I have known a homeless guy who wanted to be in jail for the winter so he took a bat to 6 parked cars…Great. Before that day I never knew that they have mobile windshield replacement places.
Interesting article from the L.A. Times yesterday. Smart-spending skid row program saves lives
Looks like a good model to build on.
I should note that, in the James Fallows piece I alluded to earlier, he was conflicted about reporting that so many of the homeless he encountered were either crazy or pathological liars. He said he hesitated to report that because he feared conservatives would seize on that as an excuse to say, “Aha! You see? There’s no point doing anything to help the homeless.”
I’m sure Fallows was hoping to find more Tom Joads, more homeless guys who WERE solid, middle-class family men before factory jobs started disappearing. But such guys are few and far between.
But one thing I know from experience: in some cities, affordable housing is mighty hard to come by. I grew up in a modest 100 year old, blue-collar house in Archie Bunker’s neighborhood. That house would now fetch a million dollars, easy.
When I was a teenager, there was a large “hotel” in Manhattan called the George Washington (it had a sister hotel called the Martha Washington). This “hotel” was, essentially, the world’s biggest flophouse- a plays where transients could get four walls and a ceiling, cheap.
By the mid-Eighties, the transients were gone, and the George Washington was filling up with single yuppies.
Like most cities, New York used to have numerous equivalents of “Skid Row,” where winos and assorted layabouts could get a squalid one room apartment for very little money. Where is Skid Row now? I’m not sure it exists. And the men who used to live on Skid Row don’t seem to know, either.
Excellent article, Shayna. But I can’t believe the reporter didn’t mention the actual name of the model - Housing First.
http://www.endhomelessness.org/section/tools/housingfirst
http://www.beyondshelter.org/aaa_initiatives/ending_homelessness.shtml
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/housingfirst/
http://www.gladwell.com/pdf/murray.pdf (warning: pdf)
That last article doesn’t mention “housing first”, but it is usually the example given of what chronic homelessness looks like, and its associated costs. From the first link:
Then Fallows did a terrible job looking. And if he were to look now, he’d be inundated with instances of “normal” people finding themselves in the middle of, or on the brink of, homelessness. And just wait until the soldiers start to come home from Iraq and Afghanistan…
Possibly because they are working with a different subset of the homeless. Also from your first link:
It sounds to me like Housing First focuses on the non-chronic homeless problem; those who may just be experiencing temporary homelessness due to specific circumstances. The L.A. project worked with the worst of the worst:
Different “target market” as it were.
Another segment of the homeless population is the street kids. I was one myself, so I can give an insight into who these kids are and why they are homeless.
When you see young people on the streets, the ages of these kids ranges from about 11 years old to 20 years of age, although almost every street kid will tell you they are older than their age if you ask.
Overwhelmingly most kids are throwaways, not runaways. And many who were running, were running from a hell (physical or mental), that was worse than living on the streets.
The smallest group is the Twinkies, as we called them, were kids who ran away from good homes for the weekend, or a couple of days, and were not really street kids. Most twinkies didn’t stick around for more than one week before they ran back home and stayed for good after they realized that street life was difficult. Sometimes a kid may seem like a twinkie, but were kicked out every time the kid and parent had an argument, or has issues at home such as parents who drank or did drugs, and home was no more than a place to sleep upon occasion.
The majority or kids came from abusive situations, and being kicked out or running away was at least an escape from abuse.
Many of the kids grew up in social services, bounced between foster & group homes, and never really had a home they could call their own. Even those who grew up in homes, often had encounters with social services due to the level of neglect and abuse in the homes.
There is also a second smaller contingent of second generation street kids, who gre up being bounced between parents who were either on the streets or social services recipients, and were sent occasionally to foster & group homes.
Most of these kids are too young, too under-educated, and not socialized enough to find work. The average level of education among street kids is grade 8 or less, and the average age is 15, getting a job or going back to school, and getting out of the streets often has to wait until they get older, or if they are a girl, if they pregnant and can get adult social services after being emancipated from their family.
As for why these kids are on the street rather than in group and foster homes, or even shelters, the two main reasons are the close bonds between street kids, and fear of social service agencies, family, and adult homeless people in shelters.
First, the bond between street kids is close because, like most teenagers, they feel a strong pull towards their peers. The street kids become a family and since most of these kids have never had a real family, this bond is ALL IMPORTANT. Beyond a family, it is its own subculture, with its own rules, manners, and conduct. I’ve described it before like belonging to a tribe, and although this tribe interacts with the dominant culture, it is not a part of it.
Secondly, these young kids have had enough experience under social services to know they don’t want to be sent home, or to a group home. Some kids fear the group homes or their family’s homes due to their experiences. In their minds, the streets are a safer place. There aren’t many youth shelters which do not involve social services, adult shelters are very dangerous places for adult homeless, never mind a teenager. Because of this, most teenage homeless will sleep in squats, tents, low-rent no-tell hotels, or friend’s couches, and will deliberately avoid things like shelters, and social workers.
Street kids also often avoid soup kitchens, and other services which may provide laundry services, clothing, or other help because of the fear of social workers and adult homeless. This leaves them only the options of panhandling, prostitution, drug dealing, or other illegal activities to provide money for things like food, shelter, and other necessities.
Drug use is worse now than it was when I was young and on the streets, but addiction can be another stumbling block when it comes to getting street kids off the streets. We drank, smoked week, did mushrooms & LSD, but back then, crack, heroin & meth weren’t available, and now you see young teens with meth addictions & heroin addictions.
Even without the hardcore addictions, leaving the streets, getting jobs, and even an education in order to become a normal person, was a slow process for most of the people I knew, myself included. It required learning how to socialize within the dominant culture of our society. It required teaching oneself discipling and self control and self motivation. It requires both independence and strength, and it is NOT easy.
I would say about 60% of my former street kid friends are now happy and settled in a very normal life, and about 25% might be described as drifters, who although they may work, float from job to job, and place to place but are not homeless, about 5% still could be considered street people, and about 10% of the people from those days did not make it, they either passed away on the streets, or from drug addictions, or gave up.
I’ve heard that here (Chicago), having a prior drug conviction will disqualify you from public-housing benefits. In fact, having any member of your household have a drug conviction can get the whole family booted out. Can anyone confirm?
Many excellent and thoughtful responses above. I am a psychiatrist working with the chronically mentally ill/addicted/homeless population.
One thing I would add is that getting on Social Security is a difficult process. I have helped many patients apply, and I swear I wouldn’t be surprised if they just throw all the applications into a big pile and reject 90% of them at random. It’s not just that they reject a lot of people, including many who are IMO completely incapable of working; once in a while they will also accept someone who seems relatively fine to me. In the best of circumstances it will take several months to get an application approved.
So, even if you are actually disabled, the Social Security system is by no means a quick or certain remedy to your problems.
I would disagree with that. Housing First is becoming the model that many chronically homeless-specific programs are trying to target (since funders and HUD want to address the worst of the worst first - since they eat up such a huge portion of assitance dollars). In fact, they came up with a different name for similar projects focusing specifically on families - Rapid Rehousing.
The reason it (usually) targets the chronically homeless is because it offers an easier solution to delivering services to them. By stabilizing them in housing, it then becomes easier for a case worker to see them regularly, provide regular transportation for them (for health care, treatment, workforce development, etc.). The standard model has been “let’s get them the services they need, then once they stabilize, get them housing.” Housing first has found that having housing is the greatest stabilizer possible, allowing services to not only become more regular, but more efficient and effective.
Well you are certainly more familiar with the program than I am. I just went by what it sounded like they were describing on the site you provided. But either way, they both seem like excellent programs, and aside from what I picked out as a possibility, I couldn’t begin to properly answer why the Times article didn’t mention them.
It’s also worth pointing out that in most (if not all) places, homeless shelters are forbidden by law from admitting unaccompanied minors, specifically teenagers. The men’s shelter I lived in could not accept any minors at all, and our affiliated women’s shelter could only let children 12 and under stay with their mothers. Apparently, the gov’t feels that opening shelters to teenagers will only encourage runaways.
We may have been legally allowed to house minors with their fathers, but as a number of our residents were registered sex offenders who had no place else to go after finishing their prison sentences, we thought it best to just say “no minors”.
Fascinating thread.
I’m particularly moved by the description of runaway kids. I ran away from an abusive home when I was 17, but fortunately for me I had an aunt willing to take me in as long as I could financially support myself. I didn’t spend a single night on the streets. I try not to think about what would have happened if I didn’t have the support of others.
If I had ended up on the street, what then? I don’t think anything could have convinced me to go back home. I had reached my breaking point and I felt I was either going to go crazy, or die, if I went home. It was the worst year of my life and I still don’t regret leaving.
I have an uncle who is paranoid schizoaffective who is constantly on the verge of homelessness. He lives alone but is extremely low-functioning. He’s currently being evicted from his apartment for a surprisingly not-crazy reason – he left a teapot on the stove and set off the fire alarm. Any sane person could make that mistake, but they are so eager to get rid of the hassle of living with him that they are ready to throw him out on the street. Every time he gets thrown out of an apartment I call my grandparents to make sure he’s not homeless. ‘‘Don’t worry,’’ they tell me, ‘‘We are not going to let him live on the streets.’’ It’s comforting in the short term, but once they pass away, what then? What’s going to happen to my uncle?
My Mom may be on the verge of homelessness right now, I’m not sure. She’s filing bankruptcy and she lost her apartment, and right now she’s crashing on her boyfriend’s couch. She’s been living in run-down motels on and off for the past year. She is working overtime at a factory and still not making enough to live.
I have two friends who spent some portion of their life homeless. Both of them lived out of their car.
In all cases, mental illness or escaping abuse was a major factor, usually both. It is a fucking travesty the way we treat our mentally ill. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that so many of them are homeless.
If only about 10% fit the description “people you see on the street” ( does that mean in a large city? panhandling?) what does the rest of the population look like?
If you had noticed me, you would have seen a fairly average looking person (aside, perhaps, from having long hair and a beard, but that’s hardly unusual in New York City) wearing jeans, a windbreaker-weight jacket, and boots, striding purposefully down the sidewalk. Not looking markedly different from anyone else around me.
I could describe for you a dozen or so folks I remember from the Queens Mens Shelter circa 1984… some would be more memorable if you saw them in public than others (one fellow in particular was prone to “fits” of almost epileptic severity when he would hear voices and would stalk around arguing with them and gesturing with his hands angrily). The majority of us looked like… you know, PEOPLE. Mostly not in suit and ties, but some exceptions even there.
It’s generally not particularly safe to just plant yourself somewhere and stay put, and there’s generally enough that you have to attend to during the course of the day that you have things to do anyhow. If you aren’t sleeping in the shelter system at this time, you have until nightfall to ferret out a place to sleep. If you aren’t eating at an institution or soup kitchen, you need to work at acquiring food. If you’re trying to become a non-homeless person, you may be heading off to interview or to talk to a social worker or whatever. But even if you are in the shelter and aren’t doing anything like that, you learn to not just plop down. You make folks nervous when you do that. Someone will complain and then the cops come. And they make you move on anyhow and perhaps cause problems between you and whatever facility you stay at. So you go find something to do, or find a place out of folks’ sight to hang out, one or the other.
It’s simple. Social security payments are around $900 a month. Rents here are well upwards of $1000 a month. Many places have rules that you cannot rent unless the rent is no more than 50% of your monthly income. (50%!! Yeesh!!)
I’d just like to pipe in that when I was unemployed in California a few years ago and trying to get assistance of any kind, I was told that unless I had kids, was pregnant or illegal there wasn’t anything out there for me. I dunno if things have changed but I know that up here in Oregon you can’t get state health care unless you’re pregnant or you’re a kid.
Some more accessible (although, necessarily, therefore less in-depth) resources than government reports and university studies on homelessness in the US:
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City - a memoir by a man who begins working with the homeless population of Boston based on his absentee father’s homelessness. It includes some chilling tales of what it’s like to be homeless and out of a shelter in a Northeast city in the middle of winter, and the author’s own homeless experience.
This American Life’s take on homelessness - a Radio program that starts off with a half hour segment on two men that voluntarily become homeless in New York City. While more wry and humorous than most accounts, it definitely helps to show some of the reasoning behind non-mentally ill homeless folks. Starts about 8 minutes in.
I’ve met people who were runaway children. I don’t mean those who think on Saturday that running away will be a grand adventure but who are back home before the weekend’s over, but about the ones who are running from abusive situations, who are used to viewing all adults as dangerous, and who fear that if they ask for help, someone will try to pack them back to the family they’re running from. At some point, those runaway children become teenagers and young adults, but they may still be terrified of speaking to anybody “official” and still living on the street.
One of the guys I knew had run away at age 9. His “movie specialist: sword fighting” diploma was the first he’d ever had. He was finally qualified for something other than “bouncer” or “truck emptier”! Few times have I seen someone happier.
I believe I described them in the very post you quoted.