Homeless: an invisible and hypervisible public problem in Brazilian cities

Abstract

The article analyzes the dynamics associated with the condition of homeless in Brazilian cities, while remaining scarcely visible and overexposed in urban, media, and political public spaces. We adopted the sociology approach of public problems to show how the social and urban phenomenon of homelessness needed to be identified, delimited, analyzed, and became the question for which society began to demand treatment. Discontinuities, ruptures, mutations, overlapping, or coexistence of elements that seemed to have been overcome can occur in the process of formation and evolution of a public problem. The understanding of the issue, as well as the strategies of action, are tied to changes as the phenomenon evolves and so do the actors involved. We present in a panoramic view the history of perception and treatment of the situation in Brazil, highlighting the media, the public authorities, and the existence of diagnoses, statistical surveys, and events about the subject. The article emphasizes that the homelessness issue is multidimensional and heterogeneous, due to strictly demographic aspects in view of the different stages of the process that leads a person to become homeless, or because there is a great diversity of how individuals live the path of arrival and stay on the street. At the end of the article, we conclude that the definition and delimitation of the homelessness issue and its operationalization in measurable indicators confronted with real life in everyday cities are situations that question the frameworks for the purposes of public policies as who the homeless person is. The borders are mobile or diffuse because there are porous bands, just as the forms of treatment of the phenomenon are porous too, ceasing to be treated only with the repression of begging or from an urban hygiene focus for being treated as social management, assistance, right to life, and fight against drugs.