Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- one Exploring the new terrain
- two The new landscape of precariousness
- three Homelessness, citizenship and social exclusion
- four Homelessness in rural areas: an invisible issue?
- five A home is where the heart is: engendering notions of homelessness
- six Theorising homelessness and ‘race’
- seven The criminalisation of homelessness, begging and street living
- eight The homelessness legislation as a vehicle for marginalisation: making an example out of the paedophile
- nine Old and homeless: a double jeopardy
- ten Homelessness in Russia: the scope of the problem and the remedies in place
- eleven Implementing ‘joined-up thinking’: multiagency services for single homeless people in Bristol
- twelve Models of resettlement for the homeless in the European Union
- Index
four - Homelessness in rural areas: an invisible issue?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- one Exploring the new terrain
- two The new landscape of precariousness
- three Homelessness, citizenship and social exclusion
- four Homelessness in rural areas: an invisible issue?
- five A home is where the heart is: engendering notions of homelessness
- six Theorising homelessness and ‘race’
- seven The criminalisation of homelessness, begging and street living
- eight The homelessness legislation as a vehicle for marginalisation: making an example out of the paedophile
- nine Old and homeless: a double jeopardy
- ten Homelessness in Russia: the scope of the problem and the remedies in place
- eleven Implementing ‘joined-up thinking’: multiagency services for single homeless people in Bristol
- twelve Models of resettlement for the homeless in the European Union
- Index
Summary
Introduction
VILLAGERS BUY THEIR TRAMP HIS OWN WOOD
Supertramp Max Smith has been crowned king of the road by kindhearted locals who chipped in £26,000 to buy him his own wood. They raised the cash so the happy hobo can live out the rest of his days under his favourite bush amid 90 acres of ancient forest…. Shopkeeper Graham Dando, 49, said “Everybody knows Max and there's a small network of us who keep an eye out for him each day…. If we don't see him we go and make sure he's all right. That wouldn't happen in the city”. (Johnson, 1997, p 10)
According to most popular discourses, homelessness is something that wouldn't happen in the countryside. Just occasionally, however, rural homelessness does hit a headline but then, as with this story from the News of the World cited above, normality is soon resumed. Instead of homeless people, rural areas entertain ‘happy hobos’. Instead of being socially excluded, the happy hobo is cared for by a supportive community. Instead of being forced to move on, he has his wood bought for him by kind-hearted locals for whom a supertramp somehow fits their romanticised view of the idyllic life-styles of country living. Readers can sleep safe in their beds as their rural idyll is being enhanced by the mysterious romanticism of the somehow ageless tramp, rather than being transgressed by the harsh social reality of homelessness.
In this chapter we want to argue that discourses from governments, academics, news media and many (but not all) voluntary agencies conspire to create the impression that the spatiality of homeless people is entirely encompassed by city limits. People's everyday experiences, both televisual and ‘live’, have served to assimilate homelessness in city sites/sights, and often to conflate homelessness with concomitant ‘urban’ issues such as the supposed street criminalities of drunkenness, vagrancy and begging. Without wishing in any sense to deny or undermine the socio-political importance of homelessness issues in the city, we want to argue that homelessness is also important in rural areas, and that its significance requires special emphasis precisely because it is usually hidden from view.
Homelessness and rurality appear to be an anathema, and we want to question why that is so. We suggest that in part, the invisibility of rural homelessness is about the ways in which homelessness is defined and recorded. In part, it has to do with the difficulties of gaining advice in rural areas, the assumed futility of trying to find affordable housing in expensive housing markets, and the reluctance of some rural people to admit that they have a problem.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- HomelessnessExploring the New Terrain, pp. 61 - 80Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 1999
- 1
- Cited by