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Homelessness

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Catch has decided to use FEANTSA’s typology, called ETHOS, when defining homelessness since it is the prevailing and the most including definition of the concept homelessness. There is a large variation of definitions around Europe, which makes it important to agreed on one single definition.

FEANTSA, the European Federation of National Organisations working with the Homeless, was established in 1989 as a European non-governmental organisation. FEANTSA is the only major European network that focuses exclusively on homelessness at European level and has consultative status at the Council of Europe and at the United Nations.

FEANTSA has over the past few years developed a European Typology for data collection on Homelessness and housing exclusion (ETHOS). This typology was launched beginning 2005 and has been discussed at various national and local meetings/seminar. It is now being used for different purposes - as a framework for debate, for data collection purposes, for policy purposes and monitoring purposes.

It is important to note that this typology is an open exercise which makes abstraction of existing legal definitions in the EU members states. ETHOS is a "home"-based definition that uses the housing, social and legal domains to create a broad typology of homelessness and housing exclusion. ETHOS classifies homeless people according to their living situation:

• rooflessness (without a shelter of any kind, sleeping rough)
• houselessness (with a place to sleep but temporary in institutions or shelter)
• living in insecure housing (threatened with severe exclusion due to insecure tenancies, eviction, domestic violence)
• living in inadequate housing (in caravans on illegal campsites, in unfit housing, in extreme overcrowding).

These 4 conceptual categories are broken down into operational categories which are applicable in all countries. The sub-categories take into account national differences in order to have a better understanding of the perception of homelessness in the different member states. Different target groups (children, women, men, older people from different ethnic or immigrant populations and with different disabilities/difficulties) can come under one or more of these categories.

This approach confirms that homelessness is a process (rather than a static phenomenon) that affects many vulnerable households at different points in their lives. The 2005 Review of Statistics on Homelessness in Europe of the European Observatory on Homelessness states that;

"Policies to address homelessness include three main elements – prevention, accommodation and support.  Prevention policies imply an understanding of both the causes of homelessness and the pathways into homelessness.  Accommodation provision involves elements of emergency or temporary accommodation and transitional accommodation as well as permanent housing (with or without support).  Increasingly policies to address homelessness recognise the need for support as well as housing and that support is needed for people who are homeless, have been homeless or may become homeless.  This understanding of the policy basis indicates the need for an understanding of the process of homelessness and housing deprivation as well as the profiles of homeless people.  ETHOS has been developed using this pathways approach."

The aim has been to develop a typology that allows for a more harmonised system of data collection and for a more comparable approach to data collection and analysis at a European level.  That is to say, it is not intended to provide a European data collection approach but rather to allow for a more effective comparison of national level data at a European level.

(Click to enlarge)


Feantsa’s ETHOS typology