This paper argues that poor's access to home is a precondition to their benefiting from development practice whose critical pursuance is essential to eradicate human deprivations in a given developing country. This argument is underpinned by the observation that a given home besides being an 'ideological construct' also provides a spatial setting for the day-today production and reproduction of its dwellers. This in turn enables, in particular, women to pursue their specific development objectives at the household level - emancipation from poverty and patriarchy. To address homeless people's well being within a development agenda, homelessness in cities in Bangladesh is first understood normatively in an inter-disciplinary premise: homeless people are 'roofless', 'rootless' and 'resourceless'. This paper looks critically at the recent gains in Human Development Index (HDI) in Bangladesh. Although HDI, developed by UNDP, is a well-known means to gauge development its key indicators, e.g. per capita income, education and longevity, are greatly affected by homelessness. Development practice side-by-side rising homelessness is exclusionary as homelessness precludes people from participating in and benefiting from development initiatives mediated by home. How an absence of normative understanding of homelessness has resulted in homeless people's exclusion from (low-income) housing provision and human development initiatives is then explained. Policy implications emanating from normative understanding of homelessness, in the housing-development nexus, are outlined in the conclusion.
