What determines the spatial distribution of homeless people in Japan?

Abstract

The number of homeless people has been increasing dramatically in Japan since the collapse of the bubble economy in the early of 1990s. This article is the first economic analysis using Geographic Information System (GIS) data to study the spatial distribution of Japan's homeless population. Results suggest that the availability of employment, public medical care and food significantly affect the spatial distribution of Japan's homeless. New supportive facilities and shelters for the homeless should be located in areas with a high availability of employment, inexpensive or free medical care and food.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Yoji Morita and the Urban Environmental Problem Research Group of Osaka City University for providing the data used in this article.

Notes

¹ Data sources: Survey on Tokyo's Homeless (Welfare Bureau, Tokyo Prefecture) and Statistics released by the Promotion Head Office of Flower and Green, Osaka City.

² Since 74.9% of Japan's homeless are living in three metropolitan areas, it is pointless to make comparisons across cities.

³ With strong financial support from the local government, the project mobilized 758 investigators for the survey.

⁴ The hypothesis of no spatial auto-correlation was rejected under Moran's I test after the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimation.

⁵ In particular, up to 10 adjacent neighboring Cho-blocks are weighted as a spatial neighbourhood.

⁶ Since daily hires are the most accessible jobs for the homeless, we added two dummies related to Airin Public Center for Hiring Daily Labor as explanatory variables in the estimation.

Table 2. Homeless density regressions

⁷ Nevertheless, after changing the definition of neighbourhood from 500 m to 1000 m bound, only parameters of indexes concerning job opportunity are significant. A similar estimation result can be obtained when using a Spatial Moving Average (SMA) Model.

⁸ The number of street-living homeless is about 2.6 times that of their tent-living counterparts.