May 2015


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Have you ever wondered who street dwellers are or where they are from? Dr. Priya Kissoon, of the Department of Geography, at The UWI, St. Augustine campus has been interviewing street dwellers in Trinidad and Tobago to find out just that. She would like to see research conducted on a national scale to help reduce the numbers of homeless people on the streets.

“When we can understand what areas people have come from, what villages, what circumstances in life, and how long people have been without stable housing, the pathways to homelessness can become routes for exiting street-life,” she says.

Starting as a small project funded by this campus, Dr. Kissoon has interviewed approximately 100 street dwellers in Port of Spain, San Juan, and San Fernando. The research re-conceptualizes street dwelling along a continuum of housing types and circumstances and addresses homelessness by situating people’s present housing conditions in the context of their whole housing histories, including personal vulnerabilities and structural factors that contributed to their homelessness and that keep them from attaining and retaining stable housing.

Dr. Kissoon’s study builds on the work of other UWI researchers, including Dr. Ronald Marshall and Professor Ralph Premdas, who have provided a snapshot of homelessness around the Caribbean, with a focus on youth. According to Dr. Kissoon, previous research has shown that homeless adults who have experienced child or youth homelessness are harder to house than homeless people who have never experienced homelessness in their youth. Furthermore, the more times a person has lived on the streets, the harder it is to find a solution to their homelessness because the streets have become a home. In other words, the two preconditions for long term or “chronic” homelessness are early first incidents of homelessness and episodic or repeated homelessness.

With a deeper understanding of the individual geographies of homelessness predictors of “chronicity” may become apparent, in combination with other factors such as poverty, family instability, early drug use, and school under-achievement or dropping out. Improving a holistic understanding of homeless histories as a part of people’s overall housing experiences reveals opportunities for preventing street dwelling through timely intervention, particularly in the lives of youth and young adults. By exposing the roots of street-dwelling, Dr. Kissoon’s research sensitizes the public and policy makers to the trajectories that precede homelessness, which should make it easier for stakeholders to respond with both care and attention.

Regarding ameliorating patterns of repeated street-dwelling, housing supply is a major issue in urban infrastructure, and even if street dwellers were willing and able to pay for low-cost accommodation, affordable alternatives to the streets do not exist in either the private or public rental sectors.

Trinidad and Tobago may have shelters, but it does not have supported transitional housing to assist in stabilizing and rehabilitating the lives of street dwellers, although there are good examples of State interventions in the Piparo Empowerment Centre and New Horizons. While considering how to tackle housing supply issues through partnerships in the government and not-for-profit sectors, trained social workers can mediate with existing family and friends to take in willing candidates from the streets. While homeless people may have some social capital on the streets that have contributed to their survival, Dr. Kissoon argues that the bridging nature of this capital to support returns to home is extremely weak for street dwellers, particularly if they struggle with addictions, mental or physical disabilities, or if the cause of their homelessness was family-related. Therefore, successful exits from street-life may be more likely amongst those people who have been able to maintain ties to a social support network that is housed (usually old friends and family)

The stark income reality is that street dwellers face a double-edged sword when it comes to employment; while they may be willing to tote and sweep and perform other tasks to subsist, some small employers are unable to compensate street-dwellers sufficiently for savings, while other employers take advantage of the marginalization of the homeless in order to exploit their cheap and ready labour.

Even if they were paid, the lived experience of homelessness is characterized by insecurity, vulnerability, and substance abuse, which places them at high risk of being victims of theft, and violence.

As part of Dr. Kissoon’s research, she has begun to map her participants’ street-dwelling locations in relation to resources available for homeless persons, as well as street-dwellers’ communities of origin. This can be used to link homeless persons to nearby resources and to illustrate the distance of people’s social displacement from their communities to the streets, thereby indicating the place of rural homelessness and residential mobility in people’s housing histories. In effect, the mapping has a dual role: to illustrate sites of intervention that could have kept people housed before the pavements seemed like their only resort; and also to reveal cities as sites of benevolence for people living in the darkest recesses of the margins of society.

Until more permanent solutions to street-dwelling are researched and assessed for their feasibility in a local context, there is a network of charitable, faith-based, and government-supported initiatives to feed, clothe, bathe, heal, and temporarily shelter homeless people. Recognizing the present limitations in housing supply, outreach and programs to keep homeless persons healthy, clean, and active can reduce the stigma of street dwelling by improving the everyday conditions of street dwellers’ lives.

Complementing Dr. Kissoon’s research activities, Mr. Leevun Solomon is an MPhil candidate in Geography at the St. Augustine campus. He is proposing to examine the process of acculturation to “street-life” amongst homeless persons. With Dr. Kissoon as his supervisor, he will explore the ways in which living on the streets affects a person’s identity over time, so that the streets themselves become “home.” Mr. Solomon hypothesizes that integration to street life, and the homeless identity, are barriers to rehabilitating the hardest to house and chronically homeless persons.

The pavements are just one dwelling place in a housing trajectory that consists of many other places, and locating the transitional points from housing to homelessness will contribute to a holistic multi-stakeholder strategy to reduce the number of people experiencing chronic homelessness in the future in this country.

How is this Geography? Social justice is closely related to spatial justice, just as housing is related to both mobility and status. Geographers are fundamentally preoccupied by the relationship between humans and their environment, and that includes various population groups and the built environment. As an urban social geographer, Dr. Kissoon analyses the relationships between space and belonging through scale, location, site, situation, and the meaning of places. Research in urban social geography and the meanings of space and place follow a long tradition in human geography.

For more information about projects and opportunities in human geography Dr. Kissoon can be contacted at: the Department of Geography, The UWI, St. Augustine campus at 662 2002 ext 82699 or priya.kissoon@sta.uwi.edu