Is Homelessness Scale-Free?

Abstract

In recent years, the claim has been advanced that the distribution of homelessness follows a power law in the temporal dimension. Here, I show evidence that homelessness may also be power law distributed spatially. If so, that may mean that homelessness is “scale-invariant,” a term used in complexity theory to refer to certain types of phenomena that thereby become probabilistically tractable. Although further research is necessary, preliminary investigation demonstrates that there are good reasons for supposing that homelessness may in fact be “scale-invariant,” which may have certain policy implications.

Keywords: homelessness; Malcolm Gladwell; power law distribution; scale-free; scale-invariant