Only in fiction and government does ‘unhoused’ have a home

In George Orwell’s classic 1949 novel “1984,” the people of fictional Oceania are told by a dictator that “war is peace.” 

In Woody Allen’s classic 1971 film “Bananas” the dictator of an island near Florida orders that “underwear will be worn on the outside.” 

And in 2024 Miami-Dade the people are about to be told in a classic bit of legislation that we can no longer talk about the homeless, who will henceforth be called the “unhoused.”

I am not making any of that up. While the first two examples are fiction, the third is not. It’s up for county action this week, in classic legislation by Commissioner Kionne McGhee.

Mr. McGhee’s rationale is that “home is the word often used to describe the personal community in which a person lives and includes loved ones, pets, important and sentimental possessions and valuables, and traditions and rituals,” and the house is “simply a structure in which all of this takes place.”

Therefore, his legislation says, “people experiencing ‘homelessness’ have homes,” just not houses. Hence, they are unhoused but not homeless, so to give them dignity we’ll label them “unhoused” and never say homeless again.

The legislation would make it county policy: “replace the use of the word ‘homeless’ with ‘unhoused.’”

It’s simple: war is really peace, underwear means outerwear, and people who we call homeless today really have homes – just not houses – so they’re no longer homeless.

Try telling the folks on the streets of downtown as they look for shelter that they are homeless no more. Explain to them that all they need is a dog or a memento of anything in their pocket and, presto, they have a home – just no shelter.

It’s like telling the sick that they’re well or soldiers in battle that they’re at peace. You can play with words and say they mean the opposite of what they do to everyone else, but those involved know that’s a load of bananas.

“The words we use to talk about people and describe their circumstances are important,” Mr. McGhee’s legislation begins.

Perfectly true. But twisting and sugarcoating the words we use also distorts the meaning of what we’re trying to say. Telling soldiers that we are at peace so grab your guns and go into battle sure sounds better than telling them they are at war, but that’s not how the rest of the world understands what “peace” is. What it sounds like is a duplicitous leader at work.

A few years back our friend’s Brickell Avenue penthouse had a leak and she was truly unhoused as she moved instead into a pricy Coconut Grove condo while damage was repaired. She was unhoused, but hardly homeless. 

I wouldn’t use public money to aid the unhoused like our friend, but the truly homeless need our help. If you change homeless to unhoused you remove the distinction. Yes, language matters – so don’t muddy it up.

If the county does ban use of the word homeless, what does it rename the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, which has raised millions to help? The Unhoused Trust won’t mean a thing anywhere but at county hall (if even there), while everyone understands what homeless means. 

Imagine trying to get state help in Tallahassee and telling the rest of the state that our homeless are all gone – they’re just unhoused. We’d get less money but more horselaughs.

Mr. McGhee cites the dictionary as telling him that homeless has the wrong meaning. In rebuttal, the 57th edition of the Associated Press Stylebook, which has sold more than 2.5 million copies in telling those of us who write for the public how to do it clearly, impartially and without offense, tells us that the use of the word homeless as an adjective is just fine but “avoid the term unhoused.”

In fact, language does change meaning as people use it every day. It evolves. But we’re pushing water uphill if we try to tell people what words to use when, and which to never use. Language might evolve that way, but in the meantime government using language in the way that the people don’t is a sure path to confusion, not clarity.

Read any county document and it’s probably twice as hard to understand as it should be. Often that’s because government isn’t looking to make things clear but to push a certain way of thinking. 

As Orwell wrote in a 1946 an essay “Politics and the English Language,” three years before his novel “1984,” the “great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms.”

And so, in the year 1984 (not to be confused with Orwell’s book) the US State Department announced that it would no longer use the word “killing” in its annual report on the status of human rights around the world, Instead, it would use the phrase “unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life,” which the department said was more accurate, as “unhoused” seems to be today. Both simply bury the meaning. 

Instead, bury this legislation. It should find no home at county hall.