Reimagining Homelessness: For Policy and Practice

Reimagining Homelessness is a comprehensive, authoritative but highly accessible exploration of housing policy and practice in Ireland, arguing that the key drivers of homelessness need to be reimagined in popular consciousness in order to address the problem at its roots.

The number of people experiencing homelessness is rising in the majority of advanced western economies. Responses to these rising numbers are variable but broadly include elements of congregate emergency accommodation, long-term supported accommodation, survivalist services and degrees of coercion. It is evident that these policies are failing.

Using contemporary research, policy and practice examples, this book uses the Irish experience to argue that we need to urgently reimagine homelessness as a pattern of residential instability and economic precariousness regularly experienced by marginal households. Bringing to light stark evidence, it proves that current responses to homelessness only maintain or exacerbate this instability rather than arrest it and provides a radical blueprint for future policy.