A famine paradigm of low-income housing deficit in the USA first introduced by recent studies of homelessness in New York City is extended to understand how impacts of that deficit may be structured according to the social network length of low-income families. A simplified mathematical model suggests that poor families with truncated social support networks are most vulnerable to housing famine, and explores how the famine may synergistically interact with inadequacy of support, leading to their becoming homeless. This view contrasts with currently popular ideologically driven explanations of homelessness. On the one hand is the assertion that vulnerability to the housing deficit is the ‘cause’ of homelessness. On the other is the claim that simplistic housing strategies, in which the interaction of housing loss with the structure of vulnerability to that loss is not recognized, can end the US crisis of homelessness. The paper is concluded with a discussion of needed empirical studies and of policy implications.
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