Paths To Homelessness

Extreme Poverty And The Urban Housing Crisis

Doug A Timmer, D. Stanley Eitzen, Kathryn D. Talley, D Stanley Eitzen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000312812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The major theme in this book is that people are homeless because of structural arrangements and trends that result in extreme impoverishment and a shortage of affordable housing in U.S. cities. It explains the economic and historical causes of homelessness with accounts of individuals and families.

PART ONE
Overview

1
Understanding Homelessness: Industrial and Urban Decline

The homeless are the most visible of America's social problems. Homeless people are found everywhere: in cities, small towns, suburbs, and rural areas. They are on the evening news, especially when it is very cold and during the winter holidays. We see them huddled in frigid temperatures on steam grates. We encounter them as they beg for handouts along the sidewalks in front of the trendiest stores as well as in the alleys of the most run-down neighborhoods. We cannot escape them as they seek refuge in church doorways, subway terminals, libraries, parks, and stores. They are everywhere and their numbers are increasing.

The homeless are the poorest of the poor. Like other poor people, the homeless receive inadequate or no medical care, tend to be malnourished, experience discrimination, and are the objects of scorn and condescension by those more advantaged. But the poverty of the homeless is extreme. They are homeless because their economic resources are exhausted. They have no personal safety net and they have escaped the one supposedly supplied by society. Finding food and shelter are troubles every day. And, most notably, the homeless are much more visible than other poor people. Whether they sleep in the streets or in shelters, they are quickly and easily identified as social pariahs.

Homelessness is not just a matter of social class. Race is also a crucial determinant, since people of color are disproportionately among the very poor. For example, in 1991, 11.3 percent of whites were below the poverty line compared to 28.7 percent of Latinos and 32.7 percent of African Americans. If we look at those at half the poverty rate or lower, 3.9 percent of whites were in this extreme category of poverty compared to 9.9 percent of Latinos and 15.8 percent of African Americans (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1992:17-19). Within these impersonal statistics are institutional racism, which disadvantages racial minorities through residential segregation patterns, job discrimination, and inferior education, and the personal tragedies and indignities resulting from discrimination that disadvantages people of color.

Although homelessness is found throughout American society, it is particularly an urban phenomenon. Homelessness is especially urban because the cities are the endpoint of industrial and urban decline. The government's data for 1991 show that 43 percent of the nation's poor were found inside central cities (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1992:1). Homelessness in the United States is predominantly a problem of the inner cities because the poor there are especially vulnerable to the structural forces that lead to unemployment, layoffs, and plant closings. The poor in the inner cities are also relatively defenseless against the problems endemic to poverty because the cities are generally financially unable to provide a sufficient safety net to meet their needs. Finally, the poor in the cities find special difficulty in finding affordable housing because of high costs and ever fewer available units. This lack of housing supply for the poor is the primary reason, as we will document throughout this book, for the rapid rise in the homeless population in U.S. cities since the middle 1970s.

How are we to understand the phenomenon of homelessness? The most commonly used explanation focuses on the faults of those individuals who are homeless. This type of explanation is based on the ideology that opportunities for economic advancement are readily available for those willing to try. In this view, individuals are personally responsible for their successes or failures. Thus, homeless persons are to blame for their deprivation because of their drinking habits, their immorality, their mental instability, their illiteracy, or their lack of purpose and initiative. In other words, the homeless are homeless because they are drunk, unstable, or lazy. The problem with this approach is that it blames the victim and ignores the powerful structural forces that push many people into difficult situations beyond their control.

If the individualistic approach is correct, then the proportion of homeless should be about the same in all large cities of the world. Personal irresponsibility certainly occurs everywhere. If that is the reason for homelessness then there should be about the same proportion of homeless in Tampa as in Toronto or in Chicago as compared to Copenhagen. Since this is not the case, socioeconomic factors must account for the differences. Elliot Liebow argues (and we agree) that "the only things that separate people who have a home from those who do not are money and social support: Homeless people are homeless because they cannot afford a home, and their friends and family can't, or won't, help them out. I don't want to overlook the differences among us but I don't think they're as important as the samenesses in us" (quoted in Coughlin 1993:A8).

The structural approach focuses on factors such as the shortage of low-income housing, the impact of changing technology on work, the globalization of the economy, and the dual labor market that dooms certain kinds of workers to economic marginality. The only problem with the structural approach to homelessness is that whereas it has great explanatory power, by itself it does not capture the human suffering involved.

A third type of explanatory scheme, the "politics of compassion," prevails among contemporary social scientists (for a critique of this approach, see Hoch and Slayton 1989). In this view, the "old" homeless (i.e., the homeless prior to the middle 1970s) are characterized as people whose flawed personal characteristics doomed them to homelessness. The "new" homeless, in sharp contrast, are portrayed as victims—victims of economic dislocation, bad marriages, the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, physical handicaps, and the like. As victims, the new homeless are seen as deserving of society's help. There are two fundamental problems with this approach, as Hoch and Slayton (1989) have argued. First, it overlooks the common economic and class origins of the old and new homeless. Second, the "politics of compassion" view leads to interventions by various professional interests, both public and private, to provide specialized care for the different "types" of homeless persons (e.g., single mothers with children, battered women, and the mentally ill). Although such interventions are surely needed in some cases, this approach has the negative consequence of leading toward permanent dependence on professional care and shelter for all of the homeless. In Hoch and Slayton's words:

Appropriate professional skills and organizational services are matched with the need of a segment of the homeless. This need becomes the social problem which these specialized caretakers can satisfy. And as the needs of various groups of homeless increasingly justify specialized treatment, those treating the homeless soon perceive this need as the reason for homelessness itself.... Public service providers and professional caretakers have ... promoted a politics of compassion in their efforts to secure the development and expansion of specialized shelters and services for the homeless.... These efforts are not only rapidly expanding the number of... dormitories for the poor but are legitimizing their institutional value as a solution to the problem of homelessness. (Hoch and Slayton 1989:5)

In this way, the "politics of compassion" fails to address the structural sources of homelessness in extreme poverty and in industrial and urban decline. The strategy for understanding the homeless employed in this book provides antidotes to the problems inherent in each of these approaches. Five themes guide our inquiry:

1. Homelessness in the United States is especially an urban phenomenon. It is not a special social problem but rather the result of industrial and urban decline. The homeless are not a "special" group of people with "special" problems. Homelessness is simply the endpoint, the "logical" outcome for part of the population—the extremely poor—under conditions of industrial and urban decay. Solutions to homelessness, then, must address this urban and industrial decline.

2. The homeless are extremely poor, the poorest of the poor. The number of people living in extreme poverty, defined as two-thirds or less of the official poverty line, has doubled since 1970. The homeless come from this group, those with the least income and the fewest basic necessities (see Rossi 1989).

3. People of color are overrepresented among the poorest of the poor and race is an important factor in the genesis of urban homelessness. Probably the single best estimate of the racial composition of the homeless population in the United States found it to be about 45 percent white, 40 percent African American, 10 percent Latino, 2 percent Native American, and 1 percent Asian American. This compares to a national population that is approximately 12 percent African American, 7 percent Latino, 0.5 percent Native American, and 3 percent Asian American. Most studies done before the mid-1970s found the homeless to be predominantly white. This suggests an important change during the 1980s. The current overrepresentation of people of color among both the homeless and the larger poverty populations indicates persistent racial discrimination in the job and housing markets as factors contributing to homelessness (Wright 1989).

4. Homeless people are not, for the most part, people disabled by drugs, mental disease, or physical affliction but rather are people negatively affected by socioeconomic trends and forces. The homeless are not deficient and defective; they are resilient and resourceful.

5. The approach will be explicitly structural, not cultural. Just as there is no "culture of poverty" that makes and keeps people poor, there is no "culture of homelessness" that makes and keeps people homeless. Just as there is no urban underclass with different and distinct values and behavior that traps them in inner-city poverty, homeless persons do not hold values or behave in ways different from the housed population that are responsible for their situation (see Reed 1992; Inniss and Feagin 1989). Rather, whatever "different" values, behaviors, and routines the homeless may develop are a response to their homeless circumstances (see Snow and Anderson 1993).

Our approach to studying homelessness begins with ethnography. This, unfortunately (from our point of view), makes our research unique. A recent review of the explosion of literature on homelessness during the 1980s found that little of it actually involved observing and talking with homeless persons on the streets and in shelters. If there was contact with homeless people, it was usually only to complete a quick survey or questionnaire. Little ongoing field observation or in-depth interviewing has been done. Instead, sociologists David Snow and Leon Anderson (1993) found, nearly all of the existent research used survey research techniques in which homeless caretakers and service providers, rather than the homeless themselves, were asked for information about the demographics or disabilities of homeless people. We believe that this is fraught with the danger of producing what ethnographer Clifford Geertz (1983) has called "experience-distant" representations and understandings of homelessness. The ethnographic approach, in contrast, provides more "experience-near" representations and understandings. In this regard, we see our study as having more in common with the few notable exceptions to the main homelessness research thrust over the past decade, exceptions such as Kozol's Rachel and Her Children (1988), Glasser's More Than Bread (1988), Snow and Anderson's Down on Their Luck (1993), and Liebow's Tell Them Who I Am (1993).

In spring 1986, we began in-depth interviewing of homeless persons and collected their life stories, including their accounts of the circumstances that led to their homelessness. This interviewing was done in Tampa, Denver, and Chicago. It took place in parks, on downtown streets, in abandoned houses, in neighborhood restaurants, and waiting in soup lines. Altogether about twenty single men were interviewed; about half were black and half were white, and they lived on the streets without shelter.

Later, we moved on to homeless shelters. Between the summers of 1986 and 1988, we interviewed another twenty people, who lived in two different shelters. The interviewing took place in a shelter for homeless women and their children on the South Side of Chicago and in a shelter for families near downtown Tampa. In the Chicago shelter nearly all of the residents were black; in Tampa most were white but there were some blacks and a few Latinos.

The interviews are best characterized as semi-structured and open-ended. Most were tape recorded with the remainder written as close as possible to verbatim after the interview. The interviews ranged in length from two to five hours; some were done in two or three separate sittings. All of the interviews were done in the context of longer-term participant observation and were not undertaken until we had established a significant degree of familiarity and rapport with those who were interviewed, both on the street and in the shelters. We believe this provided a more than adequate "check" on the truthfulness of those who told us their stories.

Thus, to counter the impersonality of the structural approach, we examined intensely, through in-depth interviews, the lives of homeless persons and families. These personal accounts reveal the isolation these persons feel as social outcasts. After all, these persons are, in the words of Patricia Cayo Sexton: "cast off, degraded, uprooted, excluded from rewarding work—by other classes, by economic policies, and by a value system that cherishes individual achievement, despises individual failure, and is profoundly suspicious of misfits" (Sexton 1983:79). We learn from the words of the homeless how they cope on a day-to-day basis with deprivation, degradation, and denial. They inform us of the extent to which cooperation and victimization prevail among and between the homeless. These glimpses into the lives of the homeless reveal that the homeless are not, for the most part, disabled by habitual drunkenness or by mental instability. To the contrary, these people are especially resilient and resourceful. Conversations with homeless persons also help us understand the degree of effectiveness of private charitable efforts and public agencies in meeting their needs. We see that the homeless are not a "special" group that requires a special solution. Rather, we see that the answer lies in policies that address urban and industrial decline in the United States.

The tendency to blame the homeless for their plight is overcome in two ways. Chapter 2 provides the context for the personal accounts of homelessness by addressing the structural sources of the problem. Some examples of these sources are (1) public and private policies that have caused a shortage of low- and moderate-income housing in American cities, (2) economic transformations such as deindustrialization, and (3) various governmental efforts to dismantle the American welfare state.

The second strategy to overcome the inclination to blame the victim is the judicious selection of homeless persons included in this book. Each homeless individual or family described here was included to illustrate a particular path to homelessness. Their personal accounts will show how individuals are affected, sometimes dramatically, by impersonal social and economic forces. In effect, we employ C. Wright Mills's "sociological imagination" (1959) to understand the private troubles of the homeless as public issues. This approach emphasizes how homeless persons are trapped in a socioeconomic contradiction at a particular time in history. Thus, the personal accounts by homeless persons will go beyond the facts of the urban housing crisis, evictions, economic decline, plant closings, and the like to capture their human reality. We want to understand homelessness in human terms. This requires that we understand how individuals and families act and react to the powerful structural forces in which they find themselves. To accomplish this goal each chapter will examine a particular path to homelessness. There will be a general discussion of the particular population at risk (e.g., those unemployed because of deindustrialization) with interview data from an individual case to give the problem its human face. The second part of each chapter will focus on how individuals caught in this structural bind face an urban housing crisis leading to homelessness.

Our approach is what sociologist Michael Burawoy (1991) has described as "ethnography unbound"—ethnography freed from simple description and done, rather, in a Millsean way. We intend to find the links between biography and history, the personal and the political, based on the case at hand. Using the "extended case method," the concrete experience of homeless persons is connected to the historical and socioeconomic forces that condition and influence it.

Although the homeless deserve our compassion, we must overcome the tendency to view them as incapable of independent action. We must seek solutions to homelessness that recognize the structural roots of the problem and that meet the needs of those affected without making them dependent on shelters and professional caregivers. The final chapter summarizes what we have learned from the accounts of homeless people. The focus in that chapter is on the social policies that these different paths to homelessness indicate would do the most to diminish significantly the homelessness experienced by growing numbers of Americans. In short, we end with the social policy question of what to do about this vexing social problem. Understanding the socioeconomic sources of homelessness, along with the appreciation of how homeless persons are affected by these structural forces, leads us toward appropriate social policies and solutions.

2
The Root Causes of Homelessness in American Cities

The facts concerning poverty in the United States are grim. Data from 1991 reveal that 14.2 percent of the population (about 35.7 million Americans) were below the official poverty line (the data in this section are taken from U.S. Bureau of the Census 1992:vii-xviii). Over one-fifth of all children (21.8 percent) were poor. About one-third of all African Americans (32.7 percent) and almost three out of ten Hispanics (28.7 percent) were poor.

As bleak as these data are, they severely understate the actual magnitude of poverty. John Schwarz and Thomas Volgy, in their book The Forgotten Americans (1992), argue that the 1991 official poverty line would have been $21,600 for a family of four (instead of the $13,359 used by the government) if it had been determined as it was originally in the early 1960s. The first poverty line was calculated by determining the lowest cost for feeding a family of a given size at an acceptable nutrition level. Because it was assumed that one-third of an average family budget went for food, the food cost was multiplied by three to determine the official poverty line. Since then the official poverty line has been adjusted each year by the consumer price index (CPI) to acc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1 OVERVIEW
• PART 2 PATHS TO HOMELESSNESS
• PART 3 CONCLUSION
• References
• About the Book and Authors
• Index