this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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It's a standard phrase in Britain, used by government reports. He's not really intending much by it other than using a phrase everyone in the UK hears all the time. Example:
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/demographics/socioeconomic-status/latest/
Ah crap, that's my bad. Thanks.
I get the same with phrases that are uniquely american and not used over here at all, like houseless. There's a whole range of culturally unique phrases for social problems that aren't standardised across english speaking countries.
The euphemism treadmills are on overdrive and they've started to diverge across space.
It seems like over a long enough period of time, any given word or name or symbol will start to be viewed as problematic or stigmatized, and a replacement comes along. Maybe it really just happens because people feel like it's stale.
(not relwvant to your overall point but) I don't think houseless is a commonly used phrase, in the U. S.; it's anecdotal but I've never heard it used.
I heard it used a fair amount in 2021-2023 ish, the point of the term was to decouple the stereotypes and stigma of homelessness from the material reality of not having a house. The term "rough sleeper" has a similar origin. Basically, just because someone doesn't have a house doesn't mean they don't have a home, they could sleep in their car, a shelter, or some other arrangement.
Oh; maybe unhoused? Heh, it's entirely a difference of formation but I legitimately didn't recognize it, because of that.
I get what you mean, now.
When I was studying housing we used unhoused for the most part. It’s definitely the preferred term for progressives in the US.
The "house" part makes it weird in the US, at least, where the highest unhoused populations are also in places where the majority of dwellings are apartments and not house-houses. If you break "houseless" down to its component parts, I've been houseless virtually my whole adult life despite an unbroken streak of leases.
"Unhoused" is less "house"-dependent because there's no separate verb form; you're housed in your apartment because what else could fill in that blank, and that's the one that's in much more common use in coastal cities in my experience.