The Homeless Person in Contemporary Society

Cameron Parsell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351381390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Pobreza en sociología

The homeless person is thought to be different. Whereas we get to determine our difference or sameness, the homeless person's difference is imposed upon them and assumed to be known because of their homelessness. Exclusion from housing – either a commodity that should be accessed from the market or social provision – signifies the homeless person's incapacities and failure to function in what are presented as unproblematic social systems.

Drawing on a program of research spanning ten years, this book provides an empirically grounded account of the lives and identities of people who are homeless. It illustrates that people with chronic experiences of homelessness have relatively predictable biographies characterised by exclusion, poverty, and trauma from early in life. Early experiences of exclusion continue to pervade the lives of people who are homeless in adulthood, yet they identify with family and normative values as a means of imaging aspirational futures.

1
The homeless person

Introduction

The scholarly literature on homelessness, and homeless people in particular, is vast. Bemoaning the relentless scrutiny of their demographics and disabilities, in the 1990s, Snow, Anderson, and Koegel (1994: 461) observed that “no social aggregation has been examined so intensely during the past decade as the homeless.” In the past twenty years, the literature has grown exponentially in line with the massive and impressive body of evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of housing first as a solution to homelessness (Padgett, Henwood, and Tsemberis 2016). Recognising the enormous body of literature globally, in this chapter, I selectively sketch research from Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom to demonstrate how people experiencing homelessness have been represented or how the homeless person has been made.

The characterisation of homeless people and the language used to describe them has changed considerably over the twentieth century and throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Despite the changes, the state or experience of homelessness is assumed to say something definitive about the identities and values of people who experience homelessness. First, homeless people are identified as a class or category of people. They are ascribed an identity based on what they lack. Even if they are found to avoid the so-called homeless identity, homelessness is the reference point by which people are defined. Second, the experience of homelessness is presented as changing people’s sense of self. Through the process of being homeless, people are assumed to take on a homeless identity. Third, people who are homeless are conscious of and actively avoid being categorised by their housing deprivation. On the one hand, scholars have demonstrated how people live and distance themselves from homelessness; on the other, some researchers depict favourable portrayals of homeless people distinct from their marginalisation to prosecute critiques of society.

Seasonal labour and frontier men

Nels Anderson’s (1923) study of homelessness in Chicago during the early 1920s represents a seminal piece of work on the early portrayals of homeless people. Although Anderson acknowledged high rates of disabilities and alcohol misuse, the homeless, or as he referred to them “hobos,” were char-acterised by their transience in search of seasonal employment. It was transience and the resultant life outside of family structures with the absence of women and children, not simply the lack of conventional housing, which exemplified the hobos’ life and indeed their difference from mainstream norms.

Transience and living outside of conventional married family structures generated concern; however, the hobo was also characterised favourably for living the American frontier dream (Kusmer 2002: 10). In contrast to latter characterisations, the hobo was not exclusively stigmatised but was also romanticised for achieving independence, political freedom, and individualism (Barak 1991: 14). Hopper (1991) suggests that the othering of the tramp lifestyle was driven by a desire to achieve distance from a mobile way of life that was not only familiar to many but also desirable. The othering of the homeless person as deviant thus sought to secure the boundaries of a normative way of living. Moreover, we can see from this romantic depiction of travelling the frontier a gendered notion of men freeing themselves from the domestic sphere (Wardhaugh 1999). Indeed, as shown in the following, the portrayal of homeless people up until the 1960s was of men.

Following the economic upheavals of the 1930s and the Great Depression, the seasonal labouring that many of the hobos relied upon dried up (Hopper 1990). Without access to employment, stigma and a characterisation of the homeless as problematic began to prevail. The hobo was seen as a group concentrated in so-called skid row areas of some cities in the United States. Skid row was defined by a concentration of low-cost accommodation, seasonal employment offices, public intoxication, and norms among its inhabitants that distinguished them from the mainstream.

Frank Gray (1931) and George Orwell (2013 [1933]) presented accounts of homelessness from their own experiences in Oxfordshire and London respectively. Gray drew attention to the tramp’s desire to live without scrutiny and control. According to Gray, a tramp preferred to live of his own volition, even if it meant living in workhouses in appalling conditions. Orwell showed how the tramps’ or hobos’ lives were characterised by begging, hunger, workhouses, prison, and forced movement around the streets of London. The homeless were seen as superfluous to society and not only cut off from resources but also, as a consequence, forced into celibacy and made to feel degraded (Orwell 2013 [1933]). Humphreys (1999: 114) cites an English government report from 1906 as describing the tramp as having “no object in life” and as “often verminous and always filthy.” Reflecting a broader debate at the time about the deserving and undeserving poor, in the early twentieth century in England, people were concerned with distinguishing between – and physically separating – the criminal classes of homeless and those who were deemed the respectable tramping class.

Despite the homeless being cast as a burden, criminal, and superfluous, at the beginning of the twentieth century in England, it was understood that the negative representations of the homeless – “always filthy” – could not be decoupled from the structural conditions that pervaded their lives. Government committees and both Orwell and Gray coupled their analyses of the derelict homeless man with clear descriptions of the unsanitary and inhuman workhouses and casual wards in which they were forced to live.

The problematic

In the United States, improved economic conditions and welfare availability following World War II saw many people leave skid row (Stuart 2016). Those who remained were primarily older men with chronic illnesses, disabilities, and addictions. Skid row became synonymous with the local inhabitants: people who could no longer contribute to society (Bahr 1973; Bahr and Caplow 1974; Blumberg, Shipley, and Shandler 1973; Bogue 1963; Wallace 1965). Rather than the seasonal labourer or even the frontier traveller, Hopper (1990) shows that by the 1960s and 1970s, homeless people were depicted as disreputable and dangerous; they went from tramps and hobos to bums and derelicts.

The negative portrayals of homeless people had a spatial and collective tone. Scholars reported that, concentrated in skid row areas of large American cities, the homeless were socially disaffiliated from the structures, norms, and responsibilities of mainstream society. From this assumption, they argued that skid row represented a place where the homeless person became reaffiliated among the homeless subculture (Bahr and Caplow 1974; Caplow, Bahr, and Sternberg 1968; Caplow 1970; Wallace 1965). Fundamental to this social isolation and disaffiliation was the prevailing depiction of people experiencing homelessness as “subjectless agents” (Barak 1991: 24). The identities, values, and day-to-day behaviours of homeless people were assumed to be known based on their reaffiliation within the homeless subculture.

Not only were the negative portrayals of the people and day-to-day lives on skid row ill-informed by the inhabitants, but the term skid row and all the negative associated connotations were in tension with the experiences of those who lived there (Kusmer 2002). Referring to research from New York, Hopper (1991: 108) said that homeless people have been cast as grotesque and thus the social problem of homelessness has been reduced to “the homeless poor themselves.” They were characterised as feckless, lazy, and hence “undeserving of sympathy and aid” (Kyle 2005: 42).

Reflecting the state’s increased role in welfare, slum clearances, and housing provision, especially building houses for returned service personnel after the world wars (Anderson 2004), skid row areas have not been a dominant feature in the United Kingdom. Indeed, in the years immediately following World War II, homelessness was not seen as a significant social issue (Pleace and Quilgars 2003). In 1969, the Minister of State for Health and Social Security asserted as nonsense that homelessness was a large problem in England and Wales (cited in Watson and Austerberry 1986). The asserted small numbers of people who experienced homelessness throughout the mid-twentieth Century in the United Kingdom, however, were depicted as the ill and dependent (Pleace 1998).

Moreover, for the first half of the twentieth century in both England and the United States, the homeless person was a homeless man. As Watson and Austerberry (1986) observe, however, this characterisation was more about public perception than it was about the experience of housing need. O’Sullivan (2016) highlighted the large numbers of women who experienced homelessness in England in the early twentieth century. He observed, however, that their homelessness was concealed – and thus they did not form part of the caricature of homelessness – because they used services that were not formally defined as homelessness services. Watson and Austerberry (1986) show a concerted feminist movement advocating for housing and shelter accommodation for women who were homeless, particularly women who had moved to London because of industrialism. Although reports of prostitution are evident, the homeless women were less stigma-tised than men; the women were not characterised as wandering vagrants. The literature identifying homeless women at the time portray them as stable workers in need of accommodation.

The pejorative characterisation of homeless people as the sick and dependent did not go unchallenged. The rise of the modern welfare state, in both the United States and United Kingdom, led to a rejection of the individualised focuses on bums and derelicts and instead highlighted the structural conditions that created homelessness (Stuart 2016). Humphreys (1999: 8) says that after the Second World War, vagrants benefited from the “softer appellation of being homeless.” By the 1970s, Watson and Austerberry (1986) demonstrate, feminists articulated strong structural challenges to the pathologised representations of homeless people dominant in the 1960s. Indeed, and as shown, the dominant and stigmatised ideas of the problematic single homeless person have been challenged by competing pictures through the first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, following efforts to portray homeless people more positively in the decades following the establishment of the modern welfare state, by the 1980s, individualism had reasserted itself, and people experiencing homeless were more often represented negatively and as the essence of their poverty (Humphreys 1999).

Consistent with portrayals from the United Kingdom of homeless people as ill and dependent, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Australian literature emphasised people’s individual pathologies but also tended to emphasise individual deficiencies for which people ought not be held accountable. For Jordan (1965), homeless people were childish with inadequate personalities. Linsell similarly described homeless people [men] as requiring a

[f]irm, benevolent father figure to guard them from the pitfalls of their own limited intelligence. To set and pursue goals, even the elementary ones of employment, good food and comfortable lodgings, seems beyond them.

Linsell (1962: 9)

In Australia, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, people experiencing homelessness were not only described as derelicts, bums, and drukens (Jordan 1965; Linsell 1962), or even ‘stiffs’ (de Hoog 1972), but these attributes were presented to explain their homelessness. Moreover, they were portrayed as unable to improve their lives. Homelessness was a result of individual deficiencies, but individuals should not be held entirely responsible for their deficiencies. Linsell (1962) suggested that even when alcohol misuse was linked to homelessness, people could not be blamed for drinking to deal with such an unpleasant experience.

Moving the responsibility further away from the individual, Linsell also suggested that the homeless had been emotionally deprived at birth and that their mothers contributed to their alcoholism by encouraging dependency (1962: 9). Towers (1974: 23) described people who were homeless as emotionally immature, disliking responsibility, which in turn led her to conclude that they required a woman they could relate to “in the role of substitute mother.” Because of their purported failings, people required a mother figure, in the form of a professional service provider, because homeless people were unable to form social relationships that relied on reciprocity (Towers 1974).

Jordan did not go so far as to link individuals’ homelessness to their mothers’ problematic parenting. He did, however, portray the ‘homeless’ as people who have overwhelmingly “suffered during childhood from deprivation and disturbance” (Jordan 1965: 29).

Consistent with the notion of disaffiliation from the United States, in Australia, people who were homeless were also identified through their problematic social relationships. They were unable to give or receive love (Linsell 1962), and it was this inability to form intimate relationships that explained their social isolation (Jordan 1965). Stemming from this isolation from ‘mainstream’ society, they engaged in “unstable” (Jordan 1965: 28–29) and “shallow” (Linsell 1962: 9) relationships with each other.

The existence of these relationships, however, was not presented as constituting a homeless social identity or meaningful collective – they were not portrayed as becoming re-affiliated. Jordan (1965) believed that the homeless never identified themselves with a homeless group. From an ethnographic study in Sydney, de Hoog (1972) found that the lives of people experiencing homelessness were boring, monotonous, and structured around unemployment offices, handout shops, clinics, and alcohol consumption. De Hoog (1972) found that people who were homeless in Sydney did reluctantly interact to consume alcohol together, but that was only because isolation and boredom were worse. People described real friendships among others who were homeless as impossible, and instead of a collective identity or subculture, people lived in “collective isolation” (de Hoog 1972: 15).

Homelessness as transforming the self

The focus on disabilities, social isolation, or even sub-sections within the homeless population continued to convey people who were homeless as inherently different to the non-homeless. Homelessness was presented as if it were a ...