A Different View
Health & Wellbeing
How I see the world is from a privileged vantage point. Not so the men and women I spoke to across a decade of working and designing across the homelessness sector.
A different view, one from the ground up, enveloped by the edges of a sleeping bag. Each view affected by a different filter that will distort the night vision. Health & Wellbeing permeates poor mental health, physical health and as a result, the potential to self medicate.
A Different View
Relationship Breakdown
Another glimpse of the night sky although just as complex, the filter of broken relationships make connection with others so problematic.
Leave! Get out the house! Perhaps for many the action to remove themselves from toxic relationships where violence and manipulation are employed to control, becomes the first step of a new life. However for many, the second step becomes much harder, as people become harder to trust. Leaving a toxic enviornment for an uncertain one.
A Different View
Transition from an Institution
The view is becoming darker, harder to see. Leaving statutory institutions can cause chaos and challenges. The care system, the armed forces, prison are all systems where support is present until it's not, and when it's not things can fall apart.
If housing has always been arranged by a social worker, or barracks or HMP then for many, the anxiety of approaching that level of administration may be enough to send someone to the streets. Not to mention the trauma that can be experienced within such systems.
A Different View
Structural Factors
A view that perhaps many can relate to, one that has a structural filter - a view that distorts due to the lack of affordable homes, the rising cost of private rent, the cost of living crisis, stagnant income, living from pay check to pay check and poverty.
Anyone one of these factors can lead to homelessness but when you add structural factors to transitioning from an institution, relationship breakdown and health and wellbeing issues, we witness a phenomenon. That is what homelessness is today in London, a chronic phenomena that was once solved during lockdown in 2020, when the fear of catching Covid increased the appetite of everyone to act.
