US failing its homeless -- why?

Great Debates
21

DTT, what this gets to is the fundamental issue in the marketing of “homelessness”: the issue of volition.

Everyone should agree that living on the street and defecating in the street is a pretty suck-ass way of life, for both the person doing it, and the person observing it. The true argument against excessive catering to the “homeless” has never been that they are secretly having lots of fun, or having a better life than us, or driving around in Cadillacs (though there are gangs of “Kosovar war victim” beggars that I’ve being seen shuttled around in vans who I suspect are doing pretty well).

Rather, the argument is over whether the “homeless” are some subsisting and involuntary group who have been deprived of homes, then sanctioned, by the oligarchy (cf. the tone of the OP). Through the late 1980s/early 1990s, the prevailing message was that the “homeless” were just hardworking folk, families mostly, who, doggone it, had had their homes taken away by Reagan. Because he hated them.

And so forth. Read Bernard Goldberg’s Bias. which focuses heavily on this era and this issue, and on the media’s disproportionate attempt to portray sympathetic, “homeless families,” rather than crackheads.

My direct experience with the “homeless” includes limited volunteering at a shelter serving holiday dinners, etc. It was an eye-opener. The clientele fell into two categories: users, and sad sacks, with the former prevailing. There was a fair amount of theft and fighting in the shelters. And . . . I was a bit troubled by the fact that the same guys I saw in the shelter at night, and clustering around the sandwich truck at midnight on the street, were the ones waving signs about not having anything to eat (or, my favorite, “please help with food OR WATER,” as though dying of thirst were a legitimate threat in America) during the day. I saw very few real “families” or people who had just plain lost some home they had earned. Basically most of the people had made a sad succession of multiple volitional life choices (drugs, not working, drugs, family conflict, drugs, abstention from serious work, dropping out, drugs) that led them, not unpredictably, to the streets. The remainder were insane.

Yet there’s been a great effort in America to promote the notion of the virtuous “homeless” person, as opposed to the more-typical drug-addled, work-averse, insane homeless person. America being America and generous, it’s theoretically willing to help any of the above; it’s simply that simplistic mis-diagnoses of the operative problems aren’t helpful. One of my bosses had a wife who ran psych clinics in the 1960s and bemoaned the “liberalizing” deinstitutionalization of maniacs as one of the main causes of “homelessness.” And this is a liberal social worker.

Arguably, the Supreme Court ruling on vagrancy laws and the related restrictions on regulation of vagrant conduct have further exacerbated the problem, to the point where the question might be put differently: Why Are The ‘Homeless’ Failing The US By Not Living Up To The Social Contract Under Which Members Of Society Agree To Order Their Lives So As To Refrain From Sleeping And Urinating On Public Sidewalks Or Bothering Innocent Pedestrians With Their Aggressive Begging?

22

It’s dubious because of the Court’s conclusion that any citizen or policeman couldn’t understand or explain what a vagrant was. To the contrary, the problem was that they could, with fair unanimity, but the Court didn’t like the fact that the definition of vagrant applied to various drifters who the Court thought were just not that bad.

Formulate a quiz wherein you allow average citizens (or average transients) to observe non-moving persons for ten or fifteen minutes, then ask them “Is that person a vagrant/bum, or a productive citizen?” I suggest that the result, among either average citizens or average bums, will be remarkably consistent and remarkably confident in the ability to identify true “vagrancy.” We all (bums included) have pretty accurate bum-radar. Thus, “vagueness” is a red herring.

So the dubiosity (?) of the S.C. verdict was in its labored suggestion that, heck, no one could know what it meant to be a vagrant, and thus **anyone[/b could end up a victim of the vagrancy statute. You know, innocent businessmen waiting for a bus could be arrested for vagrancy, right, if vagrancy were defined so broadly as “standing around?” Right? Fortunately, this wasn’t happening, and I strongly suspect the majority of people being arrested under Jacksonville’s statute (if any) were what you, I, or any bum would recognize as hardcore bums. Vagueness problem solved!

23

“I know it when I see it.” just doesn’t cut it by legal standards. What specific criteria can you spell out to differentiate bums from average joes?

24

But they don’t define “homeless” anywhere , nor do they explain which “life-sustaining activities that people experiencing homelessness are forced to do in public,” are made illegal. Are people in a government or privately run homeless shelter “homeless”? What about people doubling up with friends or relatives? How about a 17 year old mother who shares a room with her child in her own mother’s apartment but wants her own apartment? Under every definition of “homeless” I’ve seen, those in shelters count, under most, the doubled up famiy counts and I’ve even seen some under which the 17 year old mother counts. None of those people are being forced to perform any activities in public. Neither are those who could go to a shelter or live with relatives but prefer to live on the streets ,in trains, or parks. (and they do exist)

I don’t know how many government funded shelters exist in the US, but I do know that NYC will provide shelter to those who have no shelter at all.They may not give a shelter space to that 17 year old who can stay with her mom, or to the doubled up family (although they used to), but they will give it to the person who has nowhere but the street, the park or the trains. And still there are people living in the street, the parks and the trains.

25

Again, you don’t understand that the burden is not on me to spell out differences, when the public at large understands what “vagrancy” means. That’s how constitutional law works. If the constitution doesn’t prohibit laws against vagrancy (and it doesn’t; find the words “right to vagrancy,” if you please, in the Constitution); and if the prohibitions on vagrancy don’t clearly violate some other constitutional provision (and they don’t, unless you can spell it out, with proof) – then the state vagrancy laws should be valid.

Reality is not on your side either, any more than constitutional jurisprudence – pls., answer my question as to how many civilians, cops., or bums, would have a legitimate problem sorting “average joes” (you know, businessmen on their way to work; tradesmen headed for work; elderly retirees playing chess in the park) from hardcore bums). The answer is that all the sorting groups would arrive at similar conclusions: bums are not that hard to recognize, and bums themselves would acknowledge this. If there is no vagueness-in-fact in determining who is a vagrant, there can hardly be any vagueness-in-law. Can there?

26

Let’s see… panhandling. That’s a sign of being a bum. But many municipalities have outlawed this and I’ve never heard of any of those laws being struck down.

Public urination? That’s against the law also.

Walking around with a shopping cart? Nearly always the shopping cart is stolen, so that’s against the law.

Other than those things, I can’t really think of anything that you can specifically name that you can tell just by looking at someone that makes them a vagrant.

27

Were you inspired by compassion?

Since your experience is, by your own admission, “limited,” I’m not able to accept that you were able to serve holiday dinners at a homeless shelter and yet determine such an incredible amount of information:

  1. Most clientele are drug users.

  2. The rest are designated “sad sacks.” Is that a clinical diagnosis?

  3. You observed a “fair amount” of theft and fighting or just heard about it.

  4. Sandwiches were served at midnight at the shelters.

  5. Some of the same people who ate sandwiches at midnight at the shelters carried signs asking for food during the day – and one asked for water even.

  6. You were able to determine which people were in family groups.

  7. You were able to determine which people had once owned a home and lost it.

  8. You were able to determine that most of the people in the shelter(s) had made a succession of bad choices that included choosing not to work, choosing to have problems within their families, choosing to drop out of something or other and, especially, choosing to take drugs.

  9. Those who had not made a succession of bad choices were “insane.” (I believe that’s generally considered a legal term rather than a medical one.)

Let’s see. My most recent experience at a homeless shelter was…yesterday. In two days this privately funded shelter served thousands of Thanksgiving dinners. All seven members of my family volunteered. We range in age from 13 to 63. As we were mingling with the crowd outside the front door, the first thing that I noticed was that you couldn’t tell us from the people who were there to eat. (We are a rather casual family.)

The two things that have surprised me are how articulate some of the homeless are and also how frustrated they are to have jobs and still be needing the assistance of a shelter. That was just some of the ones I talked with. I can’t claim to be an authority on any of them.

We saw no fighting and heard no angry words or indication of theft. It was actually fairly cheerful.

Do you think it’s an organized effort? Do you think that people can be virtuous and homeless or is there some automatic thing that clicks in when you get downsized and eventually evicted? Are “insane” people lacking in virtue? More accurately, are the mentally disabled less virtuous than the emotionally stable?

Finally, cite please for government funded homeless shelters. They may exist, but I am not familiar with them and would like to know about them.

28

The NYC Department of Homeless Services either funds or operates a large number of shelters, which served 36,952 individuals on 11/23/04. This link http://www.nyc.gov/html/dhs/html/providers/providers.shtml will take you to a list of shelter providers. Some of the shelters are operated by private groups (Salvation Army, Volunteers of America etc ) but the city government provides the money.

29

Let’s a get few things straight here, there are homeless, there are street people, and there are pandhandlers. There is overlap between the three, but more often than not they are disctinctly different people.

When it comes to homeless, the average citizen on the street is likely to never see them. These are folks who live in shelters and are there because of some bad decisions in their lives, or just a string of bad luck. Also there’s quite a few battered women who qualify for this category. Many of these have jobs, or some source of income, but not enough to pay for a real domicle. Most often these folks are trying to improve themselves.

Street People are the folks you see pushing shopping carts or wearing large amounts of clothes in the dead of summer, etc… They are what most people think of when they think of homeless. Street people rarely go to shelters because of one reason or another, ususally an excuse like ‘to much discipline’ or somesuch. Occasionally one has a real excuse for not using a shelter (one had a dog he was devoted to and could not bring it into the shelter). Mental illness is rampant among street people, and was the basis for Reagan’s comment about homeless being so ‘by choice’.

Panhandlers are often just addicts of one kind or another who feed off the sympathy given to the two categories above. They are what cause the majority of backlash(but not all, as will be mentioned below) against the homeless due to aggressive begging. The big problem in Santa Cruz with the ‘homeless’ was actually more a problem with dealing with panhandlers. The SC city council, as always, was rather inept in handling domestic problems since they seem more concerned with declaring themselves to be ‘hate free zones’ or passing their own condemnations of George Bush.

The problems with dealing with street people is that they tend to congregate in areas that the publich would like to feel comfortable and safe in using. Right now, Logan Circle in Philadelphia is filled with the homeless. This is a major public thruway in a tourist section of town, and they tend to be something of a blight to those not used to them. The issue comes up between a person’s use of public park/space as living quarters and the public’s demand for places that are decent places to visit. In addition criminal issues and people not wanting to have some guy sleeping on your doorstep add ot the matter.

The fact is, you cannot ‘fail’ certain kinds of ‘homeless’ (namely street people). Sometimes there is nothing you can do for them, short of reinstitutionalization.

30

I would add to what’s been said: it is IMPOSSIBLE to live in most American cities, on what a minimum wage job at WALMART will pay you. Rents are sky-high, even for substandard slum housing. The cost of food in most inner cities is also high, ofetn higher than in the suburbs. if yoy live in an inner city, you may well have to buy your food from a small market, which will charge 10-60% more than a chain store(thgis is because these small outfits pay huge rents, and are often robbed.
The weird thing is, the governemnt spends a fortune on housing people-yet most cities contain huge areas of blighted, abandoned housing! take San Francisco-the city is crawling with bums…and rents are sky high. Yet, south of Mission, you will see abandioned buildings…these couldade liveable for a FRACTION of what the city spends on public housing…but nothing is done! Why is this?
I’d also say a good many of the homeless are drunks, drug addicts, or severely mentally ill. Society has decided that these people cannot be intitutionalized against their will, so they wind up on the streets. Don’t laugh-the ACLU went to court in NYC, a few years ago. they were defending the right of amentally ill street person, to refuse transportation to a city shelter.

31

You may not agree with Huerta88’s observations, but they’re not that far off re percentage breakdown of the mentally ill vs drug abuser cohorts, and the substantial overlap in between. As Mr. Miskatonic indicated the working and temporarily non-working “homeless” in shelters, and the chronic “street homeless” are fairly distinct populations, even if they’re occupying the same shelter space. The intersecting cohorts of the mentally ill and substance
abusers make up the vast majority of the chronically homeless.

The number of the truly homeless who are just down on their luck or in difficult circumstances are only a small portion of this overall total population.

32

Reading the site, they provide little info and tend to skirt around real questions.

They champion the rights of the poor to *own * their own home. They don’t say ‘own’, they used the term ‘security of tenure’.

They don’t say that the government *has * to give free housing, but then again, they don’t say how else this happens.

33

Without the security of a home (and no, secure tenure does not mean ownership, it just means you know it’s there for more than the next 24 hours), it’s impossible for somebody to have a real chance of getting a job, or dealing with addictions, or anything else. And given the huge (financial) cost of drug abuse, would providing such housing out of public funds really be such a bad idea? Nobody’s going to suggest they should get to live rent-free for life, but quite aside from humanitarian arguments, it’s cheaper than cleaning up the metaphorical and very real mess left behind.

34

By rage or by hatred? I mean, short of court-ordered community service (not my case), what other than compassion would bring you there? Your near-cheap-shot aside, I will agree that my experiences significantly reshaped my view of how compassion needs to express itself to be practical (as with my nurse acquaintance who believed, pace the liberals of 1968, that “liberating” the insane from institutions was far from the most truly compassionate decision for them or society).

When I said my experience such as it is “includes” the shelter, I didn’t say “and is limited to.” The shelter was in the downtown neighborhood where I also worked, outdoors, for two years (valet parking cars for a hotel in an outside lot). I saw more of the street people from street level than in the shelter. But I saw some of the same in both places. And, I’ve had two acquaintances who spent time in shelters for reasonably protracted periods (they, by the way, were the ones who confirmed the more negative characterizations of the lack of “honor among thieves,” as they hated almost all their fellow residents as thieves and mooches).

To return to the OP: as I mentioned before, I don’t hate street people (though a disproportionate number of the ones I’ve met have unattractive character traits). But I do believe that useful solutions to their (substantially self-inflicted) problems are unlikely to originate from politically-motivated characterizations of “homelessness” as some government- or society-inflicted plague that visits the innocent and hardworking homeowners of a city. That’s why I have a problem with the news release cited by the OP (which release has the stupidity to suggest that the housing situation in the U.S. is among the third worse in the world – really? It’s harder to find a safe place to live in the U.S. than in East Timor, or North Korea, or the favelas of S. America?), just as I did with the worldview that Goldberg documents CBS systematically projecting (a “homeless” population disporportionately made up of harmless lawabiding families who lost their houses through, doggone it, tough luck and Reagan’s heartlessness.

These aren’t the real problems, and suggesting that they are seems unlikely to lead to real solutions.

35

If you don’t have a home, your homeless. The rest are just judgments.

36

I do not buy that, nor do the majority of pro-‘homeless’ advocates, who are at pains to paint them as disenfranchised householders and workers.

Statistical and other objective judgments may be made regarding those who rank themselves among the homeless. If a disproportionate number turn out to be mentally ill, or voluntary drug abusers, then we need to address mental illness care, or drug control. But it is naiive to pretend that there is some monolithic “homelessness” problem that is subject to some uniform type of redress or analysis (implicitly a “non-judgmental” one that imputes no responsibility to or role of the various “homeless” in attaining their respective “homeless” state). This way lies the useless Reagan-era progressive analysis of viewing the “homeless” as being uniformly passive victims of malignant governmental action.

37

You still have not address the question, how do they get secure tenure and keep it, if they will not or cannot pay for it? Can it be on the condition that they be “getting a job, or dealing with addictions, or anything else”. What do you do if they will not or cannot do these things.

38

Nice elision of unwillingness and inability. I think most of us agree that there’s little moral obligation to support somebody who’s in such a position out of sheer idleness. Unfortunately, many will then say “oh well, it’s their choice to drink/do drugs/etc, so that makes them unwilling”. Which is a blanket denial of the difficulties facing addicts. Not to mention the actual difficulty of getting a job in the open market - “Can you explain the gaps in your employment?” “Yeah, I spent two years on the streets stealing to feed my heroin addiction.” So yes, support is needed until they’re capable of supporting themselves. It can’t happen all in one leap.

39

One bag lady does. A few Christmases back, when I was already thinking about trading my Caddy for a fairly small sum, a bag lady happened to knock on my door, asking if she could have my trash at the curb (it was garbage day). So I pulled out my keys and ownership and offered her my Fleetwood Brougham d’Elegance (a.k.a. “The Pimpmobile”). It took a bit of convincing, but eventually she signed the green slip took it. The last time I saw her it was a couple of weeks later – she was blowing through a stop sign. The next summer I came across the Caddy in a pick-your-parts.

40

I think a major problem is that America doens’t understand its homeless. In our WASP-capitalist society, we don’t understand why someone doesn’t just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, or why they misuse money simply given to them.

They don’t acknowledge mental disorders or drug abuse, because they’re quite clueless on how to treat it. They don’t understand that simply giving out handouts doesn’t work, because most of these people value things differently than “normal” people do.