Why we tolerate homelessness

Rough sleepers are a feature of everyday life for city dwellers. Though most regard this as regrettable, few believe responsibility for tackling it lies with them personally. And so they step around the bodies on their way to work, occasionally stopping to drop a coin in a cup. Familiarity has bred not indifference, but resignation. That resignation has made the crisis easier for politicians to neglect. Those at the sharp end of homelessness make for a particularly powerless constituency. They are less likely to vote and therefore offer little electoral bang for buck. Excluded from the labor market, they wield little economic influence. Shelter’s latest analysis suggests that at least 382,000 people in England were homeless on a given day in 2025, many of them families stuck in temporary a