"Homeless" is practically a dogwhistle, half the people using it mean "unhoused" and the other half mean "undesirable", and the people who mean "undesirable" would genuinely rather see these people die out in some kind of social darwinist faux-natural selection than lift a finger to help them.
So I and most people I associate with have been or are homeless. Homeless doesn't automatically mean 'indesirable' of course and 'Unhoused' can sound like patronizing liberal language. It describes a vast array of people in a variety of circumstances, it also doesn't cover say, my roommate who's disability literally only covers rent and bills (which are as low as you can get where we live) and still has to fly a sign for every other dime he makes, and can't really get out because seeking employment means losing disability forever so if he can't do it or could only do part time, he loses that support forever. There's also a lot of working poor in even worse living circumstances, what people think of as 'the homeless' is absolutely myriad. Lumpenprole is a good descriptor but Marx was kind of a dick to them. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but any single term for the manifold ways you can experience extreme poverty won't be enough to describe anyone's actual situation.
"Homeless" is practically a dogwhistle, half the people using it mean "unhoused" and the other half mean "undesirable", and the people who mean "undesirable" would genuinely rather see these people die out in some kind of social darwinist faux-natural selection than lift a finger to help them.
So I and most people I associate with have been or are homeless. Homeless doesn't automatically mean 'indesirable' of course and 'Unhoused' can sound like patronizing liberal language. It describes a vast array of people in a variety of circumstances, it also doesn't cover say, my roommate who's disability literally only covers rent and bills (which are as low as you can get where we live) and still has to fly a sign for every other dime he makes, and can't really get out because seeking employment means losing disability forever so if he can't do it or could only do part time, he loses that support forever. There's also a lot of working poor in even worse living circumstances, what people think of as 'the homeless' is absolutely myriad. Lumpenprole is a good descriptor but Marx was kind of a dick to them. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but any single term for the manifold ways you can experience extreme poverty won't be enough to describe anyone's actual situation.