Medieval England punished homelessness with stocks, whipping and eventually branding
After the Peasants' Revolt, a 1383 English law let constables seize vagabonds and demand proof they could support themselves; failure meant gaol or three days in the stocks. Whipping followed in 1530, and a 1547 bill added branding with a V and two years of servitude, with death for repeat offenders.
England slowly shifted from punishment toward housing. In the sixteenth century the state set up bridewells to take in vagrants and train them for a trade. Workhouses replaced them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though they were deliberately designed to discourage dependence on public help. By the 1930s some 30,000 people in England were sleeping in borough dormitories nicknamed spikes, and George Orwell described poverty in two capitals in Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933.
America developed its own traditions. After 1870, thousands of homeless men formed a counterculture called hobohemia, camping near railway lines and hopping freight trains. Jerry and Maria McAuley opened the New York City Rescue Mission in 1872, the country's first, and Progressive Era concern after 1890 spread the idea. Exposés of slum life, among them a 1903 account of the destitute by Jack London, pushed officials to tighten building codes. The Depression brought mass destitution until Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in 1933 funded public housing.
Defining the problem remains surprisingly hard. Some countries have no official definition at all. European statisticians distinguish primary homelessness, living on the street without shelter, from secondary homelessness, moving between friends' sofas, hostels and emergency lodging. A European typology called ETHOS, launched in 2005 and translated by volunteers into 25 languages, treats homelessness as a process that can touch vulnerable households at different points in life. Without a standard counting method, most cities rely on estimates, and about 330 million people worldwide lacked any shelter in 2025.
Language keeps shifting too. Vagrant, hobo and tramp have given way to terms such as unhoused, unsheltered and houseless. In 2020 the Associated Press Stylebook advised reporters to avoid the collective noun the homeless in favour of phrases like people without housing. Jimmy Carter said in 2017 that housing is a human right, a view many Americans do not share, while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on 10 December 1948, lists housing in its Article 25.
Source: Homelessness
