ABSTRACT
The earlier part of this book focused on the role of housing shortages in creating and perpetuating homelessness. However, homelessness is, for many people, caused by a far more complex set of circumstances and issues than can be addressed by improving the housing supply system alone. While it is true that poverty underpins much homelessness in both industrialised and developing countries, not all poor people become homeless and not all homeless people are equally poor. Nor are they automatically poorer than adequately housed people in the same society. As Bernasconi and Puentes (2006: 6) note: ‘Homelessness may be precipitated by a housing problem, but there are other factors that define it and perpetuate it, such as the lack of income, insecurity, stigmatisation, vulnerability, lack of choices and the inability to plan ahead.’ Thus, for many, homelessness is the result of a complex combination of social, economic, political and cultural constraints or problems
Cooper (1995) argues that an economic dimension to homelessness suggests that it occurs where the core economic institutions of the housing market, the labour market and the financial markets fail to produce and distribute housing resources in an effective, efficient and equitable manner. These core institutions are all markets which create and reinforce inequality, especially for those in the lowest income groups.
