Across countries in the Global North, there is a growing movement focused on ending homelessness. Instead of treating homelessness as a problem that just needs to be managed, governments and community organizations are now setting big goals to end it altogether.
While this shift is promising, there is still a lot of uncertainty about what these goals actually mean and how they can be achieved. In this article, we take a closer look at these movements to understand how they are described and what they offer. We draw on ideas about different types of social change — small, gradual improvements versus big, transformational shifts — and discuss how the way we define social problems shapes the solutions we create. We argue that many current efforts to end homelessness focus mainly on small-scale, technical solutions that, by themselves, are unlikely to create the deep changes needed to truly end homelessness.
We also look at Finland’s success, where homelessness has been significantly reduced by expanding affordable housing and strengthening a broad, universal welfare system. Finally, we consider what lessons other countries can learn from Finland to drive the large-scale societal changes necessary to actually end homelessness.