Protect the Unhoused Glossary
Adequate Housing/Shelter: Meeting the following criteria: legal security of tenure; availability of services, materials, facilities, and infrastructure, like water, energy, and sanitation; affordability; habitability; accessibility; location accessible to employment, schools, health care and other social facilities; and cultural adequacy (HRW)
Criminalization: Orders backed by threat of arrest to move someone from a location (“move-alongs”) or destruction and confiscation of their property and living structures, including through sanitation department clean-ups or “sweeps” (HRW)
Dehumanize: To deprive someone of human qualities, personality, or dignity: such as to subject to inhuman or degrading conditions or treatment (Merriam-Webster)
Encampments: Communities built by unhoused people on public land without authorization (HRW)
Houseless or Unhoused: People who do not have housing including those living on the streets, in makeshift structures, in temporary or interim housing or shelters, in overcrowded conditions, and in substandard housing (HRW)
Housing Insecure: Lacking stable or adequate living arrangements, especially because one lives in unsafe or uncomfortable conditions or is at risk of eviction (Google Definitions).
Sweeps/Cleanups: Systematically and routinely conducting cleanings or “sweeps” in which government officials take and destroy property of unhoused peoples, including tents, bedding, clothing, medicine, vital papers, family photographs, and other items of personal value (HRW)
Systemic Racism: The oppression of a racial group to the advantage of another as perpetuated by inequity within the interconnected systems such as political, economic, and social systems. Government policies, including red-lining, zoning, freeway construction, “urban renewal,” and mass incarceration, along with private discrimination and de-industrialization, have enforced racial segregation and contributed to Black poverty and houselessness (HRW)