Literature Review on Homelessness, Essay Example

Introduction

This brief literature review focuses on the contemporary body of knowledge on women and homelessness in the City of Calgary. Of interest are the factors that amplify homelessness among the women in Calgary as well as the characteristic features of the homeless women in this Canadian city, given that women and children are the most affected social groups in terms of homelessness (Rahder, 2006).

City of Calgary and Homelessness

The grasslands city of Calgary is ranks as the largest city in Canada’s Province of Alberta, and is located to the south of Alberta. Calgary is nested at the prairie foothills, about 80 km east of the Canadian Rockies. While homelessness has increased in complexity across Canada in recent years, there are several historically known hotspots such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and more importantly, Calgary (Hulchanski, 2009). The rising levels of homelessness in Calgary have prompted many scholars and researchers to inspect the problem anew, given that the traditional solutions don’t seem to be working (Hulchanski, 2009).

One way that new researchers are seeking to establish lasting solutions for the Calgary homelessness problem is by profiling the homeless and those most prompt to homelessness (women and children), in an attempt to know those factors that cause and amplify the problem. If the causative factors are established, then it is assumed that the solutions can be modelled to adequately mitigate those causes and solve the homelessness problem (Hulchanski, 2009). Among such studies are those that approach the problem from the demographic survey perspective are exemplified by the 2006 report dubbed, Count of Homeless Persons in Calgary, which constituted a survey conducted by the City Council of the City of Calgary, the Community and Neighbourhood Services as well as Social Research Unit (City Council of Calgary, 2006).

While more of a census than an interpretative study, the initiative provided immensely useful data for further research and planning initiatives, given that it profiled the homeless and the factors that pushed them to the street (City Council of Calgary, 2006). There have been similar surveys cum census in 1994 and 1996 in the City of Calgary (City Council of Calgary, 2006).   The weakness with such profiling attempts is that they only accumulate the numbers of homeless in one night, those in various agencies and on the street, which might not include all the homeless people. Further, it tends to be more of a counting activity than a profiling attempt, and the data can have numerous flows.

The single most informative group of studies for this paper are those that profile homeless women characteristics. Such a study was conducted by Walsh, Rutherford and Kuzmak (2009). The scholars based in the University of Calgary  Conducted a participatory and community-based study to profile and explore the characteristics of homeless women in the City of Calgary and their perceptions using qualitative interviews, creative writing, digital storytelling, photovoice, and even design Charrette, as the methods of research in a way that helped characterize the perceptions of these women in such themes as the affective, physical and external environment factors that the women perceived as ideal homes (Walsh, Rutherford& Kuzmak, 2009). In a similar study, Padgett Hawkins, Abrams & Davis (2006) also established that these factors exist even in the streets where the homeless women try to escape from reality through drug abuse. In most cases, these women were found to give their ideal homes perception the qualities they had lacked in their homes and the factors that pushed them to the streets (Walsh, Rutherford& Kuzmak, 2009).

Scott (2007) conducted a similar profiling study of homeless women in Calvary and conquered in defining these conditions deemed to have pushed the women to the streets to include low paying jobs, unaffordable housing costs, having more children than their income can maintain, being single parents, being of a particular race or races, being victims of domestic violence, being physically and or mentally disabled or having no access to available social programs (Walsh, Rutherford& Kuzmak, 2009). These were thus qualified as factors that drive these women into the streets, or the characteristic features of the homeless women already in the streets currently (Walsh, Rutherford& Kuzmak, 2009).

Besides surveys, several conferences and workshops have been held to deliberate on the homelessness issue in Calvary (Hulchanski, 2009). Hulchanski has published such his keynote address in a 2009 conference at the University of Calgary, addressing the growing home: housing and homelessness in Canada at large, with Calgary as the case study (Hulchanski, 2009). According to the address, homelessness is a sign of social inequity and ailing social welfare programs and it mostly affects women of the lowest ladders of the society (Hulchanski, 2009). The problem however requires concerted efforts of all stakeholders, most of whom are never present in such forums. The findings of such forums are rarely, if ever, practical, since they are more theoretical and scholarly than they are representative of the real scenarios in the streets (Novac, Brown & Bourbonnais, 1996).

This kind of studies and forums are closely related to those that seek ways of resolving the homelessness problem. In September 2004 for instance, the City of Calgary published a Community Services Report on Community and Protective Services, which constituted the city’s homelessness strategy/policy (Black, 2004). This was a survey of the public and their opinion not only of what the City Council should do to help the homeless, but also of whether it was important to help them (Black, 2004). The objective of the study was to formulate an endorsement framework for the Council defining strategies that should be adopted in addressing the Calvary homelessness (Black, 2004).

Another similar study profiled homeless women in shelters in terms of Absolute and relative poverty and established that the homeless women in Calgary are extremely poor and needy of assistance (City of Calgary, Community and Neighbourhood Services, Social Research Unit. (2008). The problem with these kinds of studies is that they do not have a full appreciation of the problem, its causes, its implications and its requirements. Basing strategy on surveyed public opinion might be popular but not sufficient to address such an entrenched problem as Calvary’s homelessness (Scott, 2007).

Conclusion

It is encouraging that researchers are currently changing tact and seeking to establish lasting solutions for the Calgary homelessness problem. As discussed above, studies that base their findings on public opinion, those that come up with scholarly and theoretical but impractical recommendations or diagnosis, are not an effective way to study the Calvary City homelessness problem and neither can they help solve it since they have failed to do so in the last three decades. The only research strategy that promises to work will be those that profile homeless women and the factors that prompt the women to homelessness, in an attempt to know those factors that cause and amplify the homelessness problem. Importantly, the characteristics of women in the streets display that there is a group of the population that is most susceptible to homelessness, namely women who are physically disabled, minority races, those with no skills and thus in very low paying jobs, single parents, women victims of domestic violence as well as drug addicts and mentally ill women.

References

Black, K. (2004). Homelessness Strategy/Policy. Community Services Report to the S.P.C. on Community and Protective Services 1 September 2004. Retrieved 1/10/10. From http://www.calgary.ca/docgallery/bu/cns/homelessness/cc_homelessness_strategy-04.pdf

City Council of Calgary (2006). Count of Homeless Persons in Calgary. Homeless Resource Center. The City of Calgary, Community and Neighbourhood Services, Social Research Unit. Retrieved 1/10/10. Form http://homelessness.samhsa.gov/%28S%28oihtmev3a4sk0z45mlztnl55%29%29/Resource/2006-Count-of-Homeless-Persons-in-Calgary-46668.aspx

City of Calgary, Community and Neighbourhood Services, Social Research Unit. (2008). Absolute and relative homelessness: A case study of the Calgary women’s emergency shelter using ETHOS criteria (research summary No. 08). Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Community and Neighbourhood Services, Social Research Unit.

Hulchanski, J.D. (2009). Growing Home: Housing and Homelessness in Canada. Conference keynote address, February 18, 2009. Calgary: University of Calgary.

Laird, G. (2007). Shelter-Homelessness in a growth economy: Canada’s 21st century paradox. A Report for the Sheldon Chummier Foundation for Ethics in Leadership. Retrieved 1/10/10. From http://www.chumirethicsfoundation.ca/files/pdf/SHELTER.pdf

Padgett, D., Hawkins, R., Abrams, C. & Davis, A. (2006). In their own words: Trauma and substance abuse in the lives of formerly homeless women with serious mental illness. Psychological Assessment. Vol. 76 (1). pp. 461-467.

Rahder, B. (2006). The crisis of women’s homelessness in Canada: Summary of the CERA report. Women and Environments. Vol. 70/71 (2). pp. 38-39.

Scott, S. (2007). All our sisters: Stories of homeless women in Canada. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press.

Walsh, C., Rutherford, G., & Kuzmak, N. (2009). Characteristics of home: Perspectives of women who are homeless. The Qualitative Report. Vol. 14 (2). pp. 299-317. Retrieved on 1/10/10. From <http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR14-2 /walsh.pdf>