Rural homelessness and policy

We began this book by arguing that the very invisibility of rural homelessness constitutes the principal barrier to effective policy responses. In most public and policy discourses rural homelessness is a mysterious concept – for some unknown, for others unbelievable, for most incompatible with what they know and believe about rural living. Our contention was that without appropriate encounters with the needs of homeless people in rural areas, and indeed with homeless people themselves, the mystery of rural homelessness will continue, to the detriment of the individuals and families who find themselves in circumstances of being homeless. Our survey of local authority homelessness officers in rural areas gave grounds for pessimism in this respect. The story we were repeatedly told was that local authorities in rural areas struggle to present informed discourses of the scale and scope of homelessness within their jurisdiction, let alone generate innovative policy responses. Given that local authorities are given considerable latitude in determining how to prioritise particular individuals and households within statutory definitions of homelessness, such struggles point to very significant policy issues for rural homelessness.

In Chapter Three we developed a series of ideas about why homelessness is so invisible in rural areas, focusing first on socio-cultural constructions of rurality itself. Here we argued that rurality is subject to popular imaginings which are often dominated by notions of idyllised places and life-styles, in which the benefits of close-knit community and environmental quality are intimately bound up with traditional moral values which emphasise the naturalised importance of home and settlement. Against this background, homelessness becomes dysfunctional – a series of out-of-place people and practices which cannot be envisaged as part of the idyll. Inability to envisage can lead to passive invisibility, but it can also lead to a more active purification of rural space through diverse political and cultural means that together deny the coupling together of rurality and homelessness in rural areas. The silence on rural homelessness in rural policy is deafening. As a result, those wishing to see innovative policy responses to rural homelessness recognise the need for a considerable shift in the ways in which these notions of spatiality and social problems are combined in the hearts and minds of rural people, and in the actions of policy makers.

Such a shift seems a long way off. As discussed in Chapter Four, the wider policy context within which homelessness is being tackled is itself urban-centric and thereby represents a contributor to the invisibility of rural homelessness.