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Homelessness/Housing
The following article originally appeared in Salt of the Earth. It is posted here for private use only. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the permission of Salt of the Earth magazine.
Are we winning the fight
against homelessness?
Kevin Clarke
ROCHELLE IS LEANING AGAINST A METAL RAIL before a gray concrete building that suddenly breaks from a row of small, neatly kept houses in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. She is as out of place on this residential block as this old, concrete one-time convent—out of place because she doesn't really live here. But she is staying here for a while. She hopes for not much longer.
Rochelle is homeless, and so are the four children she's brought with her to the Little Village/Pilsen Inn, a temporary shelter for homeless women with children. "I feel like they are always safe as long as they are with me," she says, explaining why her children have accompanied her from shelter to shelter on her two-year homeless odyssey and why she hasn't given them up to the care of friends, family, or the Department of Children and Family Services.
Like a lot of homeless mothers, Rochelle was fleeing a bad marriage when she left the her apartment behind.
ROCHELLE HAD A SHOT AT AN APARTMENT not too long ago in one of Chicago's housing projects. It's a grim testament to the decay and fear that have become the wretched hallmarks of public housing that she turned the offer down.
She'd rather remain homeless than "take my children to the projects. At least here [at the shelter], they're safe." Rochelle would prefer to find a place of her own on the open market, in a real neighborhood, like the one she's standing in today.
"But even studios go for $400, and I don't get but $437 from public aid. It's almost impossible to find a place for myself and four children.
"A lot of times I get discouraged and want to give up, but when you have four children, they keep you hoping. If I give up, who'll take care of them?"
Rochelle is one face of a problem that began to loom larger on the national landscape during the late 1970s—she is one of the millions of people in the U.S. who are or have been homeless.
NOW, ALMOST TWO DECADES SINCE THE WORD homelessness was first coined to describe Rochelle's dilemma—and long after most people hoped the problem would be solved—the nation still grapples with homelessness and appropriate responses to it. But is the problem the nation and the homeless face today the same as it was in 1980? Are the people the same? Are their options?
Homelessness has crept into every part of American society. The homeless can be found in suburbs and rural communities as easily as big cities.
People working for low wages who cook, clean, and care for the well-to-do in wealthy resort communities are often among the homeless. More and more homeless are being observed along the U.S. border with Mexico as shantytown conditions drift up from Mexico following the border-area industrialization being accelerated by NAFTA.
The good news...
THOUGH THE HOMELESS POPULATION continues to increase, the news on homelessness is not all grim. There are success stories every day all across the country. Individual parishes and communities continue work to help the homeless or prevent their neighbors from falling into homelessness in the first place.
And the federal government—which under recent administrations seemed to follow policies that ignored the problem or, worse, exacerbated it—has begun to channel more money into anti-home-lessness campaigns, almost doubling the $1 billion it spent in 1992.
A recent study commissioned by President Bill Clinton, "Priority Home," is remarkably frank about the scope and nature of the problem and includes a long-term plan for addressing it. That plan includes a further increase of the federal commitment.
If the plan is adopted, the federal government would spend almost $2.2 billion to combat homelessness in 1995. It remains to be seen, however, if such a plan can be funded in the more conservative Congress this year.
WHILE RISING HOMELESSNESS during a period of rising employment probably seems like a contradiction to most folks, it's probably not hard for people working in the service industry to understand.
Employment may be up, but so is poverty. Service-industry wages remain dangerously low. In Telluride, Colorado, for instance—where the famous and the fashionable fly in from across the country—Time magazine reports that the waiters, servants, and landscapers who do the work in the community can't afford to rent apartments there because of Telluride's booming real-estate market. In Telluride and other resort towns, Third World tent cities are rising up to "house" these working poor.
The new backlash
ANOTHER CONTRIBUTING FACTOR to the endurance of homelessness has been America's recent get-tough-on-the-poor politics.
Talk of welfare reform probably doesn't interest the thousands of people across the country who have already lost their meager support checks as many states curtailed their General Assistance (GA) programs. Since 1990, 22 of the only 28 states that even offered GA in the first place have cut back or eliminated the supplemental-aid program.
Such cuts often pull away the final thread of aid that keeps people from slipping out of their SROs (single-room occupancy hotels) and into homelessness.
"There's been a real backlash against the homeless," says Fred Karnas of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
"A whole new array of laws have been set up to force people out of the downtowns while doing little to deal with the root causes of the problem."
PUBLIC PLACES—LIBRARIES, TRAIN AND BUS STATIONS, government buildings, and malls—are increasingly being declared off limits to the homeless. Previously unenforced vagrancy, loitering, and panhandling ordinances have been revived or voted in where they didn't exist.
It seems that more and more states and cities are deciding that if they can't beat homelessness, they can at least keep it out of sight.
Advocates are concerned that county jails are becoming the shelter of choice for city governments, while police officers are becoming the often reluctant enforcers of provisions reflecting the public's fear and disdain of the homeless.
In an era of tax-cut rhetoric and fiscal restraints, cities "don't have the resources to build houses or provide facilities for the homeless" says Karnas.
"So they say, 'Let's use what we do have. We'll get the police, and we'll at least clean up the downtown and make it look good.' What you end up with is a giant game of musical chairs."
APART FROM THE BACKLASH Karnas describes, there is also a growing exhaustion and frustration of the public and the press with an issue that has come to seem intractable.
"It's more difficult today to get the kind of media attention we had in the days when the problem was being defined. It's old hat now," says Les Brown of Chicago's Coalition for the Homeless.
"Now we have to think: 'What's the hook here?' How can we get the media interested [in covering homeless issues or events by homeless advocates]? We've all had to become rather creative in that regard."
Though Brown worries about the public's seeming acceptance of homelessness, he doesn't find it all that hard to understand.
"There's no question that homelessness is still increasing. The economy hasn't improved for most of the people we're concerned about. People are still getting thrown out of their homes; the shelters are all full, and they're turning people away like crazy.
"We're making incremental changes, but we're not able to tackle the larger numbers. . . . There has been less interest in this now than there has been over the years, but it's not that people don't care. They're probably just frustrated.
"They don't see anything substantial happening. There are still people on the street, and there's a feeling that there's nothing else to do at this time except move on to something else."
What works, and what doesn't
BUT PERHAPS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT CHANGE occurring in homelessness as a social phenomenon is not happening among the homeless themselves but among the men and women across the country who have made it their mission to help the homeless.
There is a tremendous soul-searching being undertaken by these advocates and service providers—many of whom believed when they began their work that this particular social ill would not become a problem they would end up dedicating their professional lives to.
"When this started, we thought we were dealing with an emergency situation and that the system would eventually catch up to it," says Karnas.
"That didn't happen."
But because the initial impulse of people who responded to this emerging dilemma was simply to get homeless people a place to spend the night, early efforts focused on shelter—whether that meant shelter for a night, a week, or a month—with little attention paid to the underlying social or personal dynamics that put a person or family on the streets.
"Shelters tend to mask the problem," says Karnas, "not deal with it."
IT WASN'T LONG BEFORE MOST SERVICE PROVIDERS realized the futility of this approach and began to branch out into providing a variety of support services.
Advocates, meanwhile, who first seemed to do nothing more than agitate for more shelter beds, began to realize that pushing a city or state to build new shelters was an empty victory at best.
There's more focus now on prevention. "While there's still clearly a need for temporary shelters," Brown says, "we're putting our limited resources into jobs and housing issues.
"It's much more difficult to get people back into the system than to develop strategies to keep them from falling out in the first place, and it's much more humane—clearly, it's more cost effective."
Brown's coalition has enjoyed some recent victories in Chicago. The city has committed itself to an additional $205 million for affordable housing over the next five years. But perhaps more important, city and state officials have agreed to more reasonable definitions of "affordable."
IN THE PAST, TOO OFTEN THE TERM was applied to housing units whose cost was well beyond the reach of the working poor, the people most in danger of slipping into homelessness in the first place.
Another change—one that has fueled the growth of longer-term treatment for people who are homeless—is the realization that most homeless face a complexity of problems. Finding a new job or even a new apartment isn't going to keep them off the streets for long.
"They usually have many problems, and they all have to be fixed at the same time," says Michael Teague of Los Angeles' Union Rescue Mission. "Fixing one is not going to fix all the others." Union Rescue is only one of hundreds of one-time emergency shelters that have evolved into large-scale, multiservice efforts. Teague estimates that as many as 15,000 homeless can be found in downtown Los Angeles.
"You'd think you were in a developing country....Homelessness here in Los Angeles is a bit more [emotionally] devastating than it is in the rest of the country," he believes. "People come here looking for Hollywood, looking for fame."
HIS OWN THINKING ON THE PROBLEM has come full-circle since he first began working with homeless people 14 years ago. When he started, like most of his co-workers in an evangelical outreach program, he saw the relapse and failure among many homeless people as resulting from a lack of faith.
"I thought all you needed was Jesus Christ and the Bible. We called it a faith issue and never really addressed the chemical or physiological side."
When even a homeless person's strong faith didn't seem to work, Teague opted to try a program that was more service oriented and "that was almost apologetic about our Christian faith." That one didn't seem to succeed much better, he says.
Now he's come to believe that few efforts can work without incorporating a faith element into a strong retraining and substance-abuse recovery program.
"Now we're trying to find the balance.... Today, we're a bit more knowledgeable about chemical addiction and destructive behavior."
TEAGUE PUTS A LARGE SHARE OF THE BLAME for the homeless problem on the public-welfare system that was intended to help poor people.
On a practical level, he thinks public aid allows some parents to maintain their drug habits even after they become homeless. But he also worries about what public welfare has taught its recipients—or, more to the point, not taught them.
Teague says many of the homeless who get enrolled in his transitional-living program lack even basic employability and parenting skills. Union Rescue, as a result, has to start virtually from scratch in training before its clients are even remotely ready to begin to find their way out of homelessness.
"These are people who've never seen it modeled; never seen their parents getting up and going to work." He says that in some ways "it's easy to teach them to get off drugs and alcohol. But what do you do with them when they're clean and sober?
"Many of these guys are 30 or 32 years old, and they're illiterate. It's hard to do any retraining when they can't read."
The "Great Enabler"?
"I DON'T THINK I'LL EVER BE OUT OF A JOB," Teague says. "What bothers me most is the people who get stuck in the system. Nine years ago I met a homeless guy who became my street tutor. He taught me how to get by on the street, how to deal with the street people.
"I met him downtown yesterday. Nine years later, and he's still homeless today. That is so frustrating to me."
Teague fears that some homeless service agencies could be perpetuating the very problem they ostensibly mean to resolve. He calls them "codependent service providers."
He wonders if some homeless people learn just what they need to learn to navigate within the service community—not within the larger community they're supposed to be rejoining. It could be that some providers take care of too many needs and never press the homeless to solve their own problems. But he admits it's difficult to find the right balance.
"You can't treat these problems in isolation from one another. They need intense help early on plus goal setting and as much independence as possible.
"We set goals, and we make them accountable to those goals, and then we slowly move them out. We want the person to live independently of the Mission but dependent on Jesus Christ."
AUSTIN, TEXAS' FATHER JAMES EVANS puts the problem succinctly. Speaking about attempts to help the people he calls the "ultra-hardcore homeless"—those with substance abuse who have been living on the streets for years—he says he sometimes has to wonder: "My God! Am I the 'Great Enabler'?"
Della Mitchell, the lead organizer for Chicago's Women's Empowerment Project (see sidebar at left), is less certain about applying the codependency/addiction model to homeless people and service providers.
"I don't think shelters are 'enabling,' no. Most of them are so bad people just want to get out of them....I do worry sometimes that homelessness is becoming an industry, a business. Some people might be thinking: 'If I end homelessness, I'll be out of a job.'
"I think that homeless people must be involved with the decisions that affect their lives. I don't think many of them feel satisfied with the way things are, they just feel trapped."
WHILE GOOD PEOPLE LIKE MITCHELL AND TEAGUE and Evans worry over how their roles should evolve to face this continuing problem, that matter is probably far from the minds of the people they are trying to help. Like Rochelle, their concerns focus on their children, their future, and getting through another day.
It is on one of Mitchell's regular organizing visits to the Pilsen Inn that Rochelle hears about the Women's Empowerment Project. Speaking before a small group of women from the shelter, Mitchell says, "We're not here to fix you, because we think you'll be much better at that than we could be.
"Sometimes we go into the shelters and the women are just sitting there watching TV. That doesn't say you're committed. Our goal is to motivate you. Help us help you get back on your feet. You can make it happen, whatever your situations are."
Rochelle is curious about how the project can help her. She lingers at the meeting, asking Mitchell where she has to go to get involved.
She seems energized by the potential it holds out. She also seems to be the kind of person who can explore that potential—far from the image some may have of a homeless person.
"In some ways [being homeless] has made me stronger," she says.
"The way I was brought up, the man was in charge. He did the work, he paid the bills—and I was satisfied with that. I'm not anymore.
"Since I became homeless, I've accomplished things I never thought I'd be able to do before. I have ambitions for myself that I never had before. I never thought I'd get a GED, but I did; and now I want to aim higher. I'd like to continue my education and get something better for myself."
ROCHELLE KNOWS SHE FACES A LOT of obstacles before she reaches that something better, not the least of which is finding the day care for her kids that would allow her to pursue it. But perhaps the greatest obstacle she'll have to overcome are the attitudes of other people.
"Someone once said to me that people become homeless because they're irresponsible. She insinuated that there was some instability there that made people become homeless."
Rochelle shakes her head. "But people shouldn't generalize about it; you can't always control your circumstances."
Rochelle and several of the other mothers at the shelter agree to meet Mitchell later in the week to start their work with the empowerment project.
It could be that today they are at the end of one road and the beginning of another—one away from crowded shelters, crumbling marriages, bad relationships, or substance abuse and onto another toward self-respect and control of their own lives, and, most important of all for now, a place to call a home.—END
© 1997 by Claretian Publications