Universities can play a vital role in solving homelessness. Here's how

Traditional student life has a romantic quality that can capture the zeitgeist of an age. 

In the late 19th century, Puccini’s opera La Boheme portrayed students starving in a garret, suffering for truth and art. In the 1950s, Kingsley Amis’ novel Lucky Jim satirised the stifling conformity of provincial university campus life with its austere lodgings or ‘digs’.  By the 1980s the television show The Young Ones cast Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson as tenants in an anarchic but more egalitarian student house.

How might composers, novelists or script-writers convey students’ living conditions today? An undergraduate queuing at a lettings agency to view an over-priced student house with mould and potentially dangerous electric wiring? A student bedding down on a course-mate’s sofa because he has nowhere else to sleep?

Excess demand for student housing in university cities and towns has coincided with a contraction in the supply of private rented accommodation leaving many students struggling. We should be clear that university students are significantly less – not more – likely to experience homelessness than young people of similar age in the general population. Nevertheless the scarcity, poor quality and cost of student housing should concern university leaders when they face pressure to widen participation in higher education.   

There is, however, a wider, deeper and more radical role that universities could play in relieving and preventing homelessness beyond their student bodies in their communities.

The core argument for why universities should engage in ending homelessness is this: university cities and larger towns have higher homelessness, both in absolute numbers and per head of the population. The presence of a university in a place shapes the local housing economy, creating higher demand for low-cost rented housing pushing up rents and house prices and making these less affordable for people on low incomes. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) analyses data from its census by dividing areas in England and Wales into 15 groups, one of which is university towns and cities. We can break down their rates of homelessness by looking at their rates per head of their population of applications for homelessness support, rough sleeping and households placed in temporary accommodation to avoid homelessness. We can then compare these on a per-head basis with a similar number of towns of roughly the same size without a university.

The number of households living in temporary accommodation is more than three times as high in university towns per head compared to non-university towns (8.62 versus 2.70 per 1,000). Similarly, rates of rough sleeping are three times higher (17.45 versus 5.8 per 100,000). The exception is for people assessed as at risk of homelessness, which is slightly lower in university towns (5.90 versus 7 per 1,000). But for assessments of people experiencing homelessness, the rate is again clearly higher than in non-university towns (9.01 versus 6.71 per 1,000).

Why? University towns and cities have younger populations (median age 32). And they have more rental accommodation for students and early career academics and less owner-occupied housing. This pushes up housing costs for local people on low incomes.

There are practical steps that universities can take to tackle homelessness in their communities. As employers they can offer work to people with current or recent experience of homelessness; not solely unskilled or entry-level jobs but roles with development opportunities. They can encourage volunteering among their staff and students in evidence-based ways to prevent homelessness among at-risk groups, rather than offering short-term relief.

There is a further unique role that universities can play, in their role as educators. Homelessness seems to generate more misconceptions and false narratives than almost any other area of social policy. Platitudes such as ‘homelessness can happen to anyone’ and ‘we are all two pay cheques away from homelessness’ are untrue and are profoundly unhelpful, even if well-meant. Universities are well placed to nullify these false narratives by embedding evidence-based teaching in curriculum areas that are relevant to homelessness. Degrees whose graduates may encounter homelessness include housing studies, social work, medicine, dentistry, nursing, law, architecture, education, theology, criminology and sociology. Lecturers should take care that their references to homelessness are grounded in good evidence and data, that they avoid pejorative language and that course materials including slides and website pages do not stigmatise individuals or reinforce stereotypes.

Much public money is spent on homelessness services that have not been subject to robust independent evaluation. Some university academics and departments conduct excellent research to identify and quantify potential solutions to homelessness but they are too few and too small in scale. More robust quantitative research is needed into what works to prevent and relieve homelessness.

Yes, universities should act on student homelessness. But they can build structural solutions to homelessness, too.

Greg Hurst is director of communications at the Centre for Homelessness Impact.

This essay was published as part of a collection of essays from over 40 leading thinkers across different sectors outlining the economic and social benefits universities have on their local communities. The collection was published in memory of Lord Bob Kerslake, Chair of the UPP Foundation’s Civic University Commission (2018-19), who sadly died last year.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.