The patterns and dynamics of homelessness

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand and analyse the multidimensional and dynamic character of housing and homelessness utilising survey and census data. Different types of homelessness are conceived as states that sit on a wider housing spectrum ranging from street homelessness to home ownership. Separately identifying these states is important for at least two reasons. Firstly, they are likely to be qualitatively different experiences and made up of populations of different size and composition. Secondly, different types of homelessness and housing deprivation are often experienced episodically, creating potentially important dynamics between them. Over the long run, these dynamics create housing trajectories or pathways. In this thesis, I seek to contribute to the large body of qualitative evidence on housing pathways with quantitative evidence drawn from a collection of cross sectional, retrospective and longitudinal survey, census and administrative data. Demographic methods and tools including multistate analyses, spatial regression and microsimulation are utilised to quantify the prevalence, distribution and dynamics of housing and homelessness and reconstruct episodes and pathways. These have wide application and benefits including in terms of deriving improved estimates of homelessness prevalence and distribution and identifying and quantifying the impact of different factors on longer-run housing trajectories. The thesis has seven chapters. This includes an introduction and conceptual framework in Chapters 1 and 2 respectively, followed by four analytical chapters and a conclusion. In Chapter 3, I describe and present the results of a microsimulation model to estimate the annual number of people who experience homelessness in Australia using a combination of data sources. In Chapter 4, the spatial patterns of different types of homelessness are analysed using data on Sydney, Australia from the Censuses of 2001, 2006 and 2011. In chapter 5, I analyse associations between housing, family and employment events and entries to different states of housing and homelessness. In Chapter 6, I present a multistate microsimulation model to reconstruct housing and homelessness pathways and predict the longer run effects of different housing policy options. Chapters 4 and 6 have been published as journal articles. In Chapter 7, I conclude the thesis with a discussion of the conceptual and methodological contributions of this thesis, the key themes, important limitations and suggestions for future research.