Most single adults share housing with other adults, and living alone is considerably more expensive than living with someone else. Yet policies that discourage shared housing for formerly homeless people or people at risk of becoming homeless are common, and those that encourage it are rare. This would be understandable if such housing adversely affected its users in some way. We ask whether sh...

Although homelessness is inherently associated with social exclusion, homeless individuals are rarely included in conventional studies on social exclusion. Use of longitudinal survey data from a cohort study on homeless people in four major Dutch cities (n = 378) allowed to examine: changes in indicators of social exclusion among homeless people over a 2.5-year period after reporting to the soc...

This pilot study examined how homeless people in central Scotland integrate and appropriate mobile phones and the Internet into their everyday lives, and the meanings these information and communication technologies (ICTs) come to hold for them. It was found that ‘digital inclusion’ does not necessarily lead to ‘social inclusion’ into mainstream society, since homeless individuals tend to use I...

BACKGROUND: The homeless population is among the poorest of the poor in the United States. Employment and government programs are potential sources of income, but many homeless people face potential barriers to work: many have serious mental and physical disabilities, and many more have alcohol and drug disorders. As a result, most homeless who work do so either for a few hours per day or only ...

Dear Sir, A recently published article in The Lancet (1), focusing on psychiatric disorders and mortality among people in homeless shelters in Denmark, provided through a register-based large-cohort study very interesting, more detailed information and knowledge in this field. The Danish data are to some extent in harmony with our own published data from Estonia (2), but there are some discrepa...

Homeless people have been found to exhibit high levels of personal disability (mental illness, substance abuse), extreme degrees of social estrangement, and deep poverty. Each of these conditions poses unique housing problems, which are discussed here. In the 1980s, the number of poor people has increased and the supply of low-income housing has dwindled; these trends provide the background aga...

Homelessness is a major problem across North America: Approximately 3 million Americans have experienced homelessness within the last year, and parents accompanied by children account for about one-fifth of the U.S homeless population. Homeless people suffer from high rates of illness and frequently encounter barriers to accessing care. Comprehensive information on health care utilization for h...