Address Unknown

The Homeless in America

James Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351533911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Describes the nature of homelessness, its multiple causes, and its demographic, economic, sociological, and social policy antecedents. Finding the origins of the problem to be social and political rather than economic, Wright (human relations, Tulane) outlines remedies based on existing and modified

CHAPTER ONE

The Human Faces of Homelessness

To many people, homelessness is little more than an abstraction, a convenient term that refers to a distant and ill-understood problem. To others, like Stuart Bykofsky, it has become an annoyance, less distant although in many cases no better understood. To the homeless themselves, however, homelessness is a fact, a way of life that is relentless and nearly unfathomable in its humiliation of flesh and spirit.

As stated in the preface, the most important fact about homeless people is that they are people, not abstractions, not “tattered human bundles,” but flesh and blood human beings, some representative biographies of whom are recounted here. They illustrate the diversity of homelessness in contemporary America, and show some of the human faces behind the numbers presented later.

An Old Face

Radar¹ is a chronic alcoholic, born in a New England mill town to a military family. He took his first drink on the night of his high school graduation, and has not stopped drinking since. His father got him a job just after his graduation but six years later, he quit the job because he was about to be fired—for drinking. From then on, his life has been a long downward spiral: “First you sell your car, then your clothes, then you’re on the streets.”

Radar has never had a home or even a stable living situation, nor has he held a steady job, since his early twenties. He has spent the last two decades as a street bum in a middle-sized New England community, admittedly having moved there because he had heard that welfare would be easier to get.

Here is the pattern of his life in his own words:

You learn how to get along. In the summer you sleep out, mostly in the cemetery. You lay some cardboard down on the ground, ‘cause it gets damp, you know. When you get up, you “rough up” the grass so nobody knows you been there.

Sometimes you find a shiny tombstone and you use it like a mirror, to see yourself. You keep a toothbrush and some after-shave on you. You take the salt from a fast-food restaurant to brush your teeth, and splash on some after-shave to cover up, you know. Unless you have to drink it.

You always keep a little liquor for the morning. Wild Irish Rose wine is the best, ‘cause you can keep it down in the morning. You got to keep that first drink down, then you’re all right to get the day going.

During the day you find some buddies and you party. A favorite place is behind a super-convenience store, where there is a small wooded area and abandoned cars. It’s easy to get liquor. Somebody is always getting a check, vets or Social Security. You share when you’ve got it and they share when they do.

Easier to get a drink than a hamburger. You can always hit up a friend or a stranger for a little money. Charge the liquor at the “packy.” Got to pay the money back though, or it dries up. Always pay the liquor bill first. Money doesn’t mean anything, as long as you have a drink in front of you. Sometimes you go to the nice bars just to watch the local bigshots come in for a morning drink. They’re no better.

In winter, you get some buddies and rent a room. Then you put as many people in as possible. You can do that for a few nights and then you get thrown out because of the noise and fighting. If you got to stay out in winter, you try not to sleep. You get enough liquor to drink all night, then get inside in the day. Sometimes you get thirty or forty people together in the woods and “party” for two or three days. Then you have a fire and a big time.

Of course, there are times when no money comes or Radar is too sick to continue with the party. When this happens, he checks into the alcohol detoxification unit. By his own (possibly inflated) count, Radar has been “in detox” more than 400 times in the last nine years, not counting the times when he tried to get in but was turned away.

His stays in the unit vary from 1 night to 5 days. He was first detoxified when he was 31 years old, 11 years after his first drink. On one occasion, he failed to eat for a month and was sent to a 6-week inpatient alcohol rehabilitation program. He resumed drinking the day he was discharged.

Radar has evidently learned quite a bit from his frequent visits to the detox unit. For example, he knows the exact ethanol content of virtually everything you can drink, including Listerine (26%). He is also very knowledgeable about what chronic alcohol abuse does to a person’s body, and he discusses his health matter-of-factly, in medical terminology. He says that he does not have “peripheral neuropathy,” unlike some of his friends. He does have a “seizure disorder” that occurs when he stops drinking and for which he takes medication. His liver swells up when he drinks (probably “alcoholic hepatitis,” since this also disappears when he stops drinking). He vomits every morning until he keeps his first drink down. He has very few teeth left and he needs glasses. Although Radar is not as sick as he might be given his addiction and his life-style, he is, likewise, not a well man.

His major health problems are the many injuries he suffers while he is drunk. He was once hit by a car in front of a package store and his leg was broken. He has had multiple scrapes and bruises from fighting on the streets. When the injuries are serious, the police take him to the emergency room of the local hospital. The hospital, he says, will not keep a homeless alcoholic who has no insurance. Radar is very bitter toward the health care system, except for the people in the detoxification unit that he sees as friends.

His attitude toward the police is cautious but respectful. He has been arrested four times for drunk driving, the last resulting in a 2-month sentence in the county jail, and he has been picked up for public intoxication more times than he can remember. He once spent 6 months in jail for assaulting his girlfriend. He reports that jail was not “too bad” since he could smoke pot all day and occasionally get liquor. He says, “If you are polite to the police and keep fairly well hidden, they won’t bother you.”

Radar’s family or support network consists of the bottle gangs to which he belongs, small groups of fellow alcoholics who share liquor, companionship, and a sense of belonging. Although they are mostly men, there are some women in these groups, women that Radar initially meets in the detox unit. He says that the “regulars” protect the women when they are together. “If we are partying together, we’ll give them our coats. Nobody hits on them while we are together.” Apparently he chooses his sexual partners for other reasons, for example, if they have an apartment and will let him and one or two others sleep there in bad weather. He believes that street life is easier for women since “they can always pick up a man and go to his place for the night.” This behavior is not considered prostitution, merely a matter of survival.

Radar lives for the here and now. There is no long-range planning, no goals for tomorrow or next week or next month. “If I have a drink in front of me and you offered me ten dollars to carry a package across the street, I wouldn’t do it.” He spends all his money on alcohol. Basics such as food and shelter are lesser concerns left to take care of themselves. And yet, despite the obvious depravity of his existence, he is (at least to all appearances) carefree and happy enough with who he is. As he puts it, “The streets are an adventure—you never know where you will go!”

I have described Radar as an old face not because of his age—the man was just 39 years old when interviewed—but because of the nature of his homelessness. His story conforms almost perfectly to a common stereotype of homelessness. He is a prime example of Bykofksy’s “drunk, addicted and just plain shiftless,” a hopeless alcoholic with no real desire to change, who survives only through the generosity of friends and society. It is, I admit, hard to muster mucf sympathy for his situation or for tens of thousands of other homeless drunks just like him.

But many other faces also peer out at us from the homeless population. Let’s look at another.

A New Face

In February 1987, I was given an opportunity to testify at hearings before the House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families, having been asked to speak about the effects of homelessness on the physical health of children. Also present at the hearings were Lisa and Guy McMullan and their four children: Jamie, Ryan, Morgan, and Ryder. Their fifth child, an infant, had recently died, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

The McMullans, adults and children alike, were clean and neatly dressed, although Mr. McMullan was the only man in the room not in a suit and tie. The three older children sat quietly and respectfully, apparently well coached in how they were supposed to behave in such grand surroundings. The youngest child, only a toddler, squirmed constantly and was handed back and forth between Mrs. McMullan and her oldest daughter throughout their testimony. Mrs. McMullan spoke at length about her family, their homelessness, and their troubles. Her prepared statement to the committee follows.²

My name is Lisa McMullan. I am here with my husband, Guy, and my four children, Jamie, Ryan, Morgan and Ryder. The story of my family’s experience with homelessness began in Mile City, Montana, early in 1986. My husband and I owned a house there, but when my husband’s job was phased out due to the farm crisis, we could no longer make the mortgage payments so we gave the house back to the bank, sold everything and came East in the spring.

We first stayed with my mother-in-law, but that didn’t work out because there wasn’t enough room for all of us. There were seven of us living in the basement. After a few months we moved to Baltimore, and my husband and I both held a number of jobs. In November or December 1986, we began to have problems paying the rent on our apartment. [Lack of construction work; day care too expensive.] After several eviction notices, we found ourselves without a place to live and with no place to go.

I called around, with the help of Social Services, to several shelters in Baltimore, but no one would take us as a whole family. Finally, the Salvation Army offered us a room to stay in. The room was very small with six people in it. The conditions at the shelter were very stressful for me and my family and the children particularly became much more difficult to manage. The food was not that good as you can probably imagine.

It was very crowded, and there’s a weird feeling that goes along with being there. You feel like you’re nothing because you suddenly don’t have a home. You know you’ve done all you can do and it isn’t your fault, but the whole situation makes you feel like you must have done something wrong.

My family and I tried very hard to overcome these feelings. Especially because it really hurts the children. Children need to know and feel who has control over their lives. And suddenly they are living in a situation where they see their parents needing outside help, and they are all suddenly living with many other people they don’t know and who frighten them.

To combat all this, and to keep our family life in order, we tried very hard to maintain a schedule. We made sure we went on walks with the children, we kept them in school, and did all we could do to make them feel we still had control over our lives and were still there for them.

But this was a real struggle for us. We were up every morning at 6 a.m. to get my husband to work on time and to take the two older children to school. In doing this, we missed breakfast at the shelter every day until they began giving us boxes of cereal to bring along to eat later. We were fortunate in still having a car to be able to keep that schedule. Not everybody does.

We were at the shelter between three and four weeks. Many of our experiences there were frightening and added a lot to the stress in our family. There was no door on the women’s shower and one night I caught a man peeking into the women’s bathroom watching my 10-year-old daughter. The man also lived in the shelter and I reported him, but nothing was done about it. Another time, a woman accused my daughter of trying to push her down the stairs. As it turned out, we learned that the woman was mentally disturbed and hated to be touched, so if you got too close to her, she got very upset.

These were the kind of things—overcrowding, hunger, lack of privacy and insecurity about the future—that really put stress on our children and our family. It was very hard on us all. My two oldest children, 10 and 7 years old, were in counseling, originally to help them deal with the loss of their younger sister to crib death when we were at my mother-in-law’s house. But then I kept them in counseling all throughout this period because I knew that not having the security of a home and living in a shelter would be hard on them.

We recently found a small apartment, but it turns out that our crisis was not over yet. A week after we moved in, my husband was laid off from his job at Bethlehem Steel. We are now both looking for jobs and are trying to get stability back in our children’s lives. It is very, very difficult to maintain a family in this kind of insecure environment. I know that if it weren’t for each other, we probably couldn’t keep struggling to improve things.

Unfortunately, I know what great damage and harm that homelessnes can do to a family, even when they’re all trying to do their best to make everything work. Because of my family’s painful experiences, I wanted tc tell you our story today. We appreciate your concern and thank you for the opportunity you have provided by holding this hearing. I know than our story will help you to help others like us and especially those who have been even less fortunate.

The McMullans are the new faces of homelessness—homeless families, often decent, hardworking, previously stable families who have been victimized by economic misfortune and who are trying to piece together some semblance of family life from the resources made available to them through the social service system. In fact, as discussed in more detail later, homeless families are probably the fastest growing sector of the contemporary homeless population.

Many useful details were added to the McMullans’ story in their oral testimony. Their most severe recurring problem was finding shelters that would take intact families, especially families the size of theirs. In many cities, no such shelters exist. In these cases, the husband is shunted off to a shelter for homeless men, or perhaps to a mission, the wife and small children are sent to a shelter for women and children, and the teenaged children are sent to a facility for homeless adolescents. However desperately the family might wish to remain intact, the existing social service system sometimes simply does not allow it.

Mrs. McMullan: The social worker looked at me and she says well, I think I may be able to find a place for you and the children, but what is your husband going to do? And I looked at this lady and I said, lady, we have been through everything together. We are one of the more fortunate families, that my husband has not walked out. He has stayed with the family through thick and thin. And I said, and I am not going to throw him out to a car now. I said, you’re going to have to do something better.

The McMullans were more fortunate, perhaps, than most. The Salvation Army did provide a room where the entire family could stay. But, in solving the immediate problem, new problems arose:

Mrs. McMullan: You’re so stressed out, you’re angry, you’re frustrated, and you’re walking around just a bundle of nerves. And it makes it even harder. And you’ve got emotionally handicapped people in there. You’ve got a time limit on how long you can stay. There are roaches, the kind that walk. We ran into trying to stabilize some kind of routine, which is really hard, bec...