Where Have All the Homeless Gone?
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Where Have All the Homeless Gone?

The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis

Anthony Marcus

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eBook - ePub

Where Have All the Homeless Gone?

The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis

Anthony Marcus

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About This Book

For a decade, from 1983 to 1993, homelessness was a major concern in the United States. In 1994, this public concern suddenly disappeared, without any significant reduction in the number of people without proper housing. By examining the making and unmaking of a homeless crisis, this book explores how public understandings of what constitutes a social crisis are shaped.

Drawing on five years of ethnographic research in New York City with African Americans and Latinos living in poverty, Where Have All the Homeless Gone? reveals that the homeless "crisis" was driven as much by political misrepresentations of poverty, race, and social difference, as the housing, unemployment, and healthcare problems that caused homelessness and continue to plague American cities.

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Year
2005
ISBN
9780857456960
— Chapter 1 —
WHO ARE THE HOMELESS, REALLY?
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Who Are the Homeless, Really?
In the summer of 1993, as I neared the end of my contract as staff ethnographer on a massive three-year federally funded demonstration project on homelessness, I faced the difficult task of turning thousands of pages of research data into a doctoral thesis. Throughout my three years on the job, friends, neighbors, in-laws, and just about everybody I met at any social gathering had asked me the same question, “Who are the homeless, really?” When I came to write up my work, I discovered I still was not any closer to answering this simple question, despite having passed three years with hundreds of “homeless” and learning many of the most intimate details of their lives.
When I approached my colleagues on the project with this question they were unhelpful. “It's a stupid question. It's someone without a home,” one said. Another more thoughtful colleague told me that he had worried about this at first, but eventually decided it was more important to try to figure out what would help them the most. He pointed me toward Peter Rossi's book that describes the homeless as one part of the “extremely poor” (Rossi 1989) and some public health literature on the question. One of my professors at the University told me not to worry so much about definitions, “just pick one you are comfortable with and write about the people you met,” she said, and “stay close to the ethnography.”
As my concern turned to despair, I returned to the literature on homelessness and poverty and looked for others who had worked on this same problem. There were numerous books about the homeless, each with a different definition. Some authors had no concern for the problem of definitions (DeHavenon 1995; Dinkins and Cuomo 1992); others used the first pages of their work to qualify their subject and explain that the term “homeless” wasn't fully adequate to describe this subgroup of the “extremely poor,” “working poor,” or “underclass,” (Blau 1992; Hopper and Hamberg 1984; Jencks 1994; Rossi 1989). Since it was as difficult to find someone who self-identified as homeless as it was to find a self-identifying yuppie, all the studies relied on objective rather than subjective categories. However, nobody could agree on an objective definition, making comparative discussion and substantive conclusions difficult. Nobody could agree on how many nights sleeping publicly were necessary to make someone homeless. Nobody believed that two nights or even ten nights in a year were enough to define someone as homeless, but some researchers believed that living situations in which someone regularly spent a night or two a week in a semi-public place constituted homelessness. Then there were people who never slept publicly but had no place of their own. Kim Hopper (1991; 1995) called these “the pre-homeless,” another subgroup to study, discuss, and possibly provide service to.
Nobody was even sure what constituted sleeping publicly. Was a top landing of an apartment building public? Was a basement laundry room after closing time public? What if there was a locked closet in the laundry room where bedding and personal belongings were stored and a key was supplied by the superintendent in exchange for unpaid maintenance and cleaning duties? I had informants who lived in shacks in a garden. Did their homeless status change when electricity was run into the shack and they were given keys to a toilet and shower room in the community center next to the garden? Then there were squatters in abandoned buildings and people who lived in shacks under the highway. Furthermore, nobody was sure how to count three families living in a three-bedroom apartment. Did their status change if sisters headed all three families? What if there was a brother who lived in the living room and was registered at the shelter as an escape for when a sister's boyfriend became violent with him?
For many of my colleagues, being registered at a shelter was what counted. However, we all knew people who registered with the shelter to obtain free meals and keep their personal belongings there, but never slept there, preferring a girlfriend's house. Similarly, we all knew people for whom the shelter was an extra bedroom. They kept their belongings at parents' houses, ate meals with family, and took showers at home, but went down the block to the shelter to sleep at night because there was a lack of space or because a same-sex lover lived at the shelter. Many housing situations depended on being registered at the shelter in the event of occasional problems or uncertainties.
Finally, as is usually the case with studies of poverty in America, the race question was never very far below the surface. I had found whole networks of white ethnic blue-collar types living in the interstices of the suburbs and edge cities around New York. Generally well versed in using the system and sometimes registered at a shelter, many of these people exhibited the homeless life in every way down to the ratty clothes and street corner begging, but they were rarely included in the category. I also discovered networks of young, often college educated white Americans who had spent nights sleeping in train stations, on roofs, in parks, and on friends' floors because of economic problems and housing conflicts. However, for most people at the time, a black twenty-three-year-old casual cocaine user trying to become a writer and bouncing from bad housing situation to bad housing situation was “homeless,” but the same person in white skin was merely without housing.
Since none of the work of experts had helped answer my questions and most amelioration projects were failing, partially, I sensed, due to confusion over who was to be helped, I turned to nonexperts. A 1990 New York Times poll had shown that 82 percent of New Yorkers saw homeless people daily (Fantasia and Isserman 1994). I decided to test exactly what it was that they were seeing. I had been collecting data on many of the underhoused people, the beggars, street salesmen, and mentally ill in my neighborhood (the Upper West Side of Manhattan) and in the one where I was doing much of my fieldwork (Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan). Over the course of a few months I took people I knew from these neighborhoods around in my car, or walked them through the streets and tried to discover who they thought was homeless.
They pointed to the bizarre looking middle-aged black men asking for change from passersby. Though I knew that they were longtime residents of the Single Room Occupancy (SRO) on my block, they presented an image of homelessness. The Vietnam veteran, with VA benefits that were higher than my salary, who sold secondhand books for extra money and in order to pass the time and have a sense of purpose was seen as homeless. Though he had never spent a night on the streets, he was black, passed his days on the street, and dressed in shabby clothes. There was an unbathed black woman dragging children behind her who also got the designation homeless, but she lived two blocks down in a large crowded studio apartment with her sister and her niece. No one pointed to the well-dressed Barbadian man with sharp creased brown pants and a stylish dress shirt sitting on a bench reading a paper on his favorite traffic island in the middle of Broadway. He was a shelter resident. The white man on crutches hawking videos, who slept in Riverside Park, the good looking young black man arguing in a shop, who slept in a basement uptown, and the Latina City University of New York (CUNY) student who worked in the supermarket and alternated nights at an aunt's home in Jersey City, the student government office at City College, and her best friend's bedroom (when there was no boyfriend present) in a shared apartment, all received no notice.
My colleagues had been unable to provide a scientifically justifiable objective definition of homeless and my friends and neighbors were equally perplexed about what a homeless person was, despite seeing them every day. They tended to use a folk category that described people with some combination of dark skin, poor grooming, inappropriate behavior, and little to do with the day except hang out on the streets. I went in search of help from my informants. I knew that they did not think of themselves as homeless, but I thought they might have special insights into what I was studying.
My informants were the only group that could agree on a definition of the homeless. “Why don't you ask the Spanish guy (director of the Community Support Services office at the shelter). He's the one who decides who stays in the shelter and who gets a place,” snapped one informant, summing up the general sense about the category. Throughout fieldwork informants had expressed doubt or disgust toward my research category, but I had always disregarded what they said, often putting it down to race resentment or even mental illness. I went back to my field notes and began to revise my views of what they had told me.
Henry,1 a middle-aged African American trumpet player who had lost housing due to a combination of professional failures and a bad crack habit, had teased me mercilessly throughout my fieldwork about being an anthropologist looking for culture among the homeless. “You the guy who studies culture,” he'd say. “How come you can't teach me any of the traditional homeless songs so I can do my improvisations. You holdin out on me?” I was almost afraid to ask him his view on this topic.
I brought my doubts to an articulate older informant named Delaney who had been in the merchant marines for many years, but had lost housing after a mental breakdown. He later found a place in the sunny second story front bedroom of a boardinghouse in a beautiful historic brownstone in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, owned by the daughter-in-law of an African American World War I veteran and his French war bride. There were a few other “select” older black men renting rooms there, some of whom had briefly passed through the shelter system. We sat in the sunlight on tall antique wooden chairs and he explained to me that I was studying black culture in its most degraded form. “You want to know about the homeless, study the social workers,” he suggested, “they're the ones always talking about it.” He compared my study to looking for Jewish culture in a concentration camp, “you want to understand the camp, study the damn Nazis.”
I even had an informant who responded to an interview question about where he imagined being in five years by claiming that what social workers call homelessness is sometimes the last phase of youth for late teenage, early twenties urban black men. “It's kind of like you white folks and your frat parties,” he said, “everybody goes around sleeping in big houses with a bunch of different people and they drink beer all the time instead of use drugs. I seen all that in the movies. We just ain't got the fancy cars and the wealthy daddies.” He cited cases of people who had passed through periods without housing and a job, eventually settling down to the lower ranks of the steadily employed and disappearing from the view of social workers and researchers. At the time I merely noted it and moved on. How many of the men I had met might fit such a category of unestablished young black working-class men, and did this narrative of coming of age merely rationalize their misery, or did it give them something useful for survival, I later wondered?
As I saw the category of homeless “melting into air” many of these comments began to make sense. One of my informants, an African American in his late 20s who was too emotionally unstable for me to bring my doubts to, had once told me that he believed that the shelter was a giant intelligence experiment “to see how many niggers is stupid enough to enter. The guards, the big gorillas that sleep down at the other end, the crazy ones like me, hell even the shelter director don't know they fuckin with him. They can call us homeless or whatever the fuck they want, but it's just a bunch of poor niggers.” As I looked back, I realized that in a strange and unconscious way he was voicing the same thought that virtually all my informants had: the concept of homeless was a weak abstraction imposed from above on people who may or may not have had housing and those whose job it was to manage the crisis. None of my informants were sure where and why they fit into my study, but they were all sure that “homeless” was not a useful category.
I approached the social workers, as Delaney and several other informants had suggested. They were busy preparing for the next research project and suggested that I was taking the ravings of the mentally ill too seriously. However, there was one who encouraged me to pursue my line of questioning. As he put it, “words are important because they appear on budgets. The word homeless is like triage at the hospital. When you have somebody who is about to freeze to death on the streets, after a knife fight with a family member or being burnt out of his apartment or just out of Attica (a state prison) you gotta find the guy a place to sleep and damn quick. But after a good night sleep, a shower and a cup of coffee, how ya gonna convince him that his problem is homelessness. Sure he needs to find an apartment, but maybe he has a bigger problem, like no job or nobody to take care of him until he gets on his feet. Maybe he just needs a new prescription for his meds. The guys are not stupid. Only an idiot could convince himself that being homeless is anybody's number one problem.” He claimed that he had doubted the value of the concept of homeless for a long time, and as he became more frustrated with fitting men into the homeless model, his work life at the project became more untenable. He eventually resigned his position.
The Performance of Homelessness
As I continued to pursue a rigorous definition of what I'd studied, I found it ever more difficult to connect lack of housing and homelessness. Certainly, nearly all of the men I had spent my three years of research with were underhoused. Some of them had nowhere to go besides the shelter and continued to live in the shelter even when working long hours at the hodgepodge of temporary jobs that many of them strung together, in order to survive. Most, however, saw the shelter as one option among many possible residences. A day or two at the shelter might relieve conflict in a crowded apartment that they shared with friends or relatives. If trouble arose at the shelter a night or two on the subway might end a feud over money, drugs, or sex. Recently released prisoners usually found a few nights at the shelter a welcome relief from the dangers of unsecured basements and the pressures of taking up space on people's living room floors or trying to instantly fit themselves back into the lives of loved ones.
However, so much of New York City, during this period of rapidly rising housing costs was seriously underhoused and also approached housing flexibly. A very wide range of people in New York City during the 1980s engaged what might be called peripatetic, flexible, and unstable housing strategies. This included white students, recent university alumni, and people trying to break into an arts profession, as well as the long-term unemployed, mentally ill, physically ill, and recent arrivals from other states or foreign countries. Despite the fact that many of these people never spent a night in a shelter, they shared many housing strategies with those who had been designated “the homeless.”2 They were certainly not “homeful,” but most of them could not have credibly been included in the category of “homeless.” It seemed that the answer to the question “who are the homeless really” lay in the social role they filled and the social performance that was often necessary for their survival.
This sense that “homeless” was a very weak and abstract social performance, with little room to appropriate an identity was very clearly expressed to me when I briefly worked for Kim Hopper in his 1990 “S-Night” study that attempted to assess how accurate the U.S. Census was in counting homeless people sleeping on the streets and in public locations. In this experiment groups of students were sent out on the night when the U.S. Census takers were supposed to count the homeless. The students were dressed up in raggedy clothes and dispatched to locations known for having many homeless people. I was sent to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal at Whitehall street, where I was supposed to take my raggedy blanket and join the homeless people sleeping in a corner. I was expected to wait through the night to see who the census takers counted and how they counted.
The ferry terminal was one of the few places where I met white “homeless” people. During this long night we were pretending to be homeless, it was clear to the people who were actually living in the ferry terminal that Kim Hopper's research assistants were not used to “the life.” Most of the people sleeping in the ferry terminal assumed that we were recent arrivals from some place in the Midwestern United States and, therefore unfamiliar with this strange world of sleeping in public and gaining help through “playing homeless.” We received counseling from people around us on how to be more homeless and what roles were best for different situations, how to deal with police, teenage toughs, and so on. They were helpful and friendly, though amused by what they saw as an inability to look pathetic enough. One woman, who was actually white and seemed to be mentally ill, told my companion, who was coming along for the adventure and the $120, that “here in New York City, white people don't live like this. You should go back home to your parents.” She explained the research project to this woman, who pestered us for the rest of the night about getting Kim Hopper to hire her. When the U.S. Census workers finally arrived, they instantly spotted a fraud and made sure to interview all the researchers, making it clear that they resented being spied on at work.
Such public performances of helplessness and misery are not uncommon to beggars, indigents, and those dependent on compassion and charity, the world over. However, the connection between homelessness, helplessness, and charity that those in the ferry terminal were making was only the thin edge of a huge wedge that makes up state poverty policy and social custom. This wedge divides individuals and the self through the assumption of the universal rights, obligations, and expectations of citizenship and the systematic denial of those rights to those who are trapped in the historical nexus between African descent and poverty. The following chapter addresses some of the specific issues around the public performance of homelessness and this nexus.
Notes
1. All names of informants have been changed to protect anonymity.
2. The study that employed me required all participants to have spent at least one night in the shelter. Since the project recruited from a day program in the shelter, virtually all participants had spent at least one night sleeping in the shelter. However some were no longer shelter residents, but were still in the day program and nonetheless were categorized as homeless. Finally, it was rumoured that a small number were recruited straight to the research project and had volunteered to spend a night in the shelter to fit the project definition of homeless.
— Chapter 2 —
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY: THE PERFORMANCE OF HOMELESSNESS
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“When you got no money, no job, and nowhere to hide, you gotta be a stereotype. Good nigger, bad nigger, ugly nigger. I've been a good nigger and a bad one, but I never want to be an ugly one. They had me looking real ugly.”
Delaney, a middle-aged homeless man on why he left a community residence for the homeless against the wishes of his social workers
“I want to be one of those ‘well spoken’ black men. You know, the kind that white folks want to have around them. Ever hear the term ‘hankiehead’?”
Jeffrey, African American homeless man in his 30s on why he was carrying a copy of Democracy and Education by John Dewey
“Freddy Kruger, nobody ever fucks with Freddy Kruger. He just takes what he wants. He fucks up anyone that gets in his way.”
Michael, African American homeless man in his mid 20s on how he wants the world to see him
The Performance of Homelessness
For most of my informants the category “homeless” was tied to both the ritual humiliation that was required to receive resources from state social welfare programs or private charities and the management of black masculinity, which they often identified as one of the key problems in American society. As one of my informants, an ...

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