Diversity Reading List

Analytic philosophy has largely neglected the topic of homelessness.The few notable exceptions, including work by Jeremy Waldron and ChristopherEssert, focus on our interests in shelter, housing, and property rights, but ignore thekey social functions that a home performs as a place in which we are welcomed,accepted, and respected. This paper identifies a ladder of home-related conceptswhich begins with the minimal notion of temporary shelter, then moves to persistentshelter and housing, and finally to the rich notion of a home which focuses on meetingour social needs including, specifically, our needs to belong and to have meaningfulcontrol over our social environment. This concept-ladder enables us to distinguishthe shelterless from the sheltered; the unhoused from the housed; and the unhomedfrom the homed. It also enables us to decouple the concept of a home from propertyrights, which reveals potential complications in people’s living arrangements. Forinstance, a person could be sheltered but unhoused, housed but homeless, or, indeed,unhoused but homed. We show that we should reserve the concept of home tocapture the rich idea of a place of belonging in which our core social needs are met.