The Duration of Homeless Careers: An Exploratory Study

In this article, we examine the duration of homeless careers. We build a model of career length based on four conceptual frameworks: institutional disaffiliation, psychological dysfunction, human capital deficit, and cultural identification. Using survey data from a sample of 331 individuals in Minneapolis, we estimate a structural equation model of homeless career onset and duration. We find that, conditioned on age, people who have less consistent work histories, experienced childhood foster care, and currently express less discomfort with life on the streets have longer homeless careers. Contrary to our hypothesis, we find that people who experienced prehomeless psychiatric hospitalization had relatively shorter homeless careers, and people who suffered from severe symptoms of alcoholism had homeless careers no different in average length than those of other sample members.