Is it OK to use the word ‘homeless’ – or should you say ‘unhoused’?

‘It’s a powerful way to remind us that the issue is really a housing problem.’ Illustration: Olivia de Salve Villedieu/The Guardian

Beverly Graham was sitting in an executive leadership class in Seattle in 2006 when she first recalls using the word “unhoused”.

The director of OSL, a non-profit that provides meals to food-insecure Seattle residents, Graham hadn’t planned on speaking up. But her classmates – two dozen regional business leaders – were discussing the number of homeless people in the area, and their perspective felt very different from the one she had gained after years of helping vulnerable Seattleites. She had to pipe up.