How to end homelessness and change nothing

More on understanding the other sides

This is my last essay of the year. I've strayed a bit from my original topics of land restoration, food production, and environmental issues. In 2025 I hope to get back to my roots and refocus on these themes. Meanwhile, please bear with me as I navigate this dark part of the year. Spring is coming!

You've probably noticed that the term unhoused is used increasingly in place of homeless. By poking around on the internet, I found the main reason given for the change is that homeless has become pejorative, bringing to mind bums, panhandling, and drug problems. Hobo, tramp, and vagrant are offered as examples of words that have traveled a similar path and are no longer considered acceptable. To avoid the stigma associated with homeless, it is advised to use unhoused, houseless, or even unsheltered.

This switch seemed silly to me, and I was curious about how and why homeless came to be offensive, and unhoused preferable, so I continued poking. I was unable to find any information about the origin of the move to replace one word with another, besides vague references to HR departments, the West Coast, and Twitter.

The AP Stylebook doesn’t seem to be contributing to the change: It recommends using unhoused only when quoting a source. It says homeless is fine as long as one doesn't collectivize it with a preceding the. This form purportedly wrongly homogenizes a diverse group.

Incidentally, saying the homeless (or the elderly, or the disabled) also turns this group into a class, implying an ablility to organize politically. Never referring to such groups collectively preserves individuality, but removes the hint that a group of people might find solidarity in shared experience, leading to political action.

The U.S Department of Health and Human Services also has no problem with the word homeless, and makes use of it liberally on its website, as well as variations such as homelessness, and people experiencing homelessness. The growing use of alternatives indicates pressure from somewhere to change language, but it’s not coming from the government.

One safe assumption: It’s probably not coming from the homeless themselves either. According to Ryan Dowd of Homelesstraining,

Worrying about language is a privilege. I’ve never met anyone who slept under a bridge or ate out of a dumpster who cared about the language of homelessness. From my experience, homeless folks care about practical things like safe shelter, reliable food, medical care, and being treated like a human being.

This comes from a man who has spent decades working with homeless people, and now offers training for organizations which interact with the homeless. He also points out that it’s important to reduce the stigma of homelessness itself; just switching words isn’t effective because the stigma simply moves to the new word.

The journey of homeless from respectable to insulting remains opaque to me, and it is probably not possible for me to trace its path. Given adequate resources though, it isn’t a stretch to imagine that such changes could be tracked. Damon Centola’s 2021 book, Change: How to Make Big Things Happen, is all about how new ideas and behaviors move through populations. He draws on his personal experience as a researcher, and makes use of a relatively new tool for studying this topic: social media. The result is an engaging exploration of how information gets passed along, and, more importantly, what factors influence whether or not that information leads to action.

The book offers a fascinating look at social change, and I highly recommend it. It illustrates that with the right tools — and sufficient funding — it is possible to track cultural changes. Its most notable aspect, however, is that which isn’t discussed: its assumption that change is always good. I’m certain Centola is aware that not all change is a good thing, and as the author of what is on one level a how-to manual for implementing change, it is no surprise he focuses on the positive. He looks at things such as making contraception socially acceptable where overpopulation threatens, and promoting good farming techniques that go against “the way it has always been done.”

As I read the book though, I couldn't help wondering if bad change spreads the same way as good. When I consider the homeless/unhoused issue, the question becomes, how does silly and meaningless change happen, and more importantly, why? How did a perfectly reasonable word get tossed out for another that, to the rural ear, is better suited to describe livestock? It’s clear to me that replacing one term for another has nothing whatsoever to do with helping homeless people, and serves essentially no purpose, so I won’t apologize for calling this out as just plain dumb. Though I don’t deny that word meaning evolves over time, and there are certainly words we shouldn't be using because they are intrinsically degrading and offensive, to me that's not what the homeless to unhoused switch is about.

This push for language change doesn't feel like an organic process in any way. It feels more like a edict to the masses on how to speak properly, coming from above. While I can’t trace the origins, I can make certain assumptions about its progress. First it starts here and there, in print and social media, a few instances that get referenced a few more times. Then, because of the nature of social media, more and more people become exposed to it. A sociologist might focus on describing the precise pattern displayed as it spreads — the how — and behavior changes that come about as a result.

Meanwhile, deeper questions of why remain unanswered. Why do some resent this new word as a politically correct annoyance and others view it as a positive development? As a member of the first group, I simply don’t think it’s meaningful to put the effort into changing wording, and assume others feel the same. As for those in the latter group, I must admit that have no explanation to share beyond this: I believe they are motivated by the desire to do good.

Some might argue that this is a ridiculous assertion and rather than embracing the new language as a verbal good deed, those who use it are gleefully imposing a type of linguistical fascism on the recalcitrant masses. I do not think this is the case. More persuasive arguments could be made that the impulse for ethical behavior is real, but the result is empty virtue signaling, devoid of any positives. It could even be argued that actual harm is done though intentions are good.

I ask readers to disregard outcomes for a moment to focus on intent. If we accept that the intentions of those switching to unhoused are good, which is my conclusion from personal experience, what do we do with this information? And let's not limit considerations to the simple question of using unhoused versus homeless. What would happen if, each time we had an extreme reaction to what we consider a repulsive or destructive or merely stupid idea, we paused and reminded ourselves that the person we are interacting with probably has good intentions? And what if we practiced this habit, not with the goal of excusing harmful actions, but as an exercise, an experiment to see what happens? Perhaps if we dedicated one minute a day, in the new year, to the contemplation that “the other side” has good intentions. Would anything change? It certainly can’t hurt to try.