The Emergence of Youth Homelessness

Abstract

Youth homelessness emerged over the course of the 1980s and 1990s as one of the most serious social problems facing the UK. ‘Cardboard City’ in London attracted considerable media attention in the latter part of the 1980s as a very obvious symptom of the callousness and social irresponsibility of the Thatcher era. However, in the 1990s there has been growing recognition that young people sleeping rough in the streets of the capital represent only the most visible manifestation of youth homelessness. Disadvantaged young people living in local communities throughout Britain have suffered disproportionately from economic and policy upheavals over the past couple of decades, and many of them have also endured periods of homelessness. It was these broader patterns of youth homelessness which I set out to investigate.