At Risk of Homelessness: The Roles of Income and Rent

(Hardback)

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This volume represents a new theoretical and empirical approach to the study of homelessness. Rather than focusing on the behavioural characteristics and social deviance of the homeless themselves, the incomes, rents and demographic characteristics of a population of renters who may be at risk of homelessness are examined. Based on a study in four US metropolitan areas of changes over an eight year period in the stock of low-cost rental housing and the need of low-income households for affordable housing, Karin Ringheim contends that the extent of homelessness in individual areas is not simply related to the extent of poverty in those areas. Rather, she argues, the increase in the number and change in composition of the homeless population is a direct result of the severity of the housing squeeze and the demographic characteristics of those most vulnerable to housing loss. Among the issues the study addresses are the mismatch between available rental housing stock and what would be affordable to the low income population, changes in the cost and quality of rental housing over time, and changes in the demographic characteristics of increasingly vulnerable renters. She proposes a theory of structural change and discusses two prominent competing theories of homelessness. She developes the criteria used to select the four metropolitan areas that form the focus of the study: Baltimore, Houston, Chicago and Seattle. These four represent a range in the extent of homelessness from 3 per 10,000 to 28 per 10,000.

Author Bio

KARIN RINGHEIM is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Demography and Ecology, a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, and an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.