摘要：Objectives. We examined and compared the changing neighborhood characteristics of a group of homeless adults over time. Methods. We collected the addresses of previous housing and sleep locations from a longitudinal study of 400 homeless adults in the St. Louis, Missouri, region and compared census measures of housing and economic opportunities at different points along individual pathways from housing to homelessness and at 1- and 2-year follow-up interviews. Results. Sleep locations of homeless adults were much more concentrated in the urban core at baseline than were their previous housed and follow-up locations. These core areas had higher poverty, unemployment, and rent-to-income ratios and lower median incomes. Conclusions. The spatial concentration of homeless adults in areas with fewer opportunities and more economic and housing distress may present additional barriers to regaining stable housing and employment. A big-picture spatial and time-course viewpoint is critical for both policymakers and future homelessness researchers. Living in emergency shelters or on the streets amplifies the influence of environmental factors on homeless adults, which, in turn, makes a difficult situation even worse. People who find themselves without stable housing are vulnerable to high rates of victimization, 1,2 more health problems, 3,4 and less access to social support, sustainable employment, and affordable housing. Several studies have suggested that homeless people have been geographically “warehoused” in concentrated urban areas and that the particular environmental attributes of these areas make it more difficult for homeless individuals to improve their situation. 5–9 For example, homeless people cite affordable housing as being critically important but also as one of the most difficult needs to meet. 10 If the surrounding environment where homeless adults are concentrated has less available and affordable housing and more economic distress, this spatial segregation may be one of the many real barriers to obtaining stable housing in the future. Large urban areas with relatively high concentrations of poverty become the natural targets for the placement of emergency homeless shelters and other social services, developing into what Dear and Wolch 11 referred to as service ghettos . This dynamic is typically associated with the skid row era of the early and middle parts of the 20th century, and over the past 2 decades many cities have attempted to decentralize and disperse these areas of concentrated poverty in an ongoing policy of poverty management. 12 Although these policies have been mostly unsuccessful in dispersing those who are homeless, the geography of homeless individuals has become more complex and polynucleated than in previous decades. 13 Few studies have examined the complexities of the physical and social environments surrounding people living on streets and shelters. One promising approach to understanding these environments is to use census data as indicators of social, economic, and housing conditions in the areas in which individuals reside before, during, and after homeless episodes. Culhane et al. 14 geocoded previous addresses collected from shelter admissions in New York City, New York, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They matched these addresses with census tracts and corresponding census data for those areas and identified several predictors of shelter admission on the basis of previous residence, namely crowding, higher poverty rates, and higher rents. Generally, these neighborhoods also had higher proportions of African Americans and female-headed households. Using a similar data set from the Philadelphia shelter system and a factor-analytic approach, Wong and Hillier 15 reported associations between homelessness risk and what they labeled distressed neighborhoods (higher proportions of African Americans, poverty, boarded-up houses, vacant houses, unemployment, female-headed households, and public assistance income) and unstable neighborhoods (higher proportions of 1-person households, recent moves, and rentals and higher rent-to-income ratios). The authors of both of these studies highlighted the importance of prior neighborhood characteristics yet were unable to identify any longitudinal patterns after the initial shelter admission because they were restricted by the single point of contact collected in the administrative database. In the current study, we explored and compared the neighborhood characteristics of where homeless people come from and end up after 1 or 2 years in a large urban area. By comparing neighborhood characteristics between these 3 points on the homeless pathway, we hoped to better understand whether and how homeless adults are concentrated or dispersed over each individual time course. Were there significant differences in demographics, economic distress, and housing from when they were last housed to where they ended up living in a shelter or on the streets? If we followed these individuals over the next 2 years, would they end up moving away from baseline homeless locations to better or worse neighborhoods? We could only explore these questions in a combined spatial and longitudinal context, which is critical to understanding not just the “who” of homelessness, but also the “where.” With this knowledge, city planners and homeless service providers can better use limited resources to address the barriers to housing on macro and individual levels.
