The Language Of Unhoused And Homeless

Is a homeless person who finds an abandoned, unattended warehouse building and quietly lives there homeless?  It all depends on what one means by home.  They have a residence to themselves, but it is not a formal home in the standard or legal sense.  If someone has a small tent in the wilderness, they do not have a house, but they have a place to live.  Some people might advocate for using words like unhoused to refer to such a person, and someone could use it without bowing down to the arbitrary, shifting linguistic norms of the stereotypical liberal, who is obsessed with words that might or might not be used in the dehumanizing way they could be assuming.  

Home and house can certainly be interchangeable words.  Yes, home can sometimes have the connotation of a place where one is welcomed or at peace, having in this case perhaps more of a personal or social dimension than one pertaining to a strictly physical building of personal residence or a conventional, literal house.  Colloquially and otherwise, though, unhoused literally has the same basic etymological meaning as homeless: both indicate that someone is without a home/house of their own, though there could be varying degrees of additional deprivation, such as being without any place where one is welcomed to temporarily stay with family or friends.  It can be fine if someone simply wants to use the word unhoused to refer to a specific subcategory of homeless people or as a wholly interchangeable term with homeless.

It is still true that the word itself does not have to refer to the broader condition of homelessness in all of its manifestations or to specifically the condition of having no set address.  Concerns about the term homelessness--my god, how stupid people are when they do not look past words to concepts!--being disrespectful are likewise invalid.  Any word referring to a person could be used with degrading, malicious, or trivializing intention.  There is nothing about using the word homeless in a general or more precise sense which logically necessitates that there is an actual disregard for the humanity of the homeless behind it.

One could call someone homeless if they do indeed lack a home, and still respect them as a human.  One could call someone unhoused and still mean it in a belittling way.  Intentions behind words matter far more than the words themselves.  It is the former that really dictates what a word really means, though someone could gratuitously use words in an especially arbitrary manner (all language is arbitrary and has no inherent or universal meaning whatsoever).  This person might be a terrible communicator, but they have not necessarily believed anything erroneous or done anything wrong.

As non-telepathic beings (or at least I am one), we need language to communicate almost anything of true precision.  There is no single possible reason for homelessness and a homeless person could for a time have a location in which they live.  The term unhoused can fit them just as well as homeless.  Likewise, it could also refer to a homeless person who lives in a shelter but has no personal house to retreat to.  In any case, the it is not an inherently more philosophically accurate or morally superior word in itself.  This is a delusion of some progressives.  The more important thing by far are logical truths about the matter in question, what one means by one's words, and how one treats other people.