36
votes
Swedish government accused of trying to ‘outlaw poverty’ over begging ban – critics say proposal may not be lawful and would not tackle root cause of vulnerability
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Miranda Bryant
- Published
- Oct 2 2024
- Word count
- 542 words
So, Sweden, I hear you're looking to oppress the homeless. Well, as a forever-resident of the USA, I can point you in some helpful directions to aid in your oppression.
You've got a good start with the begging bans. If you don't already have anti-loitering laws in place, they're a really good way to have your police harass people who aren't doing anything wrong, but also aren't generating economic activity with their presence, gotta make sure only paying customers can pee and stay warm in your giant retail space! Curfew laws serve this same purpose, so you can just arrest someone for being out and about late at night!
Make sure you have all public outdoor parks be closed at sundown, as it gives another easy way to justify harassing those that dare to sleep in public.
If typical measures like this prove insufficient, start getting creative with bench design. Make the angles slightly awkward that make sitting on them for long periods uncomfortable, and sleeping on them impossible. The good old 'armrest in the middle of the bench' is a great standby!
Next you'll want to insure you have bans on punishing people for feeding the homeless, even if they're not begging. They're a lot like seagulls after all, if you feed one, more will come!
Speaking of, did you know one of the best deterrents for seagulls is putting spikes on places they'll ususally rest? There's some enterprising inventors that have developed retractable spikes that come out of the sidewalks to prevent people from sleeping on them!
Remember, these aren't people we're talking about...they're leeches on productive society looking for a handout so they can go do drugs and get drunk all day instead of laboring in a factory! They are evil, so the ends justify the means!
/sarcasm (just in case it wasn't obvious)
To be fair, some cities have tried the opposite - creating legislation centered around a lack of law enforcement that encourages homeless drug addicts to congregate.
I don’t really see that as a path forward either.
The hardest part of dealing with homeless people is that a lot of them don’t want help. They want to live outside of society. The problem is that theres nowhere for them to go because society provides the food and shelter so we end up chasing them around like raccoons.
It’s not that most of us want to punish them, we just want them to be less disruptive, and that means passing legislation to basically keep them hidden away.
Homeless people "don't want help" because they "want to live outside society" is the perspective of someone who doesn't actually understand much about homeless people. For one, lots of homeless people do indeed not want to be homeless but are stuck with it in one way or another. There are a lot of social and financial barriers to getting housing and reintegrating with society after becoming homeless. For another, a lot of times the nature of the "help" is a huge barrier -- lots of homeless people avoid shelters because they are genuinely less safe than sleeping rough or require them to give up their personal belongings or beloved pets, for instance.
And, of course, there's the general unwillingness of many people to accommodate even the smallest level of harmless discomfort. There's a lady who wanders around my neighborhood a lot who just yells random shit on the street sometimes. She's clearly mentally ill. She's also just a nuisance and clearly harmless. And far, far too many people in our world care more about the people who get a little nervous hearing her yelling than they do about her, because they've already decided she's less of a person.
This point of view is too easy/simple to be true in my opinion. We can't just ignore homeless people that don't want or can't live in society, no?
So, solution is just to ignore her? And just hope and prey that she will not start throwing rocks at cars and people, or walk naked or do something else. Instead of helping her?
Upd:
to be honest, I do not have slightest idea how to solve this issue, how to help. But definitely we can do something, and should do something. I suppose we can do it personally for one homeless person, but globally, on a level of countries.... I don't know what to do.
I definitely don't claim to have all the solutions. I just think there are far too many people who are far too eager to criminalize (and thus punish) homeless people for things that are harmless beyond making them slightly uncomfortable. There is an extreme lack of empathy whenever legislation that impacts the homeless comes up that people like the person I responded to need to interrogate, because the way homeless people are treated and spoken about by the people legislating against them is absolutely vile.
Yeah, there isn’t an easy solution for people who cant make decisions for themselves and who don’t have any family or friends to help.
Every single time we try to implement a system to appoint them some kind of social help for them it ends up just abusing the people its meant to help.
What they really need is just some person to love them enough to help them, and thats the one thing no government structure can provide.
So instead we add legislation to add some kind of intervention when these people are being disruptive. The problem with this is that it uses resources, a policeman needs to come out and remove the person sleeping on the bench in order for others to use it. So they try to automate that by making benches no one can sleep on and thats how we ended up here.
It sucks, but these people require resources, and so far this is the only way anyone has found to deal with them in a way thats not literally abusing them.
Does she want help? And what is help?
Because don't I also have to hope and pray that you or anyone else doesn't randomly start getting violent or abusive? If someone isn't harming anyone and is at worst an annoyance, letting them be is fine.
And if you don't know anything about her, you cannot effectively help her. It might be possible to befriend her and In the long-term see if she does need assistance. She may not want, or be able, to maintain social relationships. That's fine too. Neither can some people that just yell on the internet all day. She may be friendly but not want anything more than conversation.
Social services that are in communities, build relationships, and don't break trust by using force, are much more effective. People are particularly abrasive when they have to protect themselves by keeping walls up.
Homeless people are a vulnerable population. They're much more likely to have been and to be victims of violent crime than to be perpetrators. If we saw them in those eyes rather than deciding we know what's best for them (and blame them for not doing what we think they should) we might come closer to actually helping.
I disagree. Public spaces are for everyone, and anyone exhibiting antisocial behaviour that hurts quality of life should be reprimanded. If we honestly, truly believe in supporting communities, we have to use carrots and sticks to protect our shared spaces.
Yeah, I don't agree in the slightest. I'm not interested in authoritarianism. When the mentally ill person doesn't stop yelling in public, once again harmlessly, then what? Because violence and/or bodily autonomy violation are probably the only way to stop it from that perspective.
And no thank you.
That is a community member. Reprimanding her, in any sense, is ineffective.
Then I want them to be arrested for public disturbance after a certain point. There must be some kind of intervention by some kind of authority.
If someone was blasting music outside of your home every single night, would you really just accept that? Is it any different if someone is mentally disturbed? We have to draw lines somewhere if we actually want to live in social communities.
I don't believe in incarcerating people for mental illness, for homelessness nor, tbh, for noise ordinance violations. In my state even if you can "arrest" someone for this, you couldn't incarcerate them, you'd give them a notice to appear and they'd return to being allowed to be in public doing what they want.
And yeah I can hear the high school football game from my house, and the elementary school playground. And the kids next door. They all make quite a bit of noise at different times. Screaming and such. I should call the cops on them too? Do you also want children's lemonade stands shut down? Wild that you assumed this was equivalent to hours of loud music, in the first place, that isn't what the previous person described. They said "she's a nuisance" not "she's a major disruption to your life."
What exactly is the societal benefit to arresting a homeless woman who is literally harming no one? What a waste of $116/day. At what risk to her health and safety? The described behavior was certainly not more antisocial than calling the cops to arrest someone annoying you.
It's getting away from the original thread, but this is not a hypothetical in many American cities. My family regularly has to deal with disturbed people screaming on the streets. It makes your heart jump when someone suddenly starts screaming behind you, and it's completely rational to get a bit freaked out.
It's not direct targeted harassment. Many of these people aren't even homeless. They're frequently high out of their minds on meth or some concoction.
Call it empathy fatigue, but we shouldn't have to tolerate this. I want healthy, positive communities, and that means we can't just ignore antisocial behaviour that ruin public spaces.
I think you're projecting the original scenario onto your past trauma and current hypervigilance/anxiety/startle response, whatever that is. And I'm empathetic to your experiences and hope you can whatever support you need for them, that level of startle response reads as symptom. But the poster said harmless annoyance not "threatening you and your family while high on meth." Her behavior was not antisocial by any but some of the broadest standards that would lead to arresting hundreds of people in our society a day. Including a child that starts screaming and startles you. And IMO the level of authoritarianism it would require to "reprimand" adults being annoying would be far more antisocial.
But neither addiction nor homelessness nor mental illness is solved by incarceration. And the police are almost certainly not making your community safer by being called to handle those situations. But I do not want to live in a society, where someone else's bad day, or past trauma, can decide that my weird, non-violent behavior should result in my incarceration. I know I already live in that world but I don't want to.
I've worked with people high on drugs and drunk, both harmless and not. I've worked with people who'd been to prison for everything from repeated drug dealing to murder. Actually this past year, I literally talked a homeless woman who was under the influence into leaving our building until the Police showed up and agitated her. I've had to bring police into those situations sometimes, often because of policy or paramedics, but sometimes because of physical safety. Mildly disruptive "nuisance" isn't it.
Being incarcerated is how many people end up sliding all the way to homelessness and with their mental health and their past trauma untreated. I will not advocate returning to locking up the mentally ill and criminalizing poverty further.
All of this because the assumption is she's less than the other community members, that she deserves the stick for disturbing other community members, where if she could advocate for herself she probably feels pretty disturbed by everyone else. But removing her from sight in handcuffs for daring to speak too loud in one's presence feels... Between disproportionate and inhumane. Probably both.
Edit: spelling
...you're saying you wouldn't jump if someone started screaming at the top of their lungs while you were just out walking around? We probably won't see eye-to-eye on this, and that's fine. I guess you just may not have to deal with severe public nuisances on a regular basis, or maybe your tolerance level for antisocial behaviour is way higher than average.
"yelling ransom shit on the street sometimes" is different than "screams at the top of their lungs"
I'm saying your interpretation and response has not matched the described scenario in every comment. Hence my suggestion you're projecting past experiences onto this scenario.
Regardless, imprisoning people for annoying you is authoritarian. Imprisoning your fellow community members for annoying you will lead to a lot of people in jail, none of it will solve anything other than removing them from your presence. And for some folks that encounter with the police could end with death.
No I don't think that's worth it for annoyance.
Why does it matter if that person is an unhoused adult or a 10 year old playing a game? Do we call the cops on the 10 year old?
And this law isn't about arresting people for screaming, it's about arresting them for begging, which is usually much quieter and less startling than what you're describing.
Actually, the people I've seen begging in Sweden are usually eerily silent. They sit there like statues holding a sign with a QR code that you can use to Swish them a few kronor if you like. The only one Ive ever heard speak was asking for food, not money, and he insisted he was from "God Damned Texas". He wanted a saussge so we got him one. We had an interesting conversation and he was on his way.
If you don't hear a difference between a grown adult yelling their head off and a child throwing a tantrum, please let me know. They're pretty distinct in my experience.
You're right that Sweden and street begging is a different situation. Still, I can understand people being annoyed by beggars that make it their lifestyle even in a country with a strong social safety net.
I've been pretty startled by kids yelling. Yeah, I can tell that it's not an adult yelling, but why is that the difference? When I hear an adult yelling, I don't assume they're going to hurt me, I worry that they're being hurt, the same as I do when I hear a kid yelling. The startle response is the same, and that's what I thought we were talking about.
Annoyed? Fine. Lots of things are annoying. When people move into or out of my building, they monopolize the elevator for hours, instead of doing what I did and taking several small loads as quickly as possible. That's incredibly annoying, making me carry things up and down 7 flights of stairs. I don't call the cops.
American cities are already extremely different from Swedish cities in terms of amounts of assistance offered. So in American cities there are several first steps that haven't been taken to go through before even getting to the discussion about what to do in Swedish cities. Things that are focused on helping the people you're talking about, not punishing them.
I ignore the teen boys on the bus playing music without headphones. I hope that everyone doesn't start throwing rocks. How is this woman that we've described different? Because I fear her circumstances and therefore must fear her, must believe that I am different and could never end up like that?
So yes, if she doesn't want help, ignore her, until and unless she does something violent or more disruptive than the average teen boy, and respond proportionately then. If possible, talk to her. Maybe ask her to stop, ask her why she's doing what she's doing, ask her if she wants help - maybe she's changed her mind! Just generally imagine that she's doing the same exact things she's doing now but in clean clothes and freshly showered, and treat her like that.
I've worked customer service. I'd kindly ask someone to vacate the premises if they were raising a ruckus then proceed to call the cops if they continued. I don't understand what makes our public spaces any different. If we can't protect our precious few publicly-accessible third places from people screaming, how on Earth can we form functional social communities?
If we want people to actually enjoy public spaces and feel safe in them, we should take actions to protect them. The response to someone saying "I don't like when people violently scream in public" can't just be "ignore it."
Again, this is all hypothetical, as I have seen a handful of unhoused people in Sweden and not a single one has "raised a ruckus". There are also a lot more third-places here than there were in America, so it's not as rare a resource, not to say that they shouldn't be protected. Even in South Florida, where I saw far more unhoused people, I don't think I ever heard one "violently scream". Some of them ranted sort of loudly to themselves, but that was far less unpleasant to me than the definitely housed men saying "hey girl nice titties you got a man" and no one ever suggested that I could call the cops on them.
I suppose I can agree that it's reasonable to call someone in the hypothetical event of loud, prolonged yelling by anyone, but I'd prefer it to be a social worker or someone with experience helping someone in a mental health crisis rather than a cop. Violence doesn't need to be brought into the equation.
But again, my current response to someone saying "I don't like it when people violently scream in public" would be "when did that happen? I hope it didn't startle the guy that silently sits on that bench with the Swish sign or any of the pigeons that like to hang around him."
I can chime in here with a scenario that's not a hypothetical.
I work in the downtown of a large city with a really severe homeless problem. There are groups of drug addicted and mentally ill people that conrgegate outside my building. I can hear them screaming for most of the day even in my office. I walk past them daily and I'd say about 50% of the time, they directly scream at me, usually from across a street.
More rarely, I've been lunged at by them, or they've tried to push me, so I'm usually on the lookout for that on my way to and from work. On my walk back from work, I pass a public park that no one except homeless people spend any time in, because homeless people camp and sleep there most of the day. There are frequently loud shouting matches and sometimes fights there. As a result, the park is largely unusable for anyone else.
It's not as easy as you're implying it is to just ignore them. For one, I have to be vigilant against being attacked randomly, since it's been attempted in the past. I can't spend time in the park near my office during my lunch break. An entire public area has just been resigned to be an area where homeless people do drugs and scream at people on the street. At that point it's really more than a mere annoyance.
Okay, but what does that have to do with the linked article? That behavior is already not permissable in Sweden. The article is about banning begging, which is absolutely easy to ignore.
I'm actually glad to hear you've not had experiences like that with disturbed people in Sweden. The solutions are definitely context dependent. I also support initially sending out a social worker or some other specialist that's trained to deal with severe mental illness before calling for the police.
Because those people are as entitled to use the public spaces as you, or the screaming children, or the yelling on his cell phone about his ex guy, or someone reading a book. Public spaces are for the public, to which category homeless people belong.
And I acknowledge the threshold for public nuisance can be fuzzy as u/sparksbet brings up. I certainly don't mind people appreciating our shared common spaces together and generally living their lives. We have to set some kind of standards though to keep spaces inviting to everyone. I really don't care if someone is homeless or not if they're ranting and raving, throwing out racial slurs, or blasting EDM at the dog park. Every community has a line where the "malice" label gets applied and the person needs to be directly addressed to defend everyone else's quality of life.
If we can't protect our public spaces against assholes, people will retreat to private spaces and shun public parks as being lawless zones only intended for people that can't follow social norms. Part of building a strong, social community is dealing with people that make life harder for others. I don't have any easy universal solutions, and that fuzzy threshold is gonna vary.
To me, this is the perfect example of the paradox of tolerance. I think I've said about all I can on this, so thanks for discussing.
We cannot protect our public spaces from assholes. Being an asshole isn't illegal nor should it be.
I firmly disagree that this is comparable to the paradox of tolerance.
The law discussed in the article isn't dealing with that sort of behavior, though. It's completely unrelated, in fact.
At what point does it become okay to call the cops on something that harms no one? I don't even know that the woman who occasionally yells stuff on my street is homeless. For all I know she's a resident of one of the local old folks' homes. Does mental illness excuse a harmless outburst only if you sleep indoors? How loud does an old lady have to yell before we're justified in using state violence to shut her up?
I have neighbors who, based on their messages in our group chats, would absolutely call the police on their neighbors for smoking weed on the balconies of their own apartments, if they thought it would accomplish anything (weed is legal here; I do not live in the US). That's more disruptive to most of us than the lady yelling on the street, but it's happening in someone's private home. Is that something we should send the police to stop? What about if I yell just like the old lady does, but from my balcony instead? Does my rent payment make doing the exact same shit no longer disruptive enough to merit police action?
What if the person disrupting my street isn't an old lady yelling about the Stasi, but a young guy speaking Arabic on the phone with his mum? I promise you, where I live the latter is going to scare far more people than the former. Should we call the police on him?
Freudian slip?
I kind of see responses to homeless in more or less two camps. One being that they're a public nuisance, who have avenues to improve their lives that they choose not to pursue because they'd rather do drugs and live on the street, and the other being that they're normal every day people that have fallen on bad luck and need more help from a cruel, uncaring society, and that both of these opinions are mutually exclusive.
I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
The US has done a really awful job providing for homeless, but larger than that, has done a really awful job in caring for everyone in the lower brackets of income. Shelters are terrible because they're underfunded and overcrowded, and they're overcrowded because of the sheer amount of homeless people, because decent jobs that pay a living wage are becoming so rare, while housing prices are skyrocketing.
At the same time, we can also recognize that a large portion of the homeless we're talking about when this conversation is brought up are either addicted to drugs, have severe mental issues, or both, and that a portion of them would rather continue doing drugs and living on the street than earn a living and live in an apartment. We can also recognize that having someone like that living in a public area and inconveniencing people is a very real problem. At the expense of taking a slightly utilitarian point of view, inconveniencing and scaring a couple of people is a minor issue. We can probably accept that amount of harmless discomfort. Inconveniencing and scaring hundreds of people a day is a very serious problem that impacts the quality of life of a large number of people who live in cities though. The very heart of my city, which was once a thriving public square where people would meet for events, shopping, and taking their kids to play is now an extremely hostile, negative place that no person would ever willingly spend leasure time in, so framing the entire problem as something like "privileged rich people clutching their pearls because they were slightly inconvenienced" isn't really what's going on.
Anecdotally, my walk to work today is depressing and uncomfortable as I step over bodies of people nodding off, get screamed at incoherently, and sometimes get lunged at or chased. The walk to my car from my office is not something I'm comfortable making alone after hours, and that's coming from a youngish, in shape man. My female and disabled coworkers absolutely will not make that walk alone and I don't blame them, so I always have to either walk with them or assign someone to do that. Those are real issues that need to be solved.
I expect that those issues would be almost entirely solved naturally with economic reform that improves access to housing, provides real long term care facilities, or managed independent living housing for mentally unwell people, a national job placement program and so on, but there will always likely be a need for enforcement at some level. It shouldn't be acceptable that downtowns have become madhouses where people are chased down, accosted, screamed at, and have to clutch their children close while people are shooting up on the corners.
I don't think these punative measures alone will achieve much but making the lives of homeless harder, but they're way easier and cheaper to get passed than comprehensive economic reform, which no one seems to have much of an appetite for, so while they're misguided, I entirely understand the impulse, and it's not primarily out of contempt for the poor.
I think you're speaking from a very US-centric position in a way that doesn't transfer well. The party pushing this bill, the Sweden Democratics, were literally founded by Neo-Nazis. They are beyond merely "conservative". It's misplaced grace to believe that this bill does not arise from contempt for the poor.
Aside from that, what they've suggested isn't banning being loud or violent or intimidating people or public use of drugs or anything like that. Those things are already quickly addressed. They're suggesting banning begging, which as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is usually completely silent. They have signs with QR codes that let you send them money with your phone, no discussion required.
This thread keeps veering into discussion of noise and threats and inability to use public spaces. That's not happening. People with dirty faces and old coats are sitting around quietly. That's it. Public disturbance is already addressed through other measures.
Panhandling bans have been struck down in some states in the US, but not all. So it's a real mixture of what is or isn't allowable here. I do think the conversation pivoted organically if off topic of the original post.
I'm not seeing a lot of acknowledgement or understanding that what they're describing is unrelated to the article, but I can't read their minds, so you may be right.
Theres different types and different levels of homeless people.
I’m not talking about the temporarily homeless people who can use help, can generally get help for themselves, and typically find housing at some point later. This even includes drug users, because sometimes they do manage to get clean and then they can take advantage of support offered to them.
I’m talking about the chronically homeless who cannot help themselves and are generally disruptive to people who can. They have a variety of mental illnesses, drug use, and are generally unstable people. What do we do with those people? They don’t want our help and some of them don’t even understand why we’re interacting with them.
Firstly, legislation that impacts the homeless generally is incapable of actually making a distinction between these groups of people. Second, even if it could, I think treating even these "chronically homeless" people as though they're vermin to be eradicated solely because they're disruptive to varying degrees is wrong, and too many people are far too willing to approach them in that way rather than as human beings.
You know what's harder than dealing with homeless people? Being homeless.
Maybe there's a person somewhere out there who enjoys being homeless, but I seriously doubt it. Who would enjoy living under a constant threat of violence from strangers, who otherwise pretend you don't exist; from other homeless people, who are in their own desperate situations; and from the police, who are more concerned with protecting a sidewalk than you, a human being? Who would enjoy only being able to own that which can be carried, that which can be stolen by anyone stronger than you, without being to able rely on the state to set things right? Who would enjoy living in their own car or relying on their friends' good will until that good will is exhausted and the friendships are gone?
Nobody would enjoy that, and nobody in their right mind should design policy around some hypothetical group who, if they even exist, would amount to a rounding error. If you don't want to see homeless people, we should be trying to make it damn near impossible to be homeless, not throwing marginalized people into the literal margins.
The group I’m talking about is out of their mind. They don’t trust us, they don’t want our help, they get the cops called on them all the time and they’re sometimes violent.
The solution used to be mental hospitals, but those were closed because the staff kept abusing them.
We could use facilities where these people can have the care they need, mental healthcare, a place to get clean, etc, but they’d just be abused again.
I’d just like to note that studies estimate about 40% of unsheltered people have jobs. There’s certainly those really far gone but there are a lot of folks that want to do better.
Yeah it's not hard to land on a couch, between apartments, temporarily, you swear. Or in a car. Or not have the deposit for a new place. Or the old one was condemned.
It's hard to maintain a lot of jobs that way, but some people can keep some of them. (Limited shower access, transportation, money for work clothes or tools can all impact that)
I myself came very near to homelessness near the beginning of my master's degree. I was extremely lucky that one of my new classmates had a pantry room he couldn't legally sublet for me to sleep in temporarily and even luckier that another classmate was looking for someone to sublet a room to a month later. I probably would never have progressed to sleeping on the street, even without these strokes of luck -- but only because I wouldn't have been able to get my student visa without an address I was legally staying at.
I've been quite lucky not to have come close, but it wouldn't take being out of work for long before my situation fell apart. I have family but how much they could help would depend on a lot.
I'm glad you got on better footing quickly!
Finding your first long-term housing in Berlin is a task I wouldn't wish on many people, and it hasn't gotten easier since I did it, but it all worked out in the end. I now have plenty of good advice to give others! It was definitely one of those situations where I didn't realize how stressed out I was until after it was over.
From my understanding, poverty in US and Sweden are not comparable, because the contexts are different.
Begging is not necessary in Sweden, where there is ample social security that can allow one to survive, albeit very basically and uncomfortably without work: housing allowances, disability, basic welfare, and more.
From my understanding, again, Swedes, EU citizens with right to reside (they came to Sweden with employment, have registered in the system, and have a personnummer), and non-European refugees awaiting asylum approval are eligible for welfare.
This leaves EU citizens without the right to reside: they came to Sweden without employment first. They are ineligible for welfare. People in this category are usually Romani, also known as gypsies or travelers.
So this is really not about outlawing poverty: this is really about creating legal pretext to outlawing Romani. That's a whole different, delicate subject.
More broadly, it's about sovereignty and the social contract. Ideally, it's an self-enclosed social system where the better-off help the needy. But once you have open EU borders, easy transportation, and free flow of information, that enclosure breaks. Who is in and who is out of the social system? Should simply being in a country but outside of its society entitle one to its benefits? What makes a society anyway?
Which does make the point that the party behind this having started as explicitly NeoNazis is incredibly relevant.
Can we normalize the phrase “houseless” or “persons experiencing houselessness”(clunky but accurate) over “homeless,” please ?
*Forgive me if this comment is egocentric or US Centric and does not apply to the country this article was written in.
The euphemism treadmill doesn't make a lick of difference to people's lives. Houseless and homeless are nearly identical. "Houseless" also centers a stereotypical Western house as the solution when it's ironically part of the reason there's a supply-shortage in the Anglosphere increasing homelessness.
Edit: added wikitionary link
Unhoused is actually the "preferred" term rather than houseless or people experiencing houseless/homeless, but homeless folks typically prefer to call themselves "homeless." Unsheltered is another word. But mostly you have to define your terms:
Houseless simply implies not having a house. Unsheltered sounds more like they're sleeping rough (aka on the streets), and tents seem iffy. Unhoused sounds similar but maybe includes people in tents or shelters. But what about the car? The couch surfers?
What terms are used by advocacy organizations in different areas of the US will vary, but homeless is not offensive on its face and is used by national advocacy groups too. People will definitely say unhoused but no one says houseless here.
I'd be happy to switch to whatever terminology the people in question want me to use for them, but the homeless people I've encountered have all used "homeless." As someone who generally dislikes "person-first" language due to how it's been used against autistic and disabled people, "persons experiencing houselessness" makes me want to gag.
You mean, people experiencing transitions in housing situations.
You should work in PR lol
Yeah there are times to talk about "people who are experiencing X" or "people who are X" but not in place of saying "X" it's more about the sentence you're constructing.
How is "houseless" better than "homeless"?
I spent most of my 20s houseless, and had no real complaints about living in an apartment.
If I didn't have a home, that would have been a different story though.