Introduction Following a dramatic rise in levels of homelessness through the 1980s and 1990s, the last 20 years or so have seen a steady proliferation of work exploring the geog raphies of homelessness. The majority of this work has focused on the problems of street homelessness, usually in urban settings, almost all of it in an Anglo-American context. Early work in this field examined the causes of homelessness, the politics of shelter location, and street. survival strategies. More recently, homelessness has emerged as a favored lens through which to examine broader themes in contemporary urban geography. Thus ever more punitive responses to street homelessness have been used to illustrate wider trends of urban revanchism and the changing politics of public space, for example Though such work has brought the problems of home- lessness to a much wider audience, other responses to homelessness and the experiences of homeless people themselves are not always well specified in such accounts. As a result, despite a growing body of work by geog raphers "on' homelessness, the problems of homelessness itself are still not always well understood by geographers.