a cause of homelessness? We might believe that there are other causes as well, and we might want to understand the causes of poverty, but who doubts that poverty itself doesn't raise the risk of homelessness? Is this really a question worthy of extensive analysis?

There are two important answers to why we need to study how poverty is associated with homelessness:

The macro-level evidence is far weaker than the micro-level evidence. Comparisons of homelessness across cities, either 1990 Census data or Martha Burt's correlations do not provide much support that poorer cities have more homelessness. Nor is Jencks's analysis of changes over time consistent with higher poverty rates causing higher homelessness.

Even at the individual level, when we make a distinction between poverty incomes versus unemployment, the answers are more complex about the causal effects of joblessness. For example, Elliot Liebow contends that jobs are not the way out of homelessness.

So, it is worthwhile taking a closer look at the survey data on the relationships between poverty (and joblessness) with homelessness. Rossi has one of the clearest positions about the individual-level link between poverty and homelessness.

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Last updated October 18, 2002

comments to: Reeve Vanneman. reeve@cwmills.umd.edu