Wednesday 9 April is Youth Homelessness Matters Day. We customarily see homelessness as the end of the road. It is the life chosen by people whose life of separation from society has led them to prefer to live without a place to call home.
From this perspective youth homelessness seems particularly shocking because it affects people who are beginning their adult lives. It seems too soon for them to cut their connections with society. So in their case we come quickly to see homelessness as a problem to be solved, and to be moved on from.
But the reality is that very few people, young or old, choose to be homeless. They may accept it as their inescapable condition. But most would prefer a safe place to which they could return regularly as their home. The fact that in a wealthy society so many people are homeless may make us ask whether it is acceptable for anyone to be homeless in a wealthy society. It speaks of priorities that have gone awry.
Homelessness is an indictment of society because it marks a lack of connection, the necessary glue within any society. If a society allows people to be disconnected through homelessness it at least shows a lack of awareness of its own core business.
The importance of home is shown by the cultural resonance of words like house and home. They connote deep patterns of relatedness through time, as when we speak of the house of the Windsors or of the Packers. They also speak of firm connections to place, developed though metaphors of roots, of footprints left on soil, of memory enshrined in stone. Without a home we are disconnected, transient, immaterial, unearthed.
These may seem to be large words to describe simple, everyday realities. But they suggest how important the connections associated with a place of residence are in ordinary human living. For individuals to lose connections through homelessness is a tragedy; for them to be homeless involuntarily indicts a society of carelessness; for young people to lack accommodation is a mark of wanton callousness.
In the case of young people, homelessness is not only the symbol of disconnection but also its consequence. If young people choose to leave home, it is usually the least bad of their options.
Most homeless young people have escaped a very difficult home life. They may have lived under the shadow of violence, been rejected by their parents and