At the end of The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy clicks her ruby slippers together and says: “There’s no place like home,” she is not wishing herself back to a lonely bedsit in the city. Nor is she imagining a Citizen Kane-style Xanadu with vaulted arches, high walls and bountiful gardens. Luxury does not feature in her ideal. Indeed, in contrast to the vivid technicolour of Oz, her Kansas home is a dreary, monochrome vision of desolate plains pocked with scrub. For Dorothy, though, her home is irreplaceable because of what greets her on her return from Oz: a small group of people who together create a place of safety, warmth and happiness – a place where she belongs.
A home, then, is much more than four walls and a roof under which a person can meet basic human needs like sleeping, bathing and eating. When we think of homelessness we tend to think of rough sleepers. Rough sleeping is the most visible and extreme manifestation of homelessness – or, more specifically, houselessness. But those who sleep rough are actually in the minority of cases of recorded homelessness.
People who live in temporary accommodation, squat illegally, sleep in shelters or face extreme threats from outside or from within their four walls are classified in most jurisdictions as legally homeless even though they have a roof over their heads. So too are people who must ‘couch-surf’ under other people’s roofs.
