I’m hearing “houseless” a lot more lately. Usually moderated by the humanizing but awkward modifier “people.”
For at least two decades, the convention that we don’t say “the homeless” has been well established. This is to collapse a vast diversity of individuals into dehumanizing abstraction.
So we say awkward things like “people who are currently homeless or who have experienced homelessness in the past.” Or more conveniently, “homeless people.”
“Houseless” proponents focus on the nature of the deprivation. It is not necessarily a “home” that is missing. Home is an existential state. Houseless people are not always without a sense of home. “Houseless,” the argument goes, goes more to the material problem.
So, some prefer a less sentimentalized “people who are houseless” to the more familiar “homeless people.”
There are arguments both ways. A place to center one’s existence is both a spiritual and physical thing.
I’ve lived with this controversy since the National Union of the Homeless days of the late-’80s and early-’90s, and consider it a matter of personal preference.
As a words guy, I appreciate nuance. But strong opinions here have always struck me as semantically tedious. To this and the Oxford comma, I say live and let live.
Language fails. Words do not describe.
There’s a common term in Europe that we don’t hear much this side of the Atlantic: the socially excluded.
There’s a common term in Europe that we don’t hear much this side of the Atlantic: the socially excluded.
This, at it’s broadest, encompasses all forms of discrimination, but is understood among street papers to mean those who are outside of normal society.
The reserve army of the poor. The overlooked. The structurally irrelevant. The ignored, controlled, chased and sometimes banned. The not-welcome-in-society-and-consigned-to-oblivion.
I think this gets more to the point. Broader than homeless. More psychological than houseless. Focused on the issue of being ignored and seen as “less than.”
In 2012, some researchers from UCLA did an experiment that showed that social exclusion is felt as pain, and that this may be evolutionarily hardwired.
In 2012, some researchers from UCLA did an experiment that showed that social exclusion is felt as pain, and that this may be evolutionarily hardwired.
Subjects were wired to brain-imaging technology — something called fMRI — while they played a simple computer game that involved tossing a ball between three people. The other two players, while merely a computer simulation, were thought by subjects to be real people, complete with biographies and background stories.
At the beginning, they all toss the pong-like ball to one another. Then, the two simulations start bogarting the ball. Eventually the subject helplessly watches on as they keep the ball to themselves.
The fMRI imaging showed that feeling of exclusion registers in the network of brain regions that process physical pain. This means that social and physical pain have similar brain biology.
Participants played the game daily over three weeks, while the brain imaging was supplemented with a Hurt Feelings Scale that asked whether various slights they may have encountered that day hurt “not at all” to “a lot.”
Turns out, those who were excluded from the game experienced more hurt feelings in general in their daily lives.
Then things got even more interesting. Researchers wondered whether antidotes that reduce physical pain would reduce social pain as well.
Some subjects received a 500-mg Tylenol once in the morning and again in the evening. Others received a placebo. Those who received the Tylenol, over time, saw improved scores on the hurt- feelings index.
One of those studies to make you go, “Well, duh!”
The antidote, other than drugs, is inclusion.
This goes way beyond solving “homelessness.” This goes to ending discrimination, creating community and restoring people’s sense of belonging.
That’s a conversation not enough people are having.
You can fix someone’s houselessness, but unless there is a sense of community, the social exclusion remains.
You can fix someone’s houselessness, but unless there is a sense of community, the social exclusion remains. Much of the time, this is exactly what happens.
Real Change offers a place of acceptance where the wounds of exclusion are healed within the caring community of our readers. Part of the solution is recognizing that there is no “them” and “us.”
That’s something in our heads. And it hurts.
Tim Harris is the Founding Director Real Change and has been active as a poor people’s organizer for more than two decades. Prior to moving to Seattle in 1994, Harris founded street newspaper Spare Change in Boston while working as Executive Director of Boston Jobs with Peace.
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