Introduction

As I write this book, statistics show that there is an increasing housing shortage that has been projected, by 2025, to leave a third of the global urban population living in substandard housing or going without essentials to pay for their housing. Homelessness is an increasing problem worldwide. In Britain, where the fieldwork drawn on throughout this book was conducted, the latest available statistics show that rough sleeping rose by 31 per cent between autumn 2014 and autumn 2015. In the United States, the number of people living in severely overcrowded households has risen by 67 per cent since the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis triggered the recession of 2007. If we add to this data the rising number of people who are being forcibly displaced from their homes by war and other violence, the need to study how homelessness materializes and shapes the world around us becomes more urgent. As a child growing up by the sea in Devon, a rural county in the south-west of England, I initially encountered homelessness in two ways: the first was while on a rare shopping trip to Plymouth to buy school uniform in 1986. I was 8 years old. It was raining and the post-war architecture loomed greyer than usual. A man sitting on the pavement huddled his dog close to him, their heads down. I asked my mum what he was doing. ‘He’s homeless. Poor man! Don’t stare,’ she said. Her words rang in my ears as I tried, but failed, to conceive of having no home. The second encounter was more cheerful. I grew up in a house by the River Avon.5 When the tide is out, the riverbed becomes a mudflat, and in July and August it is green with samphire. A tramp called Albert, his yellow oilskins and bushy white beard making him seem to me a real-life Captain Birdseye, could be seen collecting samphire from the riverbed every summer until he died. A bench has since been erected in his memory. Albert was homeless too, but in a different, older way than the man I remember from Plymouth.