10 GROUNDCOVER NEWS LIVING ARCHIVE OCTOBER 31, 2025 Housed, unhoused or homeless? What is “domicile,” and how can we begin to look at that word to see different notions that could describe how we define classes of people? Communities are people, and where people come together, there begins the hard stuff of life, from the ugly, brutal and profane to the seemingly sublime. However, sometimes we seem to get lost along our way when we come together and organize our spaces. Possibly, it’s just our nature as primal beings that our world shows extreme signs of the need to stigmatize, place and categorize to the point of degradation of others in our systems. Homelessness, or as I prefer to call it, “Houselessness,” might in my view, be the frontier ground to see how we are really living our lives in society. It is not hard to identify a homeless person, but it could be, when it comes to seeing that same person as inclusive in our communities, and not as one to just be “humanely” tolerated. The houseless person isn’t dwelling in the shadows, but is living in plain view. They are not hiding in the attic of our collective house peering into dim light on the larger groups of people. Homelessness isn't a non-organic monster haphazardly created out of nefarious thin air; instead, I see it as organic human blood. It could be determined that it is a working residual coming out of an otherwise functioning society; however, I see it as indeed the actual state of the whole collective. A residual could be discarded as CHRISTOPHER ELLIS Groundcover writer lightly as a paper cup, or more massively as a landfill or incinerator. However, houselessness can’t be easily discarded or maintained as a landfill. To me, homelessness is generic to a system that has otherwise well-bodied, intelligent and talented people living in destitution being dehumanized. Homelessness can only be “maintained” if it is not seen as part of the whole. If it is a dreg it might be seen as “normal” while at the same time we see that dreg as shameful, a shame that is useful for us. We can separate in a moral sense the useful need while seeing it as a deplorable. It is deplorable in its actual state, and as we see it, but do we as a society need it? Every individual in our communities is essential in our civic space; he or she is to be valued not as a category or as a species in the system. For a person to be in a category or class implies a situation to be controlled and placed. When I say that a homeless person is generic I mean that their houselessness, being without a house is common. Not that it is common to be without a house, but is the housed person distant from the houseless in that they are not snared in the machinery of political and government control to the ultimate detriment of liberty, health and happiness? How do you define native to the land, air and soil, and how does it come to be that the majority peoples of the world live in utter poverty, filth and degradation? How do you define freedom if it is not to breathe clean air, to live on uncontaminated soil, and to consume healthy and organic foods? Domicile is not to have become a human commodity and cash crop. To maintain a habitation (or to be maintained within a house) isn’t to have become a resource to be commercially recycled from generation to generation. Domicile, as I choose to see it, appears to sound like “docile” when we are willing to live comfortable and convenient where mindless, cruel and human suffering is lived, in a real sense, from person to person. Most of us are not radical, nor harbor desires to disturb the status quo, or even feel a rational need to question the housing or other parameters of our lives. However, we are not given the luxury to be comfortable in silence while the world around us seems to be collapsing. It is a good thing to be civilly good, hopeful and positive in place, habitat and property, but when that comfort and content does not give thoughtful, intent consideration spaces around us, where there is abject poverty and suffering, we have become people that are sterile, placed and ineffectual for the common good. When we begin to see that housed or unhoused can have implications that can better describe the frontier to be innovative, see impoverished circumstances in a new and more productive light, we might at the first begin to be uneasy, timid, perplexed or even frightened; however, if we are diligent we will begin to breakdown iron barriers that categorize. I had a wonderful brother, now deceased, who was also a pastor in the city of Auburn Hills, and later in Rochester Hills. I was not officially homeless at the time, however, while riding see UNHOUSED page 13 to places and Labels matter! Unhoused individuals and families "Homeless population" — such an endearing term, don’t you think? But hey, what’s in a name, right? These times, they are a changin’! WAYNE S. Groundcover vendor No. 615 “Homeless population” sounds so permanent that it’s depressing. Like we’ve just come to accept it as a natural part of our existence. Well, it’s not! Don't tell me I’m part of a homeless population. You might like the statistical value of it, but I find it offensive and demeaning. So, where do we go from here? Well, folks, it is time for us to label ourselves! I’ve decided that I like “unhoused - individuals and families.” It sounds less permanent, more descriptive, less offensive and a kinder way to be addressed. And really, any acts of kindness and terms less demeaning than “homeless population” make a difference. Just like going about your business in town, you try to dress for the location and the occasion. Sometimes what you look like and sound like is as important as what you're labeled as. So folks, let’s take a pause. Let’s really take a good look around us, and decide for ourselves who we want to be identified as. How do we wish to be labeled? Let’s take a minute and decide whether or not we wish to tackle this weighty issue.
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