Exiting Unsheltered Homelessness and Sustaining Housing: A Human Agency Perspective

An emerging body of evidence has demonstrated the extent to which social programs and housing initiatives have successfully helped people exit chronic and unsheltered homelessness. Contemporary research shows that people with both health and social problems are able to exit homelessness and sustain housing over several years. Although the existing evidence is robust and often based on studies employing rigorous experimental designs, clients of programs are presented as passive service recipients whose exits from homelessness are attributed to outside intervention. Drawing on a multisite Australian study with people who had exited chronic and unsheltered homelessness, this article adopts a theoretical framework of human agency to demonstrate how people exiting homelessness play active roles in shaping the outcomes they achieve. Extending the existing evidence base, we show how they explain their outcomes in terms of imagined future trajectories and an evaluation of their options to achieve change.