Gimme shelter. Some causes of homelessness and my childhood safe place

Karen Sole
Aug 28
8 min read

What does it mean to have a roof over your head? Who would you be without it? How would you show up in the world? How would the world show up for you? What if you had children with you out there?

As a family/systemic constellations facilitator, my awareness of socio-economic determinants is an important anchor. I like this mooring in the realm of real, lived experience. Seeing the spread from the absurdity and profligacy of billionaires to the least advantaged and most vulnerable, and the conditions and circumstances that gave birth to and perpetuate the gap. Money can’t buy love - a few seconds are enough to conjure the relational misery of some of the world’s filthiest rich people - Bezos, Reinhardt, Murdoch, Maxwell, for example. But for everyone, from the richest to the poorest, money buys the necessities of life. As the filthy rich get filthier rich, the poor get poorer, until the poorest and least advantaged fall off the cliff. In the developed world this phenomenon is most readily represented by people who have no home, no permanent shelter, nowhere to go.

A few months ago, I spent a day out in a city 20km from mine, as an experimental alternative to making the trip twice. No big deal. I had my car, a book, money for lunch, and a long time to hang out between appointments. So much comfort and yet by the end of the day, I felt ragged, tired, and so grateful that I had a warm, dry place to go to.

Somewhere to go.

Such a fact to be immensely grateful for, and not one to be taken for granted in an increasingly precarious world. That’s what I thought as I drove home. How awful it would be to have only the cold streets ahead of me as the sun went down, temperatures dropped, restaurants welcomed well dressed and shod, monied or credit carded people. Fun fact: people in general, and generally, eat early in Aotearoa-New Zealand. They’ve eaten, drunk some wine, chatted, paid up and gone home before European places would open their doors for evening trade.

Here (in Aotearoa-New Zealand) we have families living in cars. The State pays for others to live in motels. A growing cohort of single men and women born after the war are house sitting as a lifestyle. Young parents can’t scrape up the deposit for a home. Of our 112K homeless people, about half are under 25 years old. There are a lot of reasons people end up with nowhere to go. It is not their fault. The system is designed for it to happen.

As Gary Stevenson of Garys Economics tells it, the economy is a finite thing, so if a very few people take hugely disproportionate wealth to themselves, others suffer poverty, and poverty from which they are unable to escape. Without redistribution of resources via taxing obscene wealth, the gap gets wider and more people fall off and out of the system in direct and less obvious ways.

The intersection of indifferent education, race, youth, old age, gender, poorly paid work or no work and insufficient support, high rents, out of reach house prices, mountainous energy costs, sky high prices of basic food items - and that’s in peace time - exacerbates the problem. We can easily appreciate that countries that create more equalitarian systems are happier, have fewer problems including homeless people. They also recognise that having shelter is the basis of a healthy life and implement bold measures to provide housing. I’m thinking of examples in Scandinavia that I have learned of, but I don’t have references to hand, and for this piece, that’s not important. What is important is that the provision of housing creates a platform for people to find their lives again.

We do not have in Aotearoa-New Zealand tent cities under bridges, in parks, or lining the streets, no favelas, no shanties. Not yet. But I can feel the whisper of it. Globally, at the most extreme, enforced displacement caused by intolerance of gender and sexual preference, of women who exert their desire for human rights, and by inter-country or civil wars and pogroms, and I’m sure many more causes represent the more acute situations. Clearly, Israel’s illegal, immoral, unsustainable incursions in Gaza (and the West Bank), present to us the the gritty results of genocide. [No, I have not forgotten other wars and genocides.] I had no intention of mentioning the Gaza genocide in this piece, but it is not possible to think of homelessness/lack of human and humane scale and scope shelter without ‘it’. As Gaza City is about to be further ravaged by the IDF the hideous reality cannot be ignored in any discussion of shelter. Regarding the questions posed in the sub-title: What does it mean to have a roof over your head? Who would you be without it? How would you show up in the world? How would the world show up for you? What if you had children with you out there? imagine homelessness in your current location and then imagine how it is for Palestinian men, women and children, if you can. In this visualisation, you are the mother or father of the children trying to survive in hell. How is the world showing up for you? That’s right. It’s not. Because world leaders won’t allow the Zionist project to be stopped.

There are many other ways to be without shelter, as all the diasporas prove; any number of addictions that sap resources, or choosing not to live with unsafe relatives - the equivalent of constructive dismissal; being flooded or burnt out in extreme weather events, and innumerable other causes. More and more precarious. I cannot comprehensively account for homelessness, lack of shelter, because it is so vast that I would never get back here.

Given that a roof over your head is the foundation for a healthy life, let’s have a quick look at it.

It’s somewhere to:

be warm
be dry
be cool
be safe
sit
lie down to sleep
close the door on the world
cook and eat
do your homework
play
learn
rest
work
nurture familial relationships
invite friends and family
wash clothes
wash your body
put your necessary things
put your accumulation of other things
enjoy physical intimacy with a partner
elaborate your dreams
provide a safe place for your children

All the comfort that we take for granted. Taps that gush fresh clean water. Soft sofas and beds. Tables and desks and TVs. Lavatories that flush all that away. Lighting and decor. Carpets, tiles, polished wood. We love it so much, and take it so much for granted!

Detailing what lack of safe, warm, dry shelter means is somewhat like trying to name all the reasons people become homeless. But it is safe to say multiple traumas, and general inability to have a life, certainly one without anxiety, danger from multiple sources, ill health, inability to get support, more especially if you are ‘undocumented’. We can imagine and shudder. We can imagine and be grateful for our plush existence.

In the early 2000s I was living in Milan, teaching English, spending lots of time with my granddaughter, Clara, and for a while, doing a writing course with Charlotte Price. One of the entry tickets to that was to write a sketchy autobiography of ten pages or so.

I’ve pulled a short piece from that that I think speaks to the safety I had as a child with a home and family. A very simple, very far from posh, imperfect but in the essential ways, sheltered life - I mean housed, with parents, who put food on the table, somewhere strong to go out from to school and to come back to, and never doubting that I could. Forever grateful.

‘We were usually outside, unless there was heavy Taranaki rain. The house was small for five children and my mother. And my father after his work day. Her frequent admonition was ‘go outside and play’. Our home playground consisted of lawns in front and back of our house, and beyond the back lawn a larger wild area. A narrow path with leg scratching grass and bidibids, flanked by much lichened apple trees, lead to a large shed. One half of it housed the chooks, the other miscellaneous bike pieces, and it had the dustiest floor ever. I hated my rostered turn to collect eggs. I was afraid of chooks, their unpredictable pecking, clucking, taking off and landing, and the way they looked at me, and still don’t rush to be around them. Another shed near the house contained the coal bin. One of my father’s brothers was our coal merchant. I loved watching him hefting the bags along the path, heaving the mouth of each one onto the edge of the bin, deftly picking up the lower edge of the bag and shaking the coal out, all the way to the choking fine dust at the end. He slapped the bags flat, folded them in half to carry back to his truck. This shed also had a cobbler’s last bolted to a sturdy workbench, a big stone bottle which contained TEEPOL detergent used by my father in concrete making. Assorted tools and machinery bits hung from nails on the dusty open framing timbers, alongside the well oiled gardening tools. The squeeze gap between the tank stand and house was the right dampness for glossy green mosses to grow. My sister and I dug kitchen knives in to the ground to lift moss up for our sand saucer gardens bound for flower shows. My maternal grandfather and uncle exhibited prize daffodils and gladioli at these shows, or we would never have known about them, but I thought then that everyone made floral saucers once or twice a year. The vegetable garden bound by hedges was my father’s territory. Years later, I discovered that I knew how to make a garden from having watched him spade the soil over, let it weather and rake it into a perfect crinkled plane, the raked lines at perfect right angles to the garden edge. I never got to running a string line between sticks to create straight rows, but I can see now the string running off the oval winding stick as Dad moved from one end of a new row to the other, walking a plank laid down to prevent heavy trampling of the soft raked soil. If we were lucky, we picked peas on Christmas Day. We shelled them sitting on the warm concrete path in our best shorts, before dusting them off and taking the peas in to our mother who would be cranking the coal range up on that summer day. In the middle of the vegetable garden was a lone Cape Gooseberry bush which produced one or two papery berry containers each summer. I never understood why it was allowed to stay. ‘

‘It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.’ Mary Oliver, Red Bird

References & direct links to booking constellations.

Dr Gabor Mate with Daniel Mate the Myth of Normal - TRAUMA, ILLNESS & HEALING IN A TOXIC CULTURE www.drgabormate.com

Gary Stevenson Garys Economics instagram, Youtube, X, *Our mental health is being destroyed by a collapsing economy 18 August 2025; The Trading Game: A Confession 432 pp Penguin ‘The high-wire true story of the millionaire trader, who won the finance game and then blew it wide open’

www.manawafamilyconstellations.com Chat, book sessions

manawa = heart breath emotion

karensole@manawafamilyconstellations.com drop a line to arrange a workable time

Karen Sole is a member of the International Institute for Complementary Therapists, and of the International Systemic Constellations Association (isca-network.org), and a member of ANZCI, the Aotearoa New Zealand Constellation Incorporated. She took her first training from Yildiz Sethi yildizsethi.com of familyconstellations.com.au. Karen's profile can be found on the above organisational sites. She participates in monthly professional supervision, facilitator member constellations of ANZCI, ISCA, and informal international groups of experienced credentialed facilitators.