A Nation In Denial

The Truth About Homelessness

Alice S. Baum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367166021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429722622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents a comprehensive review of the scientific evidence that up to 85 percent of all homeless adults suffer the ravages of substance abuse and mental illness, resulting in the social isolation that has been the hallmark of homelessness in the United States since colonial days..

Part One
Homelessness Today

1
Who Are the Homeless?

The term "homeless" is actually a catch word, a misnomer that focuses our attention on only one aspect of the individual's plight: his lack of residence or housing. In reality, the homeless often have no job, no function, no role within the community; they generally have few if any social supports. They are jobless, penniless, functionless, and supportless as well as homeless.¹

Every day, in cities and towns across the country, men and women dressed in rags walk the streets aimlessly, oftentimes talking to visions, and frequently begging for money. They are often carrying plastic bags or pushing shopping carts filled with their worldly possessions. Sometimes they curl up on a bench or in a doorway under filthy blankets or tattered coats. If someone gives them money, they may respond with prayers of thanks and blessing; others continue to stare off into space, seemingly untouched by efforts to help.

These people are called the homeless, but they are obviously more than just people without homes. They are dirty and sometimes frail; when they talk to visions, they show the signs of mental illness or drug addiction, and the smell of alcohol that infuses their clothing reveals their drunkenness. But most people seem incapable of acknowledging what they see or of talking about what they know to be true. Reinforced by what they read in the newspapers and see on the nightly news, many people feel sorrow and sometimes pity; when they are accosted by panhandlers, some may feel anger or even fear; at worst, groups gather to celebrate the lonesome deaths of the least fortunate by holding candlelight services on heating grates, saying they "died with dignity." This is denial.

For more than a decade, America has experienced a love-hate relationship with the homeless. On the one hand, many people want to reach out and help these destitute and troubled men, women, and children; on the other, they are frustrated because, despite so many public and private efforts, nothing has eliminated or even decreased homelessness. To do so, the American public must start telling the truth, by no means an easy call to action. Many will continue to be overly cautious for fear of "blaming the victim" or "medicalizing the problem"; others will view the problems as too complex and the remedies as too expensive. Unless this nation proceeds with new clarity, however, homelessness will continue to be one of the great unsolved social problems of our time.

A necessary first step is to learn who the homeless are and what problems confront them. Unfortunately, media reports about homelessness are often not very specific, and therefore not very helpful. The academic and professional research community, however, has made a concerted effort to investigate the nature and causes of homelessness in the United States. This research literature offers reasonably consistent information about the homeless, despite the difficulties of studying a population that is by definition transient and frequently hard to interview or engage in conversation.² Most important, this literature provides the knowledge that is needed to develop realistic policies and programs that have some chance of addressing the problem.

The Many Faces of Homelessness

There is no single way of describing homeless individuals, even though the term "homelessness" suggests that there is a single defining characteristic, that is, being without a home. The homeless population includes single men, single women, and families, most of which are headed by a single parent, usually a woman. The homeless are white, African American, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American. They are refugees and aliens, parolees, runaway youth and children, Vietnam veterans and other traumatized individuals, a few elderly people, and former hippies and flower children. They live in cities, suburbs, and rural areas. They are alcoholics, drug addicts, and mentally ill persons; some suffer from a combination of all three of these problems, and many have other serious medical problems. Some are victims of domestic violence; others are victims of other people's alcohol and drug habits. Finally, some are homeless because of an immediate economic crisis or a disaster over which they have no control, such as the death of a loved one. Anna, for example, became homeless when someone close to her died, but her situation was also complicated by other problems.

Anna became homeless because her pimp was murdered. While he lived, she wore furs and rode ina Cadillac; when he died, all she had left were the memories, scars, and her heroin addiction. She began her new life on the streets, graduated to a barracks shelter for women, and impressed people enough to be accepted into a "drug-free" transitional night shelter. Anna was required to obtain counseling and medication (for her mental illness) at a Washington, D.C., public mental health clinic. On the strong recommendation from the shelter, we hired her to work at our center.

When we first met Anna, she was struggling to maintain her appearance of stability. As she got to know us and understood that we worked with alcoholics and drug addicts without denying their addictions, she opened up and began to tell her story. At first, she told us that she was clean and trying hard to stay clean. Perhaps she was, but from what we could- tell, she had no support in trying to overcome her addiction. We saw pressure mounting as Anna was required to look for an affordable apartment, which she was to share with other women "graduating" from the shelter. She was terrified because she had no money for the rent deposit. The shelter had required her to establish an escrow account as soon as she had an income, but when she told shelter staff members tales about sick relatives and long-lost children whom she needed to see, she had been permitted to raid the account. As her stress mounted and her mood became more and more somber, we became convinced that she was using drugs; perhaps she had never stopped. Despite the limited resources for drug treatment, particularly for women, we attempted to collaborate with the shelter staff in helping Anna seek treatment; however, they had already decided that she had become too disruptive to remain at the shelter and had told her to leave. We hung in with her for another week, giving her just enough time to steal money from our office, and then we too had to fire her. A short while later, Anna was in jail. After her release, she found her way to another shelter.

During our last conversations with Anna she both said and acted as if she was trapped and very angry. She was angry because she had failed to "pull off" her new life—conning people into supporting her (enabling her) with shelter, food, and money so that she could continue to live with her heroin addiction. At the same time, she was angry that she had been unable to respond to the challenge of quitting her habit and untangling the web of lies, misery, and addiction that enveloped her.

The New Homeless

Many current reports focus on the changes in the homeless population and the differences between today's homeless and the traditional white male "skid row bum" of past years. By the standard of the old skid rows, it is true that today's homeless are younger; the average age of the homeless population is low to mid-thirties.³ Less than 5 percent are elderly, primarily because the homeless, particularly the substance-abusing homeless, die some twenty years earlier on average than the rest of us.⁴ Minorities are over-represented in today's homeless populations; nationally, slightly more than half of the homeless are members of minority groups.⁵ To avoid creating new stereotypes, however, it is important to remember that the actual racial composition of the homeless population in any one place reflects local and regional population trends—major metropolitan areas on the East Coast have high proportions of homeless African Americans; Minneapolis has many homeless Native Americans; in southwestern cities such as Los Angeles and Phoenix there are greater concentrations of Hispanics among the homeless; and in the Northwest, some cities report that most of their homeless are white. Finally, while homelessness occurs in rural and suburban areas, the rate of homelessness is substantially greater in cities.⁶

Despite the differences from the old skid row stereotype, the vast majority of America's contemporary homeless population continues to be single men.⁷ In the words of Howard M. Bahr, one of the leading historians on homelessness in America, "the 'new' homelessness is much like the old. Most homeless people are still multiproblem men."⁸

Mr, Ordway was only fifty years old, but he looked seventy-five. His face was lined, his hair was white, and his trembling hands were shriveled. He walked haltingly with the help of a cane and often stumbled as he came into the day center looking for food or, more likely, for money. In an effort to control his "budget," Mr. Ordway had agreed to turn over his monthly disability check to the day center so that his caseworker could pay his bills and ration his weekly allowance; but, needing money to buy vodka, he came in almost every day to ask for more money. He had a hacking cough that shook his body, making it hard for him to speak. Mr. Ordway's memory had long since ceased to serve him, and he was often unsure of just what day or year it was. He had no family that he could tell about, except for his mother; Mr. Ordway had not seen her for years but hoped that she prayed for him despite the trouble he said his drinking had caused her. The only friends he had were drinking buddies, many of whom deserted him when his cash ran out. No matter how hard the counselor tried, Mr. Ordway refused to get the help he needed—help to stop drinking, help to relieve the pain in his legs, help to stay alive—even though he was a veteran and could easily have been admitted to the local VA hospital. Nothing much mattered to him anymore; as long as he could get a bottle every day and keep from freezing in the winter, he wanted to continue to exist in his own way. Since he felt he had lost everything already, he had nothing more to lose.

Approximately one-third of single homeless men are veterans, and veterans, particularly those of the Vietnam War, are more likely to be seriously troubled by substance abuse problems and psychiatric or trauma disorders than other homeless men.⁹

One of the most confounding issues in discussing the composition of the homeless population is whether to report the number of homeless individuals or the number of homeless household units; there is no generally accepted standard, and the choice is often motivated by the desire to emphasize the size of one or another portion of the homeless population, usually families. Some studies refer to all individuals—counting each adult and every child. Others refer to homeless households—counting children accompanied by at least one adult as one household. The way these numbers are reported affects our understanding of who the homeless are.

Using the household measure, 90 percent of all homeless households are single unattached adults; 81 percent of the single adults are men and 19 percent are women.¹⁰ These statistics ignore important nuances in the actual composition of the homeless population; many women who are counted as single are actually mothers who have lost their children to the foster care system or have left them with relatives or friends.¹¹ The remaining 10 percent of homeless households across the country are families—adults accompanied by young children.¹² Although these data seem inconsistent with reports that homeless families make up almost a third of the total homeless population, in fact, the difference depends on how family members are counted. When counting every individual, family members represent 23 percent of the total of all homeless people; 8 percent are adults and 15 percent are children.¹³ To further confuse the issue, a number of good local studies report substantially higher numbers of families than the national average,¹⁴ suggesting that when making policy or planning services, it is important to take local and regional variations into consideration. These studies also suggest that generalizations about the homeless based on information derived from a single location must be made with great care. This is a caution that many popular accounts of the homeless fail to heed. For example, New York City has an exceptionally high proportion of families among its homeless compared to the rest of the country;¹⁵ it would be a mistake for someone familiar with New York's homeless population to assume that families were as large a part of the homeless population elsewhere.

Families, Runaways, and Homeless Youth

Perhaps the most troubling dynamic concerning homeless families occurs when the distinction between homeless families and homeless youth becomes confused. As Oregon's Tri-County Youth Services Consortium report suggested:

Homeless teen parent families are a unique population because they are both adult and child.... Teen parents most at risk of homelessness come from families of severe dysfunction. They share with their own parents histories of substance abuse, criminal involvement, unemployment, health and mental health problems, multiple domestic partners, domestic violence, overcrowded living quarters, and emotional/physical/sexual abuse.¹⁶

Research confirms that multigenerational domestic violence is a primary characteristic of homeless families; parents who have suffered abuse during their own childhoods tend to repeat familiar parenting styles, thus perpetuating the cycle of substance abuse and sexual and physical violence that often leads to homelessness, including homelessness among youth.¹⁷ Hard as it may be to accept, homeless youth often find homelessness and the violence of the streets a better alternative than their home situations. They are "running away: away from neglect, away from physical and sexual abuse, away from rigid or unstable families" (emphasis in original).¹⁸ Once on the streets, homeless youth turn to prostitution and crime to support themselves, and the vast majority abuse drugs and alcohol.¹⁹ Without help, these youngsters are likely to become the next generation of homeless adults.

Alienation and Disaffiliation

Despite the diversity within the homeless population, homeless people share an important and distinctive characteristic: They are almost totally alienated from people and society's helping institutions. We would like to believe that homeless people are "just like us, but have had a really bad break," but it isn't true. Substance abuse, mental illness, health problems, and even economic crises affect many people who are still able to function in jobs and maintain their housing. Most people, even the poorest in our society, have friends, family, and neighbors who can help in times of crisis; they belong to churches, unions, clubs, and have formal and informal associations with other groups. Migrant workers, for example, have no permanent residence, but they do have supportive relationships through work, family, and community, and even though their lives are often harsh and their living quarters marginal, they are not homeless. Homeless people, in contrast, lack social support systems, often because they have used them up by making too many demands on them or because their emotional problems make them fearful of close contact and enduring relationships with others. According to Howard Bahr, "Homelessness ... is a cond...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Homelessness Today
• Part II Homelessness and the American Social Experience
• Part III A More Reasoned Approach
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Authors
• Index