Changing the Paradigm of Homelessness

Yvonne Vissing, Diane Nilan, Christopher Hudson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429777103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Changing the Paradigm of Homelessness offers a comprehensive look at family housing distress related to the homelessness epidemic in the United States. This book explores the causes and consequences of this epidemic and proposes drastic changes in America's historically ill-fated approach to family homelessness. By describing this crisis in detail, the authors enlighten readers to the scope of this issue, describe those impacted by it, and outline ways to shift public policies and public perceptions. The authors interweave scholarly concepts with insights of those who are currently or previously homeless, and, in doing so, they show the importance of academic knowledge influencing policy decisions and the ways in which these influences impact the lives of real persons. This book, then, uses pedagogy, policy, and pragmatism to critique the United States' approach to family homelessness.

Part I
Background of Homelessness in the US

1 The Dilemma

In 1991, Gregg Barak, in his book Gimme Shelter, predicted homelessness would skyrocket unless we changed our housing and social policies. He advocated for a paradigm change that has obviously gone unheeded. He was correct – homelessness has grown as predictably as was obvious 30 years earlier. While few could argue he was wrong, systems continue to operate as they always have – which don’t prioritize the needs of families and especially of those who are down-and-out. Today the housing crisis in America is “a ticking time bomb that’s only going to get worse,” according to a Harvard University study (2018; Hobbes 2018). America can’t solve homelessness because we cling to limited policy ideas and quick fixes (Hobbes 2019).

Homelessness has long been a part of “the land of the free and home of the brave.” Today it is a normalized feature of US society (Da Costa Nunez 2017b). Homelessness has become an industry that has ensured a steady production of homeless people, as well as a plethora of disjointed social services that often pathologize individuals instead of housing them (Beck and Twiss 2018). Homelessness organizations don’t eradicate homelessness – they manage it in what is called the “homelessness industrial complex.” Entire networks of professions have been built around homelessness. While ostensibly here to help, they aren’t designed to actually eradicate it. If they did, they would also eliminate their jobs. Therefore, there is a structural dis-incentive to getting rid of homelessness. Causes of homelessness are social and systemic, and people end up without housing due to constrained forces over which they have virtually no control (MacKay-Tisbert 2016).

Such facts don’t seem to get in our way of refusing to let go of assumptions that belie the dominant paradigm – that there is really something fundamentally flawed about people who become homeless (Hoffer 1951). The word “homeless” evokes images of single adults, alcoholics, drug abusers, dirty, lazy, doesn’t have a job, doesn’t want to work, may be criminal, violent, mentally ill, unhealthy, bad teeth, inappropriate or outlandish behavior, uneducated, inarticulate, not trustworthy, has lice or disease they could spread to us, and sleeps on sidewalks or places they shouldn’t. Good-hearted people accept these stereotypes without question (Friedrich 2019).

We are regularly confronted by data, hard facts about the sorry state of the economy for the poor and middle classes (American Institutes for Research 2018, b), yet we tend to believe things aren’t really so bad. When we look at those who suffer, we may believe they had a hand in the creation of their own misery. Humans rely on biased sets of cognitive processes to arrive at a given conclusion or belief (Friesen et al. 2015); this tendency to cherry-pick and twist the facts to fit with our existing beliefs is known as motivated reasoning (Wier 2017). Some scholars think we are hard-wired to believe what we want to believe. People routinely use mental shortcuts to understand what happens around them; there are so many things occurring in the world simultaneously that we don’t make or take time to examine them. We use quick and largely unconscious rules of thumb to decide what to believe. People overestimate the frequency of an event when that event is more “available” in our memory – so if we see a news article about a homeless person being mentally ill, we tend to believe it even though most homeless people are not mentally ill. Sometimes we rely upon emotional reasoning to justify or defend a belief. We are more alert to information that justifies a position we already hold, a process called “confirmation bias” (Feldman 2017). It’s harder to know what facts are these days, since in the media and everyday conversation “the capacity to inject poison into the political bloodstream – in the form of lies and falsehoods, crazed conspiracy theories, smears and dehumanizing attacks – is unprecedented” (Wehner 2018).

A Huffington Post (Ruiz-Grossman 2018) article listing “5 things that people get wrong about homelessness” included the following:

1. It’s easier to look at people on the streets as the problem instead of a system that is broken.
2. It’s easier to think that people who are homeless are addicts instead of thinking that they might be like you and me.
3. It’s easier to think that people become homeless because they have substance problems or mental illness instead of blaming our poorly functioning systems for supporting people having a mental health or substance problem.
4. It’s easier to think if we gave people jobs they wouldn’t be homeless instead of looking at the fact that most homeless people work, at least part-time.
5. It’s easiest to think that homelessness is their fault instead of that they are good, decent, hard-working people who are more like us than different from us.

Blaming homeless people for their lot in life masks the role social structures play (Ryan 1971). It hides how criminal justice systems swallow up poor people, how healthcare systems underserve the poor and mentally ill, how housing markets don’t provide enough safe and affordable options. Framing homelessness as a personal pathology, rather than a social one, reinforces the legitimacy of the industry and places the blame for housing deprivation on the individual (MacKay-Tisbert 2016).

When you hear the word “homeless,” what doesn’t come to mind are people who are employed, clean, educated, dependable, honest, responsible, reliable nice people who go out of their way to help others, with families they work hard to take care of. These are people with hopes and dreams that routinely get crushed by the weight of poverty. They are the growing population of homeless people, the ones that we don’t see because in most ways they are like us.

There is the erroneous assumption that homeless people are lazy – if they would just get a job, they wouldn’t be homeless anymore. Many homeless people work but don’t earn enough to afford decent housing. People can work full-time and live with a partner who works full-time, but if they are making minimum wage, two full-time salaries aren’t sufficient to afford housing, food, transportation, and other necessities.

Homeless families provoke our fear and disdain; the working poor evokes our sympathy and sense of camaraderie. We shy away from homeless people, as if they are going to contaminate us. The invisible homelessness inspires the public to believe they aren’t really homeless. We tend to deny or downplay their financial distress because their reality is a little too close for comfort. Even saying that homeless people could be kind, loving, thoughtful, and hard-working seems to defy what we have come to believe is true. As long as we can mentally compartmentalize them to be sub-human and not-the-same-as-us, the more we can justify not caring about them or doing for them. Things switch in our brains when the distance between us and them disappears.

The down-and-out today include middle-class families and children of all ages. Families are a different category of homeless people than those seen in stereotypes. They aren’t likely to be visible, identifiable, or receive government assistance. This is partially because parents go out of their way to be independent, to care for their children and create as normal a life for them as possible. (Brown et al. 2018; Nunez and Sribnick 2013). Being defined as homeless may yield some benefits, but stigma accompanies that label, and every one of every age learns that being regarded as homeless is not a good thing. Homeless families and children are often omitted from official definitions and counts. By not helping people who are going through hard times (GTHT), a down-hill slide is almost inevitable when one-crisis-too-much becomes unbearable. Waiting until people have become destitute with no economic, social, or emotional resources to call upon help is a fool’s errand. Prevention always costs less and yields many more benefits (Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness 2012).

Targeting assistance to people who currently meet the definition of chronically homeless does nothing to prevent chronic homelessness from happening in the first place. While some of today’s chronically homeless adults are receiving supportive housing to end their homelessness, by relegating children and youth to the end of the queue in the nation’s plan to end homelessness, and failing to promote assistance that meets their unique needs, we ensure a continuous flow of homeless young people falling through the cracks, many to become “chronically homeless” themselves as the system continues to fail them over time (Duffield 2016).

The economic and personal tragedies we are creating by our homelessness policies are not in anyone’s best interests. Other options are available. There are a variety of different paradigms we could be following, alternative models, approaches, systems, and ways of contextualizing and addressing poverty and homelessness. It’s time to take a thoughtful, considered look at them. The paradigms that we highlight in this book are seeds to be planted, nurtured, to grow what would be good for us as individuals and for us as a society.

Let us get right to the point – how the nation is addressing homelessness isn’t working. Unless we change the course of action, it’s going to get much worse. This isn’t new news – those in the know have been predicting this for half a century. But what is new is that we’re going to highlight what is happening in the backrooms that the public never gets to see. What we are going to say is going to create controversy. Agencies that are dependent upon Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) money are afraid to speak about what isn’t working because they may see their funds dry up. When push comes to shove, none of us wants to be homeless. Workers protect their jobs and income streams because they know what can happen if they don’t. This isn’t fantasy – programs have closed or shifted their service focus to chronic homelessness rather than family homelessness; programs that focus on treating the destitute get more assistance than those trying to prevent people from going under. And the way those guidelines are constructed these days creates a very narrow road of possibilities that must be followed if to receive federal funding.

HUD-affiliated agencies and consultants publicly announce what a good job they are doing, how numbers of homeless people are going down, their programs are successful. Indeed, if they ceased to exist and there were no other options available, poor and homeless people would be up the creek without a paddle. Something is better than nothing. Instead of bucking the system, they play the game, follow the rules, and make others follow them too.

But behind closed doors, those working in the shelter-industrial complex are conflicted. They work hard and must believe in their mission to come to work each day and try to help people whose horrific stories can break one’s heart. But staff realize what recipients know all too well – how homeless people are treated and piecemeal services they receive are so far from being adequate that there is no way that things are going to get much better unless a miracle occurs.

HUD’s famous Continuum of Care model turns out to be a shell game, telling communities they can decide for themselves how they want to spend funding to help the homeless, but only programs scoring high on HUD’s funding rubric will get the money. On the surface, it appears communities have choice and free-will to design as needed. But in reality, only programs that adhere to HUD definitions and agendas will get funded. If agencies want to serve homeless people, they have to modify what they intend to do to meet official guidelines. While guidelines can be helpful to ensure that funding meets goals, one has to assess whether HUD’s goals for helping homeless children, youth, and families are high priority. We attest that they aren’t.

Nonprofit, charity, and religious organizations pose a conundrum as well, because they are filled with good-hearted people who contribute a great deal of social good. But there is a dark side that doesn’t get talked about. Their manifest mission may be to help the poor, but as observed in cushy corporate offices and gourmet dinners paid for by donations, if homelessness ceased to exist, so would their businesses and profits.

Like any business, there is significant variability in the quality of programs, staff, and outcomes for homeless individuals. These include poor or biased leadership, wrong-headed program avenues, questionable management or mismanagement, inadequately trained personnel, underpaid staff, insufficient funding, and antiquated facilities with scarce resources. From a cost-benefit analysis, a lot of money is being spent on outcomes that could be better.

Below are real-life examples from actual people, Tilly the provider and Sophie the recipient. Both point to the need for a different, better paradigm to address homelessness:

Tilly was a shelter director who shared her story: Her HUD transitional housing program and flexible funding for construction programs, a full set of services, good record-keeping for people who could stay two years and get their lives together worked pretty well. But HUD cut the transitional housing budget to fund Housing First programs. HUD now makes families prove they are homeless before they can get shelter. They don’t consider being doubled-up or sleeping on a cousin’s couch as homeless, so families have to have virtually no resources and sleep in their car or go to the emergency room before getting help. Once in the shelter, families must adhere to strict rules in order to stay. There are multiple hoops to jump through, time to come, time to go, what you can and cannot do when you are in the shelter, and if you fail to comply, out you go. Expectations imposed upon them are ridiculous, oppressive, nothing like one would have in one’s own home, but you have to put up with it and play the game to get help. In order to stay in the shelter, you lose your identity and how you can parent your children or care for your family. Most shelters run with patchwork-quilt funding, so staff don’t get paid much. Staff vary from being trained or not, and being well intentioned or not. Whoever is managing the staff doesn’t have time to supervise, train, or monitor them. Power can be abused by workers who thrive on the little authority they have. Workers may oppress others because they can and rail against minor infractions or rip into folks in front of others for things that they were incapable of doing. Staff can be brutal and dehumanizing. Those who fund and work with homeless people have their own agendas, and the vulnerable people are those that pay the price. Once you enter the shelter, it’s like going down a rabbit hole, full of twists and turns that you can’t see, and you have no idea where you’ll come out. Ultimately Tilly was fired because she asked too many questions, pointed out too many flaws…

Sophie used to be a stay-at-home mom before her husband left her for another woman. When he left, so did the family’s income. Alone, she could not manage the house, two children, and all the expenses, so she was awarded a housing subsidy and food-stamps. She didn’t receive other aid because she “messed up the application and they wouldn’t reconsider me for a year.” She had no family, few friends, and didn’t have good job skills or a baby-sitter, so her isolation grew along with her depression, which she tried to manage through drinking alcohol. The intake worker did a home visit and decided Sophie should go into detox. Her children were put into foster care, but her housing subsidy ended because she didn’t have the children. When she got out of rehabilitation, the state wouldn’t return her children because she didn’t have money for housing, and the bank had foreclosed on it when she was in treatment. She had to move to the shelter, which didn’t allow children. The staff weren’t sympathetic that a mother would lose her children because she became a drunk. When Sophie’s frustration skyrocketed, her outburst was deemed unacceptable and she was told she had to leave the shelter. Dismayed, Sophie couldn’t comprehend how her once-functional life had tanked as both she and her children had become homeless, apart, through the act of her husband leaving her to have an affair. At last contact, she had no idea if she could ever get her children back, given she had no place to live, no job, and now a history of substance abuse and mental illness.

Top-down funder and administrative agendas may have good intentions but be ill-conceived. Bottom-up system distress and workers who are supposed to care end up engaging in exploitation that squeeze vulnerable homeless people who get stuck smack in the middle in ways where there’s no way for them to win.

Current homelessness policies could be reconsidered to de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I Background of Homelessness in the US
• Part II Homelessness Paradigm Options
• Appendix: Business Plan for Building a Shelter
• References
• Index