“I Will Have My Own Place” — The Entrepreneurial Intentions of Young People Experiencing Homelessness in Paris and New York

Abstract

This paper explores the entrepreneurial intentions of homeless youth through the lens of effectuation theory. While entrepreneurship is often presented as a pathway to social and professional integration, little is known about how entrepreneurial intentions emerge among young people experiencing homelessness. Drawing on a four-year comparative qualitative study conducted in Paris and New York, this research examines how homeless youth envision entrepreneurship under conditions of extreme precarity. The study is based on an in-depth qualitative methodology combining urban ethnography, life-story interviews, informal conversations, and prolonged field engagement with twenty homeless youths. Data were analyzed using the Gioia methodology, ensuring a rigorous and transparent qualitative analysis. The findings show that entrepreneurial intention among homeless youth is primarily driven by aspirations for autonomy, emancipation, and control over an uncertain future rather than by opportunity recognition or profit maximization. These intentions closely align with the core principles of effectuation, including means-driven action, affordable loss, strategic partnerships, and the leveraging of contingencies. Across both cities, homeless youth engage in an effectual mode of action shaped by survival practices, peer-based networks, and improvisation. By extending effectuation theory to the context of homelessness, this study contributes to research on entrepreneurial intention under conditions of extreme marginalization and offers insights for the design of tailored entrepreneurial support programs grounded in homeless youths’ lived realities.