Examples from readings

Since our main goal is to make homeless more visible, we wanted to use some of the readings to back-up why we picked this. In "The Everyday Geography of the Homeless in Kansas City", the author Paul Rollinson makes a few points that support our mission. "Early in the 1980s, homelessness was viewed as a tragic and temporary aberration affecting the most vulnerable members of US society. Today, it appears that homelessness is not an aberration: 7.4% of all adult Americans have been on the streets or in a shelter at some time during their lives (Link et al., 1994)." This is an important claim because it highlights one reason as to why people sometimes overlook who actually make up the homeless population. Sometimes a person can be in a shelter for just periods of time, on and off again, and the public tend to not see this as not being homeless. Why? Because most of society tends to view a person being homeless only if they absolutely have no shelter at all, more of the extreme of homelessness. This is one major reason it gets overlooked.

More support comes from the article "Alternative Cartographies of Homelessness:Rendering visible British women's experiences of 'visible' homelessness"by Jon May, Paul Cloke, and Sarah Johnsen. "Constructions of homelessness move around a number of powerfully restrictive
tropes. In the popular imagination homelessness tends to be reduced to the experience of ‘visible’ homelessness or ‘rooflessness’ (May, 2003). Thus constructed, it may in turn come to be understood as mainly restricted to the urban realm and largely, if not wholly, a male preserve (Cloke et al., 2000; Higate, 2000a)." This is a very important notion because when it comes right down to it, many people think of the homeless as predominantly males. It's hard to picture a homeless woman, especially if she has kids. This is partially true because society doesn't want to admit that it happens in our country and by not admitting it then it's not a reality.

Our campaign would help out in making the situations, like the ones in the article, more visible. It can be clearly seen that many homeless are being overlooked. It would require society accepting that it is a real issue and needs to be dealt with. By highlighting the fact that there are more homeless than those of the extreme end, those without absolutely any shelter whatsoever, I think people would have a better understanding of how big of a problem it actually is. This is why we want to make it more visible to the public.