Ending homelessness: First global collaboration to end street homelessness

Street homelessness is an extreme manifestation of social injustice with profound negative consequences for individuals and communities. It is a complex problem, with a variety of underlying economic and social factors, and its persistence makes visible profound inequalities in societies around the world.

The issue often struggles to achieve sufficient attention at an international level. Leading researchers in Heriot-Watt’s I-SPHERE (Institute for Social Policy, Housing and Equalities Research) set out to tackle this through supporting a pioneering collaboration designed to address street homelessness on a global scale.

Expert input to the creation of the Institute of Global Homelessness

I-SPHERE’s work spans all major forms of extreme disadvantage, focusing resolutely on those at society’s margins. This first global initiative on tackling street homelessness integrated 13 research teams across six continents to identify strategies to reduce its prevalence in diverse global contexts.

The collaboration began in 2014, with Heriot-Watt contributing research expertise that helped in the creation of the Institute of Global Homelessness (IGH) at DePaul University, Chicago. Heriot-Watt researchers collaborated with GISS Bremen (Association for Innovative Research and Social Planning, Germany) and the University of Pennsylvania to construct IGH’s intellectual infrastructure, developing the Global Homelessness Framework that underpins the Institute’s work.

IGH’s A Place to Call Home initiative was launched in 2017. It sought to initiate a concerted effort to eradicate street homelessness across the globe. Its first cohort involved thirteen ‘Vanguard Cities’ located across all six continents, all of which committed to specific goals to be achieved by the end of 2020. The goals set by these cities ranged from ending street homelessness entirely in their city, to ending it in a particular neighbourhood, or within a certain subpopulation, to achieving specified proportionate reductions of various kinds.

First global collaboration to gather primary qualitative data on homelessness

Heriot-Watt, as an independently-funded evaluation partner, along with GISS (Bremen), assessed the cities’ performance against their stated goals, monitoring progress and crucially identifying the components of successful interventions that could be transferable to other contexts. This work is believed to be the first global collaboration to gather primary qualitative data on homelessness in a rigorously comparative way.

The assessment process required the team to overcome numerous challenges. It involved tailored working with local teams in seven languages and compliance with internationally varying data protection laws. The team had also to balance the need for ‘standardised’ research instruments with applicability in diverse contexts, and undertake sensitive negotiations with some of the cities involved to reassure them about the evaluation process.

Influential impact across the UN, national governments and communities

The assessment collaboration has been transformative, providing evidence to local and national governments and community sector partners across the world. It demonstrated, for

the first time, that comparisons spanning diverse contexts in the Global North and Global South are methodologically possible and invaluable in generating international dialogue on street homelessness reduction.

The findings highlighted the need to move away from a one-size-fits-all approach, towards more specialised interventions that target specific subgroups. Appropriate services for women, children, older people and other vulnerable groups, as well as culturally-sensitive responses to Indigenous people and other groups affected by racial and associated forms of prejudice are essential.

The ground-breaking work of the project contributed to a UN Resolution calling for the first common measurement of homelessness across member states (2021). It also informed IGH’s Memorandum of Understanding with UN-Habitat to improve global homelessness data. Heriot-Watt was involved in the expert stakeholder group which provided definition and methodology recommendations for the UN Secretary-General’s first homelessness report to the General Assembly (2023).

The project’s recommendations have shaped the next IGH Vanguard City cohort, including an increased focus on Global South cities and support for frontline workers. It has also influenced new homelessness projects in Uruguay, and in the UK it inspired Manchester to pivot services.

A Heriot-Watt expert, Professor Fitzpatrick, presented at UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum (2022, Poland) and our team were involved in founding the International Journal on Homelessness, alongside IGH, providing a lasting vehicle for knowledge exchange.