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3 publications listed under Unhoused populations

Homelessness and Nature Across Landscapes and Disciplines: A Literature Review

2025 / Unhoused populations

The complex social-ecological dynamics of homelessness in natural resource management have become increasingly apparent in recent years. Systematically understanding and engaging with these dynamics across sectors, disciplines, and landscapes has presented a conceptual and methodological challenge for both practitioners and researchers. Though some interdisciplinary research has expanded in recent years, the understanding it has fostered largely remains fragmented across disciplines, and its implications for practice are poorly understood. To help create connections across this fragmented dialogue, we reviewed 111 relevant academic journal articles, books, and reports across a broad range of disciplines. Across this literature, we observed an increasing focus on understanding homelessness drivers, impacts, and solutions through a coupled social-ecological systems lens, though key gaps remain. Research oriented towards urban studies, environmental justice, public health, political ecology, and Indigenous studies offered especially important methodological and conceptual innovations that promise to better confront and address justice in fluid, dynamic, and integrated social-ecological systems. We discuss opportunities for studies to better incorporate community concerns, attend to heterogenous homeless populations, apply multiple scales of analysis across disciplines, address market forces, incorporate diverse worldviews and researcher reflexivity, and address complex social-ecological challenges like climate change. To help mobilize around these needs and opportunities, we encourage researchers, practitioners, and people with lived experiences of homelessness to co-produce a research agenda, a process which could establish a shared foundation for increased collaboration across sectors and disciplines and identify priorities for better understanding and attending to the complex and contested challenges of homelessness across landscapes.

Public Nature and Health for Homeless Populations: Professionals’ Perceptions of Contingent Human Benefits and Harms

2024 / Unhoused populations

Table 1. Characteristics of the overall homeless and unsheltered homeless population in Washington (statewide), and King and Snohomish counties (US Census, 2020; US HUD, 2022a; 2022b). Professionals observe benefits and harms of natural area use for homeless populations. Perceived harms include increased environmental exposures and social vulnerability. Perceived benefits include privacy, desired social conditions, and reduced stress. Relationships between nature and health were seen as variable and context dependent. This article investigates relationships between public nature and health for unsheltered homeless populations. It examines perceptions of health benefits and harms for people living in public natural areas including local, state, and national forests and parks in the Seattle metropolitan area (USA). Interviews with environmental, social service, and law enforcement professionals who regularly interact with this vulnerable population were conducted and thematically analyzed to understand perceptions of physical and mental health outcomes. Results show professionals’ perspectives on the health benefits and detriments of time spent in natural environments and the contextual factors perceived to influence health. Interviewees’ observations about the variability of personal circumstances and biophysical, social, and weather conditions encourage the nuanced consideration of how contingent therapeutic landscapes provide deeply needed benefits, but for a population with a diminished capacity to adapt when conditions change. We conclude with insights for future research that directly assesses homeless populations’ exposures and health outcomes of living in public natural areas.

Unsheltered Homelessness in Public Natural Areas Across an Urban-to-Wildland System: Institutional Perspectives

2023 / Green spaces, Unhoused populations, Urban

Figure 1. Conceptual relationships and interactions among social and ecological subsystems related to unsheltered homelessness in public natural areas. This article conceptualizes homelessness on public lands within a social-ecological systems framework, exploring dynamics in public natural areas in the Seattle metropolitan area (USA), a system with a compact urban-to-wildland gradient. While prior research has studied the dynamics of unsheltered homelessness within particular parks or cities—often in areas where camping is prohibited—our interview-based study makes integrated considerations of these dynamics across a range of jurisdictions. We present a thematic analysis that examines professionally diverse perspectives on the dynamics, stressors, and outcomes of public natural area usage by unsheltered individuals. We found a generally uncoordinated system in continual motion, in which considerable resources were expended for short-term, site-specific solutions that yielded system-wide detrimental outcomes perceived for unsheltered individuals, social service and environmental institutions, and ecosystem health. We discuss how improved institutional coordination and mutual understanding about intersecting governance systems could sustain better public land, public health, and social outcomes.