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Preventing and ending homelessness requires actions at multiple levels. HOD researchers have contributed by analysing the structural causes of homelessness and their links to social exclusion, by empirical work with collaborators and policy engagement at the national and local levels. A national 12-site experiment examines what interventions work best to end homelessness for families. Qualitative interviews help to understand families’ experiences, their access to supports, the ways they make housing decisions, and the ways that programs separate family members from one another. Work in New York City and Alameda County California helps homeless service administrators target prevention services to people who can derive greatest benefit from them and evaluates a prevention program. Local work in Nashville responds to needs identified by the homeless service system.

The ethnographic research carried out across a number of European countries demonstrates that while there are some differences in the nature, experience of and response to women’s homelessness across the EU, the similarities in relation to this are more remarkable. In order to learn from this we need to pay more attention to women’s life stories in the context of those individuals and agencies with whom they come into contact so that we can reflect on their meaning in the construction and maintenance of different cultures which are interactively and discursively constructed across a number of dimensions. This information needs to be further analysed so that the homeless archipelago becomes part of a wider and more responsive system.

Public health studies issues and policies implemented and often governed by local-level public health departments. Yet public health policy research emphasizes state and federal relations. Obscuring the role of local politics and in designing and implementing public health policies inaccurately portrays the functioning of public health systems and may lead to incomplete assumptions about the effects of health politics on public health. Homelessness is no exception, with a long history of expanded governing authority for communities and local governments. To understand homeless policy governance, we must draw from theories of urban politics and intergovernmental relations that have been developed to explain social policy. Chapter 2 develops the main theoretical argument of the book: limited coordination between policy interests governing homeless policy and trends of decentralization in homeless policy governance contribute to fewer publicly funded policy alternatives for solutions to chronic homelessness and increases the policy alternatives for private actors.

At the start of this book I offered examples of how archaeological knowledge and skills are being applied in ways that are socially useful and relevant to contemporary society. Building on what Holtorf and Fairclough (2013) term the ‘New Heritage’, I want to go further to suggest that some participatory cultural heritage work might explicitly set out to function as a therapeutic social intervention with marginalized communities. I will call this Applied Heritage. Before I outline what Applied Heritage could conceivably comprise I want to look more closely at the findings and results of the Homeless Heritage project. In the first part of this chapter I unpack how material culture relates to and stimulates memories which shape perceptions and may be useful in aiding the reconstruction of identities following experiences of marginalization or trauma. Following this, I will look at the negative impact that memories can have for populations who feel ‘out of place’ in the physical environments in which they are forced to exist. I examine several ways in which a cultural heritage lens can be shown to have been useful in addressing some of the challenges first experienced in engaging people on the Homeless Heritage project. The second part of this chapter looks at how an archaeological approach to contemporary homelessness was useful in identifying how historic attitudes to homelessness, which were enshrined in policies intended to deal with vagrancy, continue to haunt current homeless legislation. Archaeologist Michael Shanks has observed that ‘a key component of archaeological thinking is . . . personal standpoint, in a context of sometimes considerable state investment in heritage and stewardship of the remains of the past’. The Homeless Heritage project sought to document multiple ‘personal standpoints’ which often directly contravened those memories of the past preferred and pushed by the state. As we saw in the brief history of the development of homelessness as a social status offered in Chapter 4, states have increasingly conflated homelessness and associated social deprivation with criminality.

Chapter 3 is a detailed description of the major overarching policy that guides school-based practice with children and youth experiencing homelessness. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act (MVA) is the major federal policy on homelessness, and this chapter teases out the major educational provisions that shape school-based practice with homeless children and youth. The policy is designed to give homeless children equal educational opportunity and uphold the right to education. Chapter 3 gives guidance to how the MVA outlines who is eligible for services and provides direction on the mandated role of school social workers and other related professionals in facilitating the policy’s provisions. The chapter discusses a conceptualization of how prominent provisions can be organized using direct citations from the policy itself. Chapter 3 defines our policy-mandated roles and tasks as school-based practitioners in helping children and youth experiencing homelessness obtain education.

Chapter 4 examines national variation in municipal responses to chronic homelessness, identifying the prevalence of municipal-level supportive housing policies among municipalities affected by homelessness in the United States and identifying and examining factors associated with the presence of a municipal-level supportive housing policy. The presence of municipal-level supportive housing policies is an indication of evidence-based policy adoption to address chronic homelessness effectively in urban areas. To date, there has been almost no research on the political predictors of the adoption of these evidence-based policies. Results demonstrate that most municipalities facing homelessness challenges do not have supportive housing policies. Of the municipalities in the data set, only 40% had a municipal-level supportive housing policy. These municipalities tend to be: more liberal; sanctuary cities; have fewer but better funded nonprofit health organizations; lower rates of municipal governmental fragmentation; and located in states without Medicaid expansion.