• Ninety-five percent of the money you throw in that paper cup will be spent on crack.[10]
It is possible to paint totally different pictures of the homeless population. Advocacy groups such as the Coalition for the Homeless love to portray the homeless as people with whom the public can identify. People tend to help others more if they have things in common. Folks like you and me, who unfortunately became victims of terrible bad luck—a death in the family, a fire in the house, an accident at work. Indeed, there are tragic cases where law-abiding, decent American families lost income and housing and wound up on the street.
This group of all American families is, however, at 1 percent, a tiny minority.[11] The average homeless person has a completely different profile. According to a study from Rossi, 3 out of 4 are single, young, black and male; 30 percent have had psychiatric difficulties in the past; 80 percent have drug or alcohol problems; 40 percent did not finish high school.[12]
“Everybody is one paycheck away from homelessness.” It is a slogan that not only Bernard likes to use, but that is repeated over and over like a mantra by homeless organizations to generate sympathy for their clients. Homeless people are in many ways “folks like you and me,” writes sociologist Christopher Jencks, “but so are saints and serial killers.”[13]
“Lying for justice” has become a generally accepted practice that some people are not even ashamed of. “Sure I’d lie. I’d lie to help the homeless,” Jennifer Toth reports in The Mole People, quoting a staff member of the Coalition who was furious because she had openly written about crime, insanity, and drug consumption among tunnel people.[14]
The fact that “prettification” happens amongst outreach workers and homeless organizations is understandable: every lobby group has a tendency to be creative with the facts. If lying serves a higher purpose, and if it is done to defend the interest of “people without a voice,” the temptation becomes even harder to resist.
Others, however, question whether it is actually in the interest of the homeless themselves. It creates disbelief, skepticism and irritation among the “worldly.” The “believers” on the other hand search for easy solutions while they underestimate the complexity of the problem, according to Jencks and Burt.[15]
Some journalists also take over the “folks-like-you-and-me concept.” New York Times journalist Walter Goodman heavily criticized the media during the Democratic Convention of 1992. The convention was held in Madison Square Garden, right across from Penn Station, which is home to many homeless people. Weeks beforehand, the police were busy cleaning up the neighborhood by chasing away street people. The Coalition pointed some national TV crews to this clean-up operation, and suddenly homelessness became a huge news item. Poor homeless mothers with cute little kids appeared in front of the cameras to talk about their plight.
“Television news producers can count on advocacy groups to supply them with model victims for viewing purposes, people… untouched by…mental illness, AIDS, domestic violence and lack of education and skills,” Goodman writes. “And why should a producer focus on one of the 50 percent of single homeless people who have served time in jail when he can just as easily find someone without a record?”[16]
That same week of the convention, a disturbing report was published about the homeless population in shelters. After anonymous and voluntary urine testing, it appeared that 65 to 80 percent tested positive for drug use in the three preceding days, mostly crack/cocaine. The survey, requested by Mayor David Dinkins, also found a large number of HIV-positive and mentally ill people. Low skills, little work experience, and prison records were also rife.[17] The report confirmed ugly truths that were until then only heard at Republican cocktail parties.
“Homelessness is a euphemism, a nice way to talk about people who are in fact mentally ill and are addicted to alcohol or drugs,” says Al O’Leary, spokesman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority Police. “The homeless have a warning function for people to confirm themselves at the capitalist system,” Professor Terry Williams says. These two extremes represent the American political debate. “Conservatives blame the homeless, liberals blame the conservatives,” Jencks says pointedly.[18]
DEFINITIONS AND STATISTICS
Statistics on the number of homeless are notoriously inaccurate and are a middle ground between raw estimates—guesstimates—and the rare statistical material that is available from shelters, soup kitchens, research, and local governments.
In the mid-’80s, numbers ranged from a few hundred thousand to the incredibly high number of six million. The trouble with counting starts with the difficulties of a basic definition of homelessness. Before the homeless started roaming the streets in large numbers by the end of the ’70s, the term homeless was hardly used: The usual term was vagrancy. Even wandering seasonal workers who worked unskilled jobs but could afford a simple hotel on Skid Row were called vagrants.[19]
People began using the more politically correct term “homeless,” not simply because of negative stereotyping—wandering, criminal, antisocial, bums—but more to reflect that the new vagrants were the result of new demographic and sociological developments. It is tempting to discuss the exact definition of homeless at great length. “Till the moment we enter the House of the Lord, we are all homeless,” Father Bill Robinson, a reverend from Brooklyn, told me.[20] Metaphorically speaking, Father Bill is correct, but science and politics need more operational definitions. At the moment, the most widespread definition of homelessness is “not having customary and regular access to a conventional dwelling… that is intended to be used as a sleeping place.”
Beyond that, there must be somehow “a private space that has the ability to exclude strangers.”[21] Using this definition, the shelter population, although they each have a bed, are considered homeless. Same for the tunnel people, although some of them don’t consider themselves to be homeless. Families who are camping out in the highly overcrowded rooms in welfare hotels but still have some privacy are technically not homeless.[22] The alcoholics who live in cheap hotels in rooms of thirty square feet, or the poor black families who are cramped into squats are also not considered homeless. Overlooked in most studies and surveys are the “couch people,” those who have lost their homes and are staying on the couches of friends or relatives.[23] To count the homeless population, usually a distinction is made between shelter and street people. Shelters, of course, can provide the exact number of how many people stayed there. The counting of street people, including those who live in the tunnels, is much more complicated. A few surveys, however, have shown that the ratio between shelter and street people is fairly stable and is about fifty/fifty.[24] So by doubling the shelter population, one has a rough estimate of the total homeless population. Of course, there are seasonal fluctuations. On cold winter nights, many homeless street people may decide to sleep in a shelter.
Another distinction is between long-term and short-term homeless. Only a small group, around 20 percent, is homeless for a relatively short period, with a maximum of three months. Sometimes called “crisis homeless,” these people normally stay in shelters until they find a solution. Compared with the long-term homeless population, they are also hampered to a lesser extent by drug addiction, mental illness, and low levels of education and work experience. Most of the homeless, however, remain over a year on the streets and are referred to as “the chronically homeless.” A return to ‘normal’ society becomes harder with time.[25] Associated with this distinction are two ways of counting the homeless. One is the PIT (Point-In-Time) count, the actual number of people that are homeless on a certain date. Another method of counting is to look at the number of people who have experienced homelessness over a period of one year, be it a short spell or a long-term situation.[26]
10
My personal observations of a group of roughly ten to twelve homeless people, who could be found with great regularity holding paper cups at the given spots such as subway exits, restaurants, banks. Bernard knew all of them not only by name, but also the full details of their crack use. Most of these individuals claimed they needed the money to buy food. On the Upper West Side however, nobody needed to go hungry. There are some twenty different places—churches, community centers, soup kitchens—that provide free meals and food packages.
12
Rossi,
15
Jencks,
Burt,
17
Dugger,
19
Skid Row originated from the word Skid Road—the road where seasonal workers and loggers skidded tree logs in the Pacific North West. In the winter, when snowfall hampered operations, most loggers were out of work and hung around the skid road, hoping to find a job. Now Skid Row has entered mainstream language and is used by street people as well as sociologists to indicate a rundown neighborhood frequented by vagrants and the homeless. In New York, it has traditionally been in the Bowery.
20
Robinson, whom I met with at Saint George’s Church in Brooklyn, used to work at Pete’s Place, a small church operating in downtown Manhattan. He became Bob’s spiritual counselor when he left the tunnel, and stayed to stay in touch with him. See chapter 27: The Case of Bob. O’Flaherty mentions the American versus the British tradition of defining homelessness. In the U.S., he explains, homelessness has the notion of being uprooted, and implicates a detachment from social and family networks. In the English tradition, there is more emphasis on the legal right to occupy a residential space. In the last view, squatters are officially homeless.
22
Jencks, The Homeless, 4. Welfare hotels are, in fact, small shelters for families with children who cannot safely stay in shelters for single males. The rooms are paid for by the Welfare Department and, in New York, the Department of Homeless Services. Advocacy groups and most researchers consider the welfare hotel populations as homeless.
23
Cohen and Sokolovsky, Old Men
26
The 2008 Annual Homeless Assessment Report gives the following numbers for 2008: About 664,000 people were homeless—sheltered and unsheltered—on a single night in January 2008. About 1.6 million people were homeless in emergency shelters or transitional housing at some point during the year between October 1, 2007 and September 30, 2008. (HUD [2009], 30).