Complementing Naseem Bazargan’s study, “Chaos and Control: A look into the radical culture of the Suitcase Youth Clinic,” is an equally compelling treatise by Natalie Khorochev entitled “Homes for Humans: Rethinking Homelessness from the Ground Up.” A Suitcase Clinic alumna who received extensive recognition for her thoughtful and inspiring tenure as General Clinic Coordinator, Natalie Khorochev authored this thorough exploration of homelessness for her honors thesis in UC Berkeley’s department of Sociology. It is an important document in the history of our organization, insofar as it makes extensive reference to the shared culture and ethos of the Suitcase Clinic, particularly that of our SPEAC (Student Project for Education and Advocacy in the Community) subdivision. It represents a professional application of our methodology towards a noble goal, and all of our volunteers are encouraged to benefit from her effort. The Suitcase Clinic is fortunate to have received her attention, and wishes her the best with her future endeavors. Anabstract is also available. As always, all Suitcase Clinic volunteers, current and alumni, are encouraged to share their research projects with our extended online community.
The entirety of the study can be read below in a search engine-friendly format:
Brief Summary/Abstract:
Homes for Humans presents a meta-analysis of the existent analysis of homelessness presented through a careful reading of literature on the issue as well as through in-depth conversations with those who have worked at agencies serving the homeless and with people experiencing homelessness. Reflective of the literature on homelessness, the major dialogue in this thesis is with Teresa Gowan’s dissertation Sin, Sickness, and the System: The Discursive Construction of Male Homelessness in San Francisco and St. Louis (2003). Gowan proposes that there are three main perspectives used to explain homelessness: the moral model (sin-talk) which blames homelessness on the poor choices of individuals and/or their families; the disease model (sickness-talk) which blames homelessness on the psycho-physiological problems of individuals (e.g., addiction, mental illness, physical disabilities); the structural model (system-talk) which attributes homelessness to shifts in the political economy and housing market that have in turn reduced jobs, social support programs, and the supply of affordable housing. While Gowan treats these three perspectives as mostly separate paradigms, particularly pertaining to why homelessness exists and what we should do about it (and most to the literature places itself in one of these three camps), there is a need to integrate these perspectives. Each element within these perspectives represents a significant part of understanding homelessness and this thesis integrates the three paradigms by proposing a larger human rights framework. The human rights framework and call for “homefullness” allow us to overstep some of the less productive debates (e.g., structural change vs. individual change) by stressing the need for all levels of support as well as society’s moral obligation to each other.
While Gowan “chooses” the structural analysis of homelessness as the most productive way of approaching the issues of homelessness, the analysis to follow offers a deeper criticism of this paradigm. It points out that advocates of structural change can’t get enough social traction to do more than employ the tactics of the disease model (i.e., they call for stopgap emergency services until underlying housing and job shortages are addressed). Also, the structural model assumes that its perspective advances the greater social good, however, it does not make an explicit claim to morality. The silence allows more conservative perspectives to monopolize the moral debate and suppress the civic energy that is needed and most importantly generated by participating in a “cause”. This ceded moral ground can potential be reclaimed through the human rights paradigm that frames efforts to end homelessness as a just social cause and not as just a social cause. Such a perspective holds the possibility of opening doors for a new public commitment to “homefullness.”
The challenge here is that people do not fit into any one explanation of homelessness provided by the current discursive analyses. An alternative, more holistic, approach based on human rights is a model that essentially reframes the way we speak of, view, and address homelessness. This alternative has the potential to create a discourse inspiring the kind of structural and social service changes needed to reach homefullness and eliminate homelessness. Through this process of reframing the discussion from the ground up, the human rights paradigm emerges as the new and alternate frame for homelessness than those established by the current paradigms.
Homes for Humans:
Rethinking Homelessness from the Ground Up
Submitted by
Natalie Khorochev
Senior Honors Thesis
Department of Sociology
University of California at Berkeley
Advisor: Mary Kelsey
May 2006
for gwen
I. A (re)introduction.
Dirty. Unkempt. Lazy. Addicted. Street Dwellers. Sick. Dysfunctional. Scraggly. Scary. Disaffiliated. These are some of the prominent descriptors attributed to people experiencing homelessness on account of their outward appearances. From these descriptors subsequent generalizations are often made about homelessness nationwide. Two decades since this phenomenon was seen as a societal problem in need of immediate and emergency assistance, homelessness persists. Seeing homeless men and women continues to activate these negative perceptions and (re)produce a “downward gaze” establishing homeless people as part of a marginal population created by these perceptions. This position becomes solidified when juxtaposed against popular notions of normative functioning and the definitions of home and private life. It also influences the creation of policy and the approaches taken to understand, explain, and address homelessness. This production of assumptions based on what is seen also has implications on the many who do not comprise the visible homeless, but who experience situations of homelessness as they lack permanent housing. While the provision of permanent housing is a fundamental element in moving toward homefullness, the frameworks that exist for discussing the problem obscure this obvious answer to homelessness.
Whether part of the visible or invisible homeless, the essential situation of these individuals is that they, due to a complex interplay of forces, live without permanent housing. Indeed, it is verifiable that people who are homeless are at times also struggling with mental illness, substance abuse, have other ailments are in need of health and social services and/or have been through a variety of (traumatic) experiences that “caused” their homelessness. These conditions alone are not the causes of homelessness, as those who live housed in permanent situations sustain similar experiences, habits, and disabilities. To explain the existence of this disparity between those who have and those who lack “housing”, much of the scholarship thus far has been dominated by three leading discourses on homelessness: disease, moral, systemic (Gowan 2003). The first two discourses base their understanding of the problem around the pathologies and behaviors of homeless men and women. These discourses regard homelessness as a condition (a social sickness) that has come about through individual decisions and actions. The last discourse presents a discussion of structural influences and constitutes the systemic debate in relation to homelessness. Although these discourses have largely legitimated the academic discussion of homelessness and presented the need for funding and resources to address it, the major problem within them is the denial of an individual’s agency, respect, and worth. As well as an absent discussion and framework of basic human rights, in particular, the denial of permanent housing as one of the most flagrant violations of human rights.
In her recent dissertation titled Sin, Sickness, and the System: The Discursive Construction of Male Homelessness in San Francisco and St. Louis (2003), Teresa Gowan lays out the three discourses (see Appendix A) on homelessness that comprise the social debate around the problem. The disease model sees homeless individuals as weak or dysfunctional because of a “sickness” and individually responsible for their situation based on some type of disability. Similarly, the moral model also focuses on the individual, identifying homeless people either as sinful, deviant, promiscuous, or irresponsible. This model suggests that perhaps they come from dysfunctional families, ones that failed to provide proper discipline, situations of child abuse, or are themselves lacking in appropriate life skills. The systemic model rather sees the “system” as provoking homelessness and precluding individuals from accessing vital resources that could if accessed prevent/end homelessness. The systemic model points out class disparities and inequality, racism, lack of affordable housing, and declining welfare support as the most significant social inequalities contributing to homelessness. These three discourses reveal how different constructions of a problem ultimately lead to varying conclusions about its causes, the strategies to manage homelessness, and the agency of the individual.
In continuing this discussion, proposals to manage homelessness based on the moral discourse range from the clearance of homeless people from city streets to removal of cash benefits. The disease discourse advocates treatment of illness and addiction, and sheltered housing. While the systemic discourse suggests the restoration of living wage jobs and affordable housing, although strategies to effect these long term demands have been truncated to the same tactics of the disease and moral models. Meanwhile, prevention and emergency services are proposed in the systemic discourse until other structural conditions improve. These proposed solutions then fall on a continuum starting with agencies focused on prevention, to those that hope to ease the plight of homelessness, as well as those that talk of ending homelessness, either by providing solely short term solutions or attempting to establish long-term plans (depending on their resources and funding stream). However, as homelessness continues to grow, the development of a more useful and applicable approach is imperative.
Over the past two and a half decades, a combination of the disease and moral discourses has constructed the dominant thoughts about homelessness, its causes, and its management. This collusion of discourses emphasizes the sin and sickness of homeless men and women, and has produced an abundance of information based on such assumptions to manage the problem. However, the systemic approach has not done much better to address the problem and through its specific discursive framework led to the development of the emergency service provision and an industry of homeless services. This “industry” is best described as a range of organizations and services that aid homeless men and women as they fight against homelessness. However what has developed is a network of services and organizations that focus on addressing immediate needs versus on long-term and ameliorative efforts. Along with this industry, the approaches of the first two discourses—mainly “clearance and corral” (Gowan 2003) via criminalization and incarceration, removal of cash benefits treatment, and sheltered housing—contribute to managements of the homeless and not the problem.
These discourses contribute heavily to the current understanding of homelessness and its causes, as well as shape our understanding of the individuals who experience this situation. Nonetheless, even the composite of these approaches, mainly concerning their proposals to address the problem, is still not enough to help people become housed and homed individuals. They do not change the number of available jobs, housing units, or increase access to healthcare and education for people within homelessness. Rather the current paradigms offer is a way of organizing and explaining homelessness based on a rigid models or forms of analyses. The pages that follow present a discussion of the anomalies that exist within homelessness exposing the shortcomings of the three main discourses and attempt to formulate a new paradigm that explains homelessness within a framework of human rights. This human rights paradigm moves away from viewing homelessness within the constraints of the moral and disease models. It sees homelessness not only as a violation of the basic premises of human rights, but also as a social crisis in need of attention and radical change. This new paradigm then creates new frames and ideas through which to view homelessness. These frames, as will be discussed, are based on “human rights talk,” rooted in the lived experiences of homeless people and emphasize the humanity of homeless men and women in hopes of bringing them toward homefullness.
II. An anti-definition.
Although definitions clarify questions and set a standard for approach, it is difficult to favor them in the context of this project for two reasons. The first is that most definitions operate within the same power structure by which homelessness is defined today (through academics and policies regarding homelessness), thus perpetuating those forms of power that identify homeless people, rather than homelessness, as the problem. Second, suggesting a definition that encapsulates the fluidity and dynamics of homelessness is difficult. For example, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines “chronically” homeless people as single adults over the age of eighteen, who have been homeless for more than a year, and have either a substance (ab)use issue and/or are mentally ill. This immediately excludes those who are not chronically homeless, along with youth and families, many who of whom have been homeless for more than a year and have the same issues. In a recent Letter to the Editor, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless,
There are currently seven different federal definitions of homelessness, and HUD’s is the most restrictive, while the US Conference of Mayors and many national homeless organizations would like to see the Department of Education’s definition be adopted since it includes families who are doubled up and living in motels, which the HUD definition does not (2006).
Sifting through various definitions and analyses of the problem, the following is a synthesis of thought, an anti-definition of sorts that will hopefully help guide the rest of the discussion and should only be taken as far as it does not wrongly exclude or preclude people, but establishes the “ins and outs” of homelessness. I recently wrote this as part of the mission statement for a new division of the Suitcase Clinic called the Student Project for Education and Advocacy in the Community (SPEAC):
Homelessness is a temporary condition that people fall into when they cannot afford to pay for a place to live, or when their current home is unsafe or unstable. Other factors, such as job loss, physical and mental disability, various hardships—including personal, and drug addiction can accelerate people’s slide into poverty and for some eventual homelessness, especially in the absence or proper social services. The lack of housing, access to healthcare, and supportive services etc creates the “homelessness trap” in which individuals find themselves cycling through the system. The lack of these provisions also acts as a barrier that keeps individuals from moving into situations of homefullness.
Homelessness is also a state of vulnerability–to health risks, violence, and harassment by police; heightened exposure to the elements; and absence of privacy. Homelessness can turn into a more permanent condition when people become alienated from society and/or when it becomes increasing difficult and frustrating for individuals to reintegrate into the “mainstream”. However, homelessness is not an inherent quality of trait and it is not (nor should be) linked with any particular identity, nor does it define the people experiencing it. Each individual is unique and must be addressed in that way, and each person is worthy of being treated equally in society and should be given the utmost opportunity to succeed and transition out of a state of homelessness. Homeless people are also not a “population” of their own; they are individuals who have every right to the access afforded to people in society. Thus, it is important that we recognize that the greatest contribution one can make towards ending homelessness (on an individual level) is acknowledging someone with a smile or a nod and showing that they are recognized—most importantly recognized as human beings.
To start, it is important to talk more positively about homelessness, for example referring to people experiencing homelessness as ‘un-housed’ individuals in a state of homelessness. It is also important to highlight common misperceptions about homeless men and women; a frequent one is equating substance use/abuse with un-housed individuals. Although there is a large number of un-housed individuals who may suffer from substance use/abuse, we cannot equate the two, the same principle applies to attributing mental illness. The hope is that this will shed a new and positive light on people experiencing homelessness and help highlight the importance of promoting the need to afford utmost access and assistance to homeless men, women, and children to help them in their current situations and assist them in their move them to homefullness. Homefullness also includes an emphasis on an individual’s capabilities, abilities, and their capacity. It is also about promoting people’s ability to choose rather than using coercive measures or those of force. Such an approach has greater potential to reduce recidivism and promote permanence.
Homefullness is the situation in which people have a permanent residence, which is safe, stable, private, and secured. In which people have access to basic amenities (heat, water, refrigeration). Living housed removes the stigma and negative associations attributed to those who are visibly homeless, and gives people a greater sense of permanence. Furthermore, individuals coming to homefullness should have a strong support network/community in order to come to a place of independence (versus dependence on social services) and with this stability they hopefully can move towards “healthfulness,” “jobfullness,” etcetera.
Table 1: Homefullness as the Antithesis to Homelessness
Homefullness* Homelessness
In a permanent residential situation either owning or renting. This does not including living in a shelter, doubled up, forms of transitional housing, or informal housing- tents, abandoned building, etc. Un-housed- living sleeping, residing within informal spaces, not permanent housing, including shelters, (SRO) hotels, jails/prisons, transitional housing, living doubled up, camping, or residing in abandoned buildings.
Safe, stable, private, secure Unstable, often unsafe, not private or secure
Having first and foremost basic amenities- including storage, refrigeration, heat/electricity, running (clean) water, etc. Lacks basic amenities altogether (especially those that are as easily accessible as walking from your own bedroom to kitchen, etc).
Being clean, dry, housed Susceptible to the “elements” (weather).
Having a kitchen, stove, shower, telephone within the living unit, and a mailing address. Especially difficult to have a telephone and mailing address that puts people in contact when looking for housing, jobs, etc, and simply needing to be reached
Being housed relieves the stigma and negative associations attributed to people experiencing homelessness. Stigmatized, stereotyped, seen as lacking something or as doing something wrong, incapable.
Housed as not utilizing public space for activities thought to be conducted in private: cooking, sleeping, going to the bathroom, etc. Visible (yet simultaneously invisible), often dehumanized through criminalization and incarceration for violating “quality of life” rules/regulations.
Less vulnerable to the abuse, harassment, and ailments that occur when individuals live unprotected in situations of homelessness. ° Vulnerable and susceptible to physical danger, abuse, hate crimes, brutality, increase sickness and pain, proper self care.
Relief of the worry about where to go at night and about getting trespassing tickets for sleeping in areas prohibiting trespassing, etc. Manage life around where to eat, sleep, and go throughout the day and at night.
Creates sense of increased security and stability which makes it easier to manage life and establishes sense of permanence. Sense of insecurity, loss, instability, chaos, impermanence.
* Housing individuals who have become used to managing their lives while living in informal spaces could be challenging and difficult, therefore homefullness includes the necessity of support, care, and supporting services for individuals who may not be used to living housed. In order to achieve homefullness, housing needs to be made a priority, available, and affordable to individuals who are living below, right at, or slightly above the poverty line—affordability should not be determined proportionately to the prices of housing in the immediate area, based on housing market rates, or only for those in the middle-class. Some argue that being housed does not necessarily mean that an individual is homed (Veness: 1992). For the sake of clarity and sanity, this concept of homefullness referring to having a private, permanent residence, also refers to domestic life and the social meaning of home.
° Abuse, harassment, and ailments also occur in the lives of housed individuals, however, it is commonsensical that susceptibility levels rise when someone is homeless (National Coalition for the Homeless- Hate Crimes Report)
III. Methods.
This “definition” and the analytical basis for this project came from three main sources. The first is from an array of textual evidence about homelessness primarily coming from books, articles, online publications/sources, newspapers, and one recent dissertation. The second is from my personal experiences as a public policy and research intern at the National Coalition for the Homeless during the 2005 summer. Also from volunteering my time at the Suitcase Clinic (General Clinic), a student-run drop-in center at UC Berkeley for low income and homeless individuals. Thirdly, from a series of interviews, nine in total, including one group meeting with four other individuals besides the principle contact person, ranging from professionals, academics, and/or activists in a field directly or indirectly involving homelessness and working with people experiencing the problem. My interviewees included:
- Paul Boden the founder and former director of San Francisco’s homeless advocacy organization, the Coalition on Homelessness. In Spring 2005, Boden also created WRAP, the Western Regional Advocacy Project, an organization determined to make ending homelessness a national priority. By ensuring that legislators in Washington DC receive a constant, consistent, constituent-informed message from the west coast, WRAP strives to shape public policies that address the systemic causes of poverty, ensure adherence to human rights, and are grounded in the experiences of those who live with and work on homeless issues every day.
- Janny Castillo a community organizer for BOSS- Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency- who was herself a graduate of the Harrison House Emergency Shelter and the McKinley Transitional Program. BOSS is dedicated to helping homeless, poor, and disabled individuals achieve health and self-sufficiency, and to fighting against the root causes of poverty and homelessness, through a variety of housing, work, and health services.
- April Davis, staff at the Alameda County Homeless Action Center (HAC), which is a non-profit legal services program for homeless and mentally ill people in our community. Founded in 1990 with a Berkeley Law Foundation grant to respond to the legal needs of homeless people, HAC now provides legal assistance to homeless and indigent people primarily in the areas of public benefits (SSI, GA, Food Stamps, and MediCal).
-A group interview with the Faithful Fools, including Rev. Kay Jorgensen, Sister Carmen Barsody, and Susan Knutson, an organization in San Francisco called to a ministry of presence that acknowledges each human’s incredible worth. Aware of their personal judgments, they seek to meet people where they are, through the arts, education, advocacy and accompaniment. They also participate in shattering myths about those living in poverty, seeing the courage, intelligence, strength and creativity of the people they encounter. As well as, discover on the streets a common humanity through which celebration, community, and healing occur.
- Jessica Flintoft, Programs Director at HomeBase: Center for Common Concern, California’s public policy law firm on homelessness whose purpose is to end homelessness, prevent its recurrence, and decrease its effect on communities. The approach of Homebase is twofold: identifying and analyzing the causes of homelessness and developing and implementing long-term solutions that remove these causes. HomeBase works with service providers, local communities, public and nonprofit sectors, and homeless people to implement these solutions.
-Terry Messman, founder and editor of the Street Spirit as well as long-time activist and homeless advocate. Street Spirit is a publication that reports extensively on homelessness, poverty, economic inequality, welfare issues, human rights issues and the struggle for social justice. For the past 10 years, Street Spirit has been dedicated to empowering poor and homeless people and giving a voice to the voiceless, especially as the voices of the poor are virtually locked out of the mainstream media.
- Jane Micallef Homeless Policy Director for the City of Berkeley, assisting in the City’s progress in implementing needed homeless services and facilities.
- Alan Steinbach Ph.D., M.D., Clinical Professor, Joint Medical Program, University of California, Berkeley, as well as important collaborator with the Suitcase Clinic, a humanist and humanitarian student organization that has offered free services and supplies to the uninsured, homeless, and low-income communities of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Suitcase Clinic started in 1989 when a group of students realized that their clients needed more than just medical care- that the needs of the homeless and low-income population went beyond just the medications needed for their current illness. With the belief that health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease and infirmity, the students conceived the idea of a clinic that would provide more than just medical services. Today, along with medical services, the Suitcase Clinic offers free eye-screenings, legal counseling, as well as haircutting, foot washing, and chiropractic adjustments.
- Paul Terrell, Ph.D.- Professor of Social Welfare Policy University of California, Berkeley and board member of the Berkeley Food and Housing Project (founded in 1970). BFH is has worked for 35 years to ease and end the crisis of homelessness for men, women, and children in the Berkeley community. With seven programs ranging from free meal services to permanent supportive housing, BFHP provides a continuum of care to accommodate a broad spectrum of specialized needs. BFHP also assists low-income and homeless individuals with needs and disabilities that are not effectively met by mainstream social services. The agency’s hallmark is to provide services with compassion to foster a nurturing, healing environment that can effectively end an individual’s cycle of homelessness.
My criteria for choosing these individuals was that I wanted a range of perspectives coming from those who have done direct service work and also those coming from an academia/research, activism, and government or policy perspective. It was important to gather evidence based on current experiences in order to compare and contrast this information against textual evidence. The impetus behind this data collection was to explore what was and what was not being said about homelessness and the people experiencing this situation, in order to come to a better understanding of the problem and work toward sustainable solutions.
I started out by asking myself why homelessness is so persistent and what was the fundamental difference was between people living homeless and those who were not. I could not find answers that were good enough, except that the element separating “us” and “them” was the most obvious: housing. What I found through textual analysis explained homelessness from varied perspectives/directions, but I was left with a looming sense that ending homelessness is seen as intractable. Many of these texts proposed solutions, especially involving housing, without simultaneously considering other models (disease, moral, or alternatives ones) that recognize the lived realities and complexities of homelessness. This made talking to those “in the field” even more important because it helped match their perspectives to those I found in the literature. I asked each of my interviewees a list of the same fifteen questions (see Appendix B), including various follow up and impromptu questions that arose throughout each hour-long conversation. Across the board, I heard talk of the need for housing as fundamental to addressing homelessness, and subsequently, jobs, healthcare, and education. My interviewees also spoke in depth about the pervasiveness of the disease model in dictating policy and governmental/organizational decision-making processes concerning homelessness. Here, the construction of homelessness from this model had led to a disengagement and de-prioritization of the problem based on the narrow understanding of homeless men and women as the deviant “Other.” After each interview I transcribed each conversation and took notes on the information categorizing sections of each interview by theme. I was especially interested in what my interviewees said about moving toward a new approach of addressing homelessness.
Throughout my work, I was asked on numerous occasions if I was planning to talk to people experiencing homelessness for this project. I have long been talking with homeless people throughout my work with homelessness in Berkeley, particularly through my involvement at the Suitcase Clinic. My decision not to conduct formal interviews with homeless people, apart from notes and observations, was twofold. First, I did not want to present a skewed picture of homelessness that would lead this paper away from its central focus. Interviewing a handful of homeless men and women, whom I know or have seen around Berkeley, would yield significantly different results than conducting a large-scale investigation. One that includes asking a large number (250+) of homeless people a series of questions and compiling/deciphering the data systematically in order to obtain the common threads among homeless individuals in a given locale. This was outside (monetarily and time wise) the scope of my project however it is the approach advocated and previously conducted by the Western Regional Advocacy Project to present a more accurate, rather, than skewed picture of homelessness and better serve and help those people experiencing it. The second reason for not conducting such formal interviews, is that asking such questions as “How or why did you become homeless,” “How long have you been on the streets,” and “Can you describe your experience with homelessness,” does not in any way help the individual, except that at times, presumably, it gives them someone with whom they can talk. Also, while personal stories are valuable, important, necessary to hear, and deserving of empathy, in this situation they do not bring new or surprising information to the discussion. Thus, the few quotations that are included from personal communication have not been systematically gathered through a formal interview process and some were based on conversations that occurred in years past.
IV. Examining existing scholarship.
From the top-down
The promises of the Great Society by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s to expand the welfare system produced an optimism that people would eventually move out of poverty. As described by A R Veness in Home and Homelessness in the United State (1992), individuals should be given the resources and opportunities provided by the federal government and move into permanent housing. During this period of time people became housed as they transitioned from single room occupancies (SROs) to public housing, a program expanded by Johnson. Throughout the 1970s progress continued to be envisioned for those who remained marginally housed —living doubled-up with friends or family, in dilapidated or overcrowded housing, in substandard conditions, abusive situations, and/or hotels—to soon become fully homed (Veness 1992). However, before this vision of progress could come to fruition, when met with economic recession and with drastic cuts in public housing under President Reagan, homelessness rose dramatically in the early 1980s:
The loss of well-paying jobs and affordable housing, and withdrawal of government subsidies in housing… this return to laissez-faire attitude by government [had] several implications for the personal worlds, or homes, of those people who once managed on their own (Veness 1991:463).
Further, the privatization of the housing market, decline of SRO housing, deinstitutionalization of mental institutions, the closing of state hospitals the nation over, and the expansion of a low wage job sector, pushed many already impoverished Americans into homelessness. Those already experiencing homelessness were pushed into further destitution. When the government lost its ability to (or simply chose not to) fund the welfare state, the welfare state in turn lost its legitimacy (Veness 1991:461), and homelessness was no longer just about having permanent housing.
A complex web of constraints, particularly economic and physical, undercut the stability of those experiencing homelessness, and pushed them and others further into the situation. At this time activists insisted on the right to shelter as a fundamental necessity, along with food and clothing and this ultimately sparked the development and promotion of emergency assistance, marking the establishment of numerous emergency shelters across the country. However, with the simultaneous movement by the Reagan Administration to decrease welfare benefits, along with economic instability for the poor and working class, and an increase in the privatization of the housing market, emergency services served as band-aid operations addressing the immediate problems of people experiencing homelessness. Over time, a compassion fatigue materialized in response to the continued rise in homelessness and people became disillusioned with the problem. By the 1990s, a massive homeless service industry had emerged. Homeless agencies did not necessarily focus on ameliorative efforts to end homelessness. Instead, this industry limited social services to work that eased the experiences of people by meeting their immediate needs.
Today, homelessness is largely seen as an inextricable part of society and lacks political support and buy-in. The three aforementioned primary discourses— disease, moral, and systemic— continue to be utilized to explain the dynamics of homelessness and deconstruct the problem in order to make it manageable. Teresa Gowan presents the discussion of homelessness within these discourses in her 2003 dissertation. She refers to the act of applying them in discussion among professionals, governments, activists, media sources, as “sick-talk,” “sin-talk,” and “system-talk” (2003). These ways of “talking,” from their respective foundational perspectives, have constructed homelessness as a societal and/or individual problem. For the past two and half decades, the disease and moral models have dominated the discussion and compose a majority of the debate around homelessness. Here, micro-level discussions, targeting the role of the individual and their deficiencies/dysfunctions, make homelessness seemingly more palpable and easy to decipher. These discourses are also implemented to divert attention from and mystify the systemic model, which has a greater potential to for example advocate for a regulation of policies that work against anti-homeless organizations. Also, taking a closer look at structural influences on homelessness has the potential to recognize the real “relationship between labor and capital or to use its [government’s] taxation capacity to redistribute wealth down the social scale” (Gowan 2003:33). Reflective of this, Talmadge Wright in Out of Place, speaks to the ways in which, currently, homeless individuals are “framed” and contained in academic and policy discourses as passive apolitical subjects, and subjected to a physical isolation through containment in shelters and segregation in marginal areas (1997:40). Also, by their very presence in public areas, they “communicate their ‘out of place’ status” (Wright 1997:40), and, as suggested by community members and local government because they are people without established homes, they ought to be “installed in shelters, ‘in their place,’ and out of sight” (Wright 1997:40).
Explaining homelessness based on an individual’s deficiencies, sickness, or disabilities, the disease discourse views “mass homelessness [as] evidence of an epidemic of drug abuse, exacerbated by family dysfunction and mental illness” (Gowan 2003:22). Advocating primarily for treatment of the individual, its suggests a “housing ready” prerequisite under which people have to be clean and sober, and seen as capable to manage their lives within a home environment before entering housing. Often, the surveillance for appropriate behavior occurs within sheltered or transitional housing with supportive services, in which people become “housing ready.” Similar in approach, the moral discourse describes the individual as fully responsible for his or her situation. This model views the dependence of individuals on social services as evidence of moral failure and people in situations of homelessness are viewed as “lazy, hedonistic, opportunistic, and irresponsible” (Gowan 2003:22). In Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (2003) by Don Mitchell,
Intent is clear: to control behavior and space such that homeless people cannot do what they must do in order to survive without breaking laws. Survival itself is criminalized…It is outlawing: just those behaviors that poor people, and the homeless in particular, must do in the public spaces of the city. And this regime does it by legally (if in some ways figuratively) annihilating the only spaces the homeless have left. In other words, we are creating a world in which a whole class of people cannot be—simply because they have no place to be (2003: 163,167,171).
The effect of theses discourses leaves no room for the homeless person to be seen as an individual with agency, without being defective in some way. Existing homelessness scholarship has essentially done in the disease approach what Mitchell says city planning has done to public space. Incarceration along with anti-homeless legislation restricting panhandling, loitering laws and/or quality of life citations (Amster 2003, Davis 1992, Mitchell 2003), and cuts to the welfare system, as well as programs such as Care not Cash that remove cash transfers, are deemed effective ways to address the moral failures of homeless men and women. With this perceived deviance, the individual is constantly subject to criminalization and in turn this criminalization is called upon to restore their expected and appropriate social functioning. Such an approach, among others of the same nature, are described by Alice S. Baum and Donald W. Burnes in A Nation in Denial: The Truth About Homelessness in which they make claims that the United States was (and still is) in deep denial about homelessness because
The primary issue is not the lack of homes for the homeless; the homeless need access treatment and medical help for the conditions that prevent them from being able to maintain themselves independently in jobs and housing (1993:3).
Explaining why people become homeless and why those very individuals cannot move to housing, here becomes one in the same. That is substance abuse, physical and mental disability, and personal choices/behavior have not only maintained people within homelessness but are now treated as the key cause. In this respect, medicalizing, providing treatment, and rehabilitation become the sole answer to homelessness. This approach then is buried in the thought that,
Those disabled by addictions and mental illness or both, who drift in and out of homelessness, staying intermittently in shelters, hospitals, jails, detox units, transitional programs, and [find themselves] back on the streets in a continuous cycle, are particularly at risk of not being able to maintain independent housing (Baum & Burnes, 1993:137-8)
This vision of ending homelessness starts with the promotion of rehabilitation services because from the perspective of the disease and morality paradigms, homelessness is antithetical to normative social functioning and expectation, so homeless men and women need to be rehabilitated. Here, Baum and Burnes argue that, “policymakers and the public must address the disabilities that make maintaining stable housing impossible before making the issue of affordable housing the central issue for today’s homeless” (1993:138). The premise for such models sees homelessness as comprised of men and women who are alcoholic, irresponsible, mentally ill, and those who cannot sustain themselves. Therefore, the practices of “clearance and corral” (Gowan 2003) that move homeless men and women into shelters, jails, treatment facilities are necessary as their situations and actions make them seem incapable, difficult to treat, and publicly intolerable. Treatment and rehabilitation are thereby the practices proposed by the disease and moral models to manage “the homeless”.
These practices are further presented by Peter Rossi, who frames homelessness in his book Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness (1989) as he details the history and demographics of homelessness, its transformations over time, especially those that came with the decline of SRO housing. Rossi also makes the connection of homelessness to –and distinction from– extreme poverty, and the meaning of short and long-term homelessness. In an attempt to explain people who have become victims of “perverse macro-level forces” (1989:195), or provide a structural explanation of homelessness, according to Rossi,
The critical characteristic [of homeless people] is the high level of disability that both impairs their earning capacity and reduces their acceptance by their families, kin, and friends. There are the people who are most strongly affected by shortages of unskilled positions in the labor force, lack of inexpensive housing, and declines in the economic fortunes of their families, kin, and friends. Under these unfavorable conditions, unattached persons with disabilities have increasing difficulty in getting along on their own. (1989:194-195).
Looking at macro-level forces suggests that the “deficits” attributed to homeless people are (wrongly) generalized as causes of homelessness and from them that people can only get back on their feet via shelters, medicalization, incarceration, and varied rehabilitative services (Wright 2000). Such services are indeed needed for some. However, solely focusing on treatment and sheltered housing does not move beyond short-term or temporary solutions to homelessness. The extension of the discussion on homelessness beyond the pathologies of the homeless person, are thus taken up in the third discourse of homelessness.
The systemic discourse looks at wider social injustices existent within the social, political, and economic spheres, which influence the lives of people experiencing homelessness. This position rejects the individualization of causes pertaining to the problem, an idea that is prevalent among the other two discourses. “System-talk” asserts that homelessness is a wide “‘variety of complex social system dislocations’… inadequate income, declining welfare services, and loss of housing” (Wright 2000:31). Essentially, what is unique to the systemic discourse, is that it
Reverses [the] downward gaze, instead by looking “up” at the way the broader social forces [such as unrestrained globalization, unemployment, and institutional racism p.23] have contributed to the hardships of many. The individual, in systemic narratives, is vague. The most salient thing about him or her is that they have been damaged by “the system” however that is defined (Gowan 2003:129-30).
In 1987, this “looking up” at broader social forces materialized in the enactment of the McKinney Act. Today the McKinney-Vento Act (named in 2001) remains the first and only, federal homeless legislation. McKinney-Vento mandated the funding of (anti) homeless programs and saw homelessness as a “status in society rather than a condition of housing” (O’Flaherty 1996:9). The emphasis on socio-structural forces instead of individual narratives (people’s choices, behaviors, and pathologies) pertaining to homelessness, came to see the agency of homeless individuals as weak and sought to justifies the provision of emergency services and prevention strategies to address homelessness (Gowan 2003).
In the eyes of many activists and professionals, this act, “created a massive bureaucratic structure for the management of homelessness” (Gowan 2003:51) via the roles of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Interagency Council on Homelessness, who remain the two main players in managing funding for homeless agencies nationwide. The work of HUD fluctuates based the level of fiscal priority the federal government years over allocates to the McKinney-Vento Act. Tied to the funding of the federal government, organizations receiving HUD funding often lose their flexibility and decrease the scope of their services. They have to follow rigid guidelines and focus their work to address the immediate needs of individuals. Providing access to other networks— labor, housing, healthcare—which are crucial for the effectiveness of anti-homelessness play a minimal role in HUD’s analysis. Demanding the allocation of funds rather than requiring tangible provisions –housing units, access to acute and extended healthcare, mandating a federal (or state) living wage to support rent prices, and supportive services close to housing sites—was the precedent set at the inception of the McKinney Act. The act called for funding rather than for “physical” provisions, and years over this funding to anti-homeless program has been contracted. Supposing that advocates for McKinney-Vento had required a certain number of housing units to be built at the time of its enactment and in the years after, those physical units would exist today and would provide a structural base as well as act as leverage to address homelessness. From the beginning, this Act exemplified the unwillingness of Congress to challenge neoliberal and market economic practices that attempt to provide a momentary buffer through the federal budget to “aid” homeless men and women. Instead it emphasized individual responsibility and ultimately displays the denial of structural inequalities within society. This coupled with today’s rigidity of the welfare system has created a system of means-testing, monitoring entitlement, and policing the receipt of benefits. Despite federal definitions, homelessness continues to be recognized not only as a status of disengagement and disaffiliation, but also as a condition reflecting inadequacy and dysfunction. This makes it difficult to move beyond emergency provisions and roots homelessness deeper in the disease and moral discourses.
The ambiguity of the “system” reflected in the systemic approach as causing homelessness, continues to influence the structuring of organizations to attend to immediate needs because at the least people receive services that ease their plight. However, in the absence of new resources, providing services without permanent housing and other long-term components, the systemic discourse will continue to develop more assistance programs to ameliorate immediate situations of homelessness rather than end it (Baumohl 1996). Without an this emphasis on systemic transformations to move toward ending homelessness, that is
Without adequate long-term housing, the process of “transition” becomes not linear but circular, not a pathway out of homelessness, but more of an “institutional circuit” where homeless people move from program to program. The “breaking down” process of persuading clients to reorient themselves, to refigure the narrative of their lives, appeared less potentially liberating, and more potentially dangerous, or even abusive (Gowan 2003:102).
The potential for liberation, safety, and care or nurture, as antithetical to the above statements, are thereby diminished. In this circular “transition” or homelessness trap, the focus on the individual overpowers the need to prioritize structural modifications.
An emphasis on establishing organizations that work to directly address the structural forces over emergency care is necessary in order to provide tangible results in favor of those who are homeless. According to Martha Burt of the Urban Institute in her recent book Helping America’s Homeless: Emergency Shelter or Affordable Housing? she states that,
While we appreciate [this knowledge] we still do not know many things about which services to offer and how best to deliver them, one conclusion is inescapable: Every available study indicates that giving homeless people housing, through shelter plus care, vouchers, group homes, or any other mechanism, helps ensure that they will not be homeless any more. On the other hand, giving them a vast array of different services, absent of housing or the income to obtain it, does not (2001: 323)
We have come full circle, according to Burt, because the ability to afford housing still remains part of the problem, and thus the ability to obtain housing and financial resources to acquire it should be a major part of the solution (2001: 323). As she argues, the meeting of people’s basic needs once they become homeless is not enough, and services without a housing component do not work.
Seeing from the ground up…
Incorporating and/or interpreting the existing scholarship on homelessness from the ground up, vis-à-vis academia, allows for the portrayal of the complexity of life for those who lack a permanent residence. Following are five ethnographies that examine the way people live as they experiencing homelessness, the strategies they use for survival, and the complexity of their everyday situation. As a disclaimer, ethnographic approaches also have the potential to present a skewed view of homelessness based on the closed population they study. Such a presentation bears serious implications when applied generally to homelessness, especially when the anecdotal evidence is used by organizations and agencies to structure their work. The inclusion and utilization of ethnographic works here is for the purpose of demonstrating the ways in which they have supported the central paradigms on homelessness. As well as how these paradigms have pervaded the lives of those “studied” homeless men and women, the situations they face, and the approaches they take to “deal with” homelessness. These empirical studies ultimately demonstrate that there is a wide adherence to the disease discourse on homelessness, and that the systemic model’s greatest impact rests in the emergency shelter system, creating a homeless shelter industry (Burt 2001). What these studies show is that, homeless life is far too complex to be conceptualized within the current discursive framework, especially the moral and disease discourses.
Analyzing the dynamics of shelter life, Elliot Liebow in Tell Them Who I Am (1993), after volunteering his time for 5 years at an emergency women’s shelter in Washington DC, presents an account of the stories of some twenty women who “came to homelessness by many different paths, almost all of which, one way or another, had to do with being poor and powerless” (1993:16). Throughout the years he documented their interactions with each other and shelter staff, observed the activities of their daily lives, noted their feelings, and accounted their struggles with finding jobs, keeping relationships, and seeing their children. He also describes how they managed their time and money, tried to obtain subsidized housing, and their struggles to get off the streets and into homes. Liebow witnessed their downfalls, abuse, and their tensions with shelter life and with social workers. In addition he reflects on how social structures mixed with a number of personal difficulties present situations that make it challenging and frustrating to manage daily life and “remain human in an unremittingly dehumanizing environment” (1993:222). This is summed up in Liebow’s realization that,
I had to come to see how inadequate it was to think of them on one-dimensional, stereotypical terms such as “mentally ill” or “alcoholics,” as incomplete persons deficient in morals or character, or even as “disaffiliated” persons, [and] go-it-alone further isolates those no longer connected with family or friends (1993:1).
Furthermore, “making it” does not simply involve “getting off the streets.” Through his ethnography, Liebow presents a critique of the public welfare system and concludes that shelters are inadequate places to live. Temporary shelters compromise one’s safety and privacy and do not move one towards respect, neither from other individuals nor from institutions. Liebow claims that,
Underneath the formal change [to help those in need] our public welfare system is a latent charge full of ambiguities and contradictions, and we should not be surprised to see them played out in the lives of the dependent poor. Nor should we be surprised that it is not always clear to the poor whose interest the system is designed to serve (1993:147).
From Liebow’s point of view, what is missing from the discussion of homelessness is the crucial recognition that people have ended up on the street because they, through a variety of reasons, came to no longer have a place to live. Their lives were laden with compounding factors that attributed to their situation, reflecting the causes presented by the systemic discourse. Thus Liebow proposes a “housing first” approach as a starting point to confront these factors, and argues that rehabilitation and reintegration for homeless people start first and foremost with housing.
In Sidewalk (1999) Mitchell Duneier looks at homelessness primarily through the lives of men making a living and working in New York City at the intersection of Eighth Street, Greenwich Avenue, and Sixth Avenue. He describes the informal life/networks of sidewalk vendors and other street people who utilize public space as both work and home. Duneier, by way of his analysis, calls into question the debate over the right to public space by individuals who in many ways have no where else to go and find their means of subsistence on the streets. The observations of and interactions with men and women presented in this book serve to frame a larger discussion about the habits that sustain existence, construction/utilization of public space, the legalities, the opposition, and what it really means to live and sleep on the sidewalk. Through his work, Duneier makes connections between analytical research and the reality of street homeless life paying particular attention to the ways in which individuals make a living within an informal economy. Many of these connections are reflected in Duneier’s description of Ishmael, a street vendor, in which,
He may tell a researcher that he would choose to have a place to live, but not if that means he must give up the things that otherwise sustain him: yes, a place to sleep; but also free or cheap food, social networks, abundant trash, and most important, a place to earn a living by selling what he takes from the trash. Into his presence on these block must be read more that the existence of “homelessness”. We must see into the uses to which he puts the sidewalk…as series of complementary elements tied together in an encompassing manner that ultimately sustains… Ishmael chooses to sleep on the block…because he is on the block first and foremost to work and, through that work, to live his life (Duneier 1999:169).
Evoked in the stories presented by Duneier is the class-version of the structural analysis of homelessness that includes economic polarization and low pay as the central causes of homelessness. He argues that, though informal, the work done by sidewalk (homeless) vendors is legitimized by their determination and adaptation to homeless life. The lack of social safety nets combined with the “system,” keeps people within informal job sectors so that they can survive.
On this point Teresa Gowan furthermore argues that much of this work may go unrecognized and unappreciated by observers as “the work of homeless [individuals] makes little sense outside the context of their general isolation and rejection by broader society [they] tend to interpret their work as an escape from stigma” (Gowan 2001:75). Despite formal recognition, homeless men and women continue to “interpret their work as an escape from stigma” (Gowan 2001:75). Duneier makes the connection between living and working on the streets and the choices that the men presented in this story make in order to live. What is crucial to realize is that living and working on the streets sets homeless men and women up as different from “normal” citizens and creates the spaces, in which disease and moral models are easily attributed when considering,
The difference between Ishmael and “decent” people is that the latter have solved problems of where to sleep in ways that fit in better with standard ways of dong things. To some extent, that is true. But when “decent” people have not done so, few people accuse them of being indecent (Duneier 1999:178).
When bathrooms are open to the public but the “public” does not include people who are or who look homeless, individuals have to find their own ways of urinating and defecating. This does not establish means for their categorization as “indecent”. The point here is that the actions and personalities of people experiencing homelessness are simply made more visible, scrutinized, and deemed “indecent.”
A similar account, though focusing on the work of homeless recyclers who attempt to create their identity and combat stigma by working within the informal economy in San Francisco, is presented by Teresa Gowan in “Excavating ‘Globalization’ from Street Level: Homeless Men Recycle Their Pasts” (2000). Here, Gowan explores the lives of a three homeless men who make a living through recycling and by which they attempt to overturn the stigma associated with homelessness. Gowan works from a systemic approach, frequently questioning the global economic job market, asking why
The efforts of the recyclers to carve out normality from stigma and to create routine from the anomie of unemployment are [not] reflected in the main body of the academic literature on homelessness. [Instead] the vast social welfare machine dominates the field, converging on the failures, sickness, or cultural incompetence of the homeless individual (2000:78).
Gowan explores why working informal jobs is not recognized as legitimate and details how globalization has added to the instability of society, the dismantling of the welfare state, the insecurity felt my many Americans who are one or two missed paychecks from becoming homeless, and the “wholesale abandonment of the poor,” (2000:102). She also lifts the screen of the disease and moral approaches, looking beyond these “symptoms” to how the “abandonment of the poor” forces people to improvise in order to meet their daily needs and routinize their lives in the absence of safety nets.
Continuing to explore the attempt of homeless people to “make it,” David A. Snow and Leon Anderson in Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People (1993), look into the lives of homeless men living in Austin, Texas. They assess the ways in which daily routines and established survival strategies have formulated a street subculture. Snow and Anderson describe how institutional and political constraints influence the lives of these homeless men, as they not only “affect the survival opportunities and resources available to the homeless, but also contribute to the texture of street life” (1993: 77). They also discuss that these daily routines occur in public places, how they are highly regulated because public space is considered prime and highly valued real estate set aside for business purposes and for use by “domiciled citizens.” This delineation of space presents an ecological constraint on homeless people (1993:102) despite the fact that they find themselves simultaneously needing to use public space as home and in order to survive while being criminalized and scrutinized for doing so. Even in the face of these struggles, homeless individuals continue to maintain their dignity, respect, and carve out a sense of self and meaning. One way is through work. However, institutional constraints further present challenges such as adherence to certain demands of dress, behavior, and professional etiquette are often close to impossible for people living on the street, who have no address, phone number, let alone appropriate attire and access to facilities. Also, regular/formal work yields low/minimum wages and is not seen as a way off the streets. Therefore, many homeless people turn to the informal economy of day labor, illegal activities, and street vending in order to secure an income. Consequently, they feel that such activities are a more effective use of their time, and use these income-generating activities/techniques as well as their relationships and connections with others on the streets to secure a sense of self and identity. These survival strategies ultimately demonstrate their creativity and resilience.
In his work Reckoning with Homelessness (2003), Kim Hopper discusses the plight of the literally homeless- the “visible” poor– those without nightly housing– who take up shelter either in established shelters or in public spaces. He questions the definitions attributed to homeless people and the guidance gleaned from official literature to addressing the problem (2003: 15). Hopper presents the difficulty of classifying homelessness (2003:16) within static categories and calls for the need to connect fieldwork to framework (2003:210) in order to explore the dynamics of the problem. Hopper’s study is both important and influential in that it makes two crucial observations about homelessness reflecting the need to embrace a systemic model to understand and address homelessness. The first is, according to Hopper,
We’ve ignored such traditional topics of ethnographic inquiry as the following: the growth of precariously accommodated populations at risk of displacement (from their own or shared housing) and of competition for affordable housing; and careful examination of rectification strategies proposed (from emergency relief to income, housing, service policies, and police practices) (2003:209).
The second is,
“‘Solving’ homelessness—at least the sort that does not arise out of liminal breakdowns, late-adolescent adventure, or exceptional occupation… ‘Housing,’ to steal a slogan, ‘works.’ The trickier tasks are recognizing how it was solved (or prevented) in the past; what about those practices or policies that might be resurrected and retooled to the specifications of the present; and what newly fashioned remedies might be needed, and how, if they work, they might be replicated (We may not choose to reinvent skid row, but functional equivalents of low-cost, low demand accommodation are surely needed.) (2003:215, italics mine).
Hopper sees ethnographies as lenses into the construction of homelessness based on the three aforementioned discourses that “shape our inquiries” and are “limits to witnessing.” The ethnographies are not limiting per se; what is limiting are the paradigms in which,
Sin-talk, sick-talk, and system-talk each set up a particular model of the homeless person, the ideal type who best fits the discourse’s story about homelessness. Each of these ideal types, in turn, is connected more or less explicitly with certain configurations of class, gender, and race. There is therefore an intimate affinity between individual and discourse, between habits formed in particular social spaces and a particular story of the fall (Gowan 2003:111).
Concluding what has been said…
Stepping back from the explanations and proposals of discursive models, in reality, the complexity of homeless life extends beyond the scope of the discourses on homelessness. Living on the streets is problematic as it compromises one’s safety, stability, health, etc, and subjects individuals to adverse conditions that are not suitable to sustain their lives. Nonetheless, many people experiencing homelessness have carved out their lives in such a manner that the streets have become their community, family, and most importantly their home. This seems absurd, however the alienation that many experience when becoming homeless and the frustration of trying to manage their way through service organization to achieve concrete changes in their lives, has led people to share such a mentality. It is simply not plausible to “get it together” without a place to live and sense of stability.
Jacqueline Wilson, a homeless women in her late forties, who has spent close to a decade facing homelessness in the Bay Area after the loss of her family and subsequently, her house and employment led her into homelessness, has been battling the odds for years. “Getting out” (of homelessness) seems unfathomable and futile:
“Living out here [in People’s Park] gives me a sense of belonging, a sense of being, that I am loved and known by people. What is stopping me from getting out of there is fear. I am scared of changing my life and what that will bring. I know what it was like to feel alone and be depressed and that makes me not want to live anymore. I never want to relive that again, if I did I would probably kill myself (Wilson, personal communication, 2006).
In order to cope with the fear of isolation and keep from falling into depression, Jacqueline has created for herself a support network and community made up of individuals whom she has met in People’s Park and around Telegraph Avenue. These types of forged communities are imperative as,
Homelessness, a deeply stigmatized, exceptional state, [continues to write] a large questions mark over every [person’s] head, compelling some kind of explanation. Almost everybody on the street struggle[s] to find his [/her] own understanding of [their] situations…” (Gowan 2003:9).
Attempting to carve out an explanation for one’s life and situation, social networks and communities among homeless individuals emerge for support and the meeting of emotional needs that may have been severed when one came to experience homelessness. However, even with such networks, for Jacqueline, the hardships and vulnerabilities of living homeless, without stability and immediate access of basic amenities, attributed to the deterioration of her life. The onset of mental illness co-occurring with the use–and quickly abuse– of crack cocaine, as well as battling cancer, pushed Jacqueline further into homelessness. These factors, along with a growing incarceration record, drugs use, and proliferating mental illness, made it (and for many make it) more difficult to approach moving into housing. At this point, the utilization of disease and moral models that focus on an individual’s deviance, poor choices, sickness, and mental/physical dysfunction and can lead to a debilitating internalization by the homeless person that pushes them even further into their homelessness. However, Jacqueline’s situation asks,
What, exactly, were [and are] the feasible alternatives to roads that they [people experiencing homelessness] wished that they had not taken? In this way… a much clearer picture is seen of how out-of-control addiction and homelessness were created and reproduced through participation in [and utilization of] various discourses and practices, especially through the moral discourse on [homelessness]” (Gowan 2003:14).
If you were to walk past Jacqueline on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, despite what her case history file say, you would not think of her as homeless, addicted, or mentally ill. Adapting to the ebb and flow of homeless life, she manages her appearance and health to the best of her abilities, and utilizes the services in Berkeley to help ease her situation. Nonetheless, addressing one aspect (such as mental illness or substance abuse) of a person continues to leave others (need for housing, jobs, education, healthcare, etc) unattended-to. In this case addressing the basic and daily needs of a person often leaves issues of substance abuse, mental/physical health, etc untreated. When this occurs even with the perspective of temporary housing often people return to the environments from which they came, fall into patterns of managing their lives within homelessness, and continue with the routines and practices that make their lives bearable. All while their physical and mental conditions exacerbate causing them to fall further away from becoming housed. Furthermore, different groups of people experiencing homelessness have particular needs. For example, the needs of single, unaccompanied male adults are quiet different from mothers with children, the elderly homeless, the youth, mentally and/or physically disabled, veterans, and others. What they do have in common is that they all experience homelessness. Homelessness thus is a dynamic, complex and multifaceted social problem that requires prioritizing the need for safe and sustainable housing, a living wage and economic opportunity, access to healthcare and education. Also seeing homeless men and women not as passive victims, but as capable, dynamic, and active individuals that need to be given agency in order to make choices and increase their self-efficacy.
With this in mind, we go back to the analysis made by Kim Hopper in Reckoning with the Homeless (2003), who goes further to state that the crisis of homelessness, that was thought to pass in first in the 1970s with housing provisions and then in the 1980s with flood of emergency services and also by waiting it out, rather than providing employment and housing. This rather has both incurred high social costs and has created a “massive artificial relief industry with a perverse interest in sustaining demand for its services” (2003: 216). When decisions are made concerning homelessness, they look to immediate solutions in order to manage the problem but shy away from efforts for sustainable change and long term options and solutions. There is immense data, spanning from ethnographic studies, to statistical analysis, facts sheets, federal and local reports (concerning various topics), analyses, and historical research, that relay the who, what, where, why, when, and how of homelessness. In this sense there is a considerable amount of information, scholarship, and knowledge about what works and what does not work to move people out of homelessness, however why then does the problem continue to persist.
The ethnographic portrayals (as does much of the literature) support the disease and systemic discursive constructions of homelessness, and apart from calling for a need for housing, do not offer a better paradigm of analysis. We have come full circle according to Burt, because the ability to afford housing still remains part of the problem, and thus the ability to obtain housing and financial resources to acquire it should be a major part of the solution (2001: 323). However, in the absence of new resources, providing services to homeless people, without housing, will continue to draw more in assistance programs than expand ameliorative efforts (Baumohl 1996). Part of the concern surrounding homelessness and the difficulties around ending it is the fear that it has
Fall[en] prey to the pull of hysteresis. Economists borrow the term from physics to describe the cumulative (or developmental) complexity of a destabilized system, careening from one induced adjustment to another, getting progressively further off course and out of balance, such that restoration to its original state is an even more costly and difficult affair (Hopper 2003:208).
Not only have we seemingly come full circle in approach, but also have a social situation that is more deeply embedded within emergency provisions rather than ameliorative efforts influencing the rise of chronic homelessness.
V. Setting up a new paradigm.
A new framework is needed to discuss homelessness, one that works from the recognition of the complexities of homelessness and people’s lives within it. An individual’s situation, such as Jacqueline’s who is suffering from mental illness, substance abuse, has cancer, and has an incarceration record, does not fit into neatly into an explanation of homelessness provided by the current discursive analyses, let alone address it. An alternative approach is needed to see that individuals move toward homefullness and recognize that housing and home are elements of basic human rights. Such an alternative also must, as one of its main components, focus on empowering individuals and groups of people experiencing homelessness to advocate on their own behalf. As well as increase their self- efficacy and improvement, and together with homeless advocates push for the prioritization of structural transformations based on a re-conceptualization of basic human rights. This model, which essentially reframes the way we speak of, view, and address homelessness, has the potential to create a discourse inspiring the kind of structural and social service changes needed to reach homefullness and eliminate homelessness. George Lakoff in Don’t Think of an Elephant states,
Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently (2004: xv).
In order to come to a place that recognizes human rights, reframing the issue of homelessness is necessary. However, based on my findings, starting this reframing process in direct service agencies is difficult. It is often that service providers and organizations are closely tied to their funding streams (especially when privately funded) and/or have an influx of clients, which precludes them from the flexibility needed to embrace operating from a human rights approach. Many agencies and organizations are unable to fathom reorganizing their services in the face of pressure from their funding sources that set outcome goals and require cost-benefit analyses. Yet, when interviewing activists and advocates for the homeless, many articulated critical principles and insights that have the potential to contribute toward constructing a working/ implementable human rights discourse on homelessness. Due to their position on the frontlines of policy and research, rooted in continuous contact with homeless men and women, they are not subject to the same pressures and rigidity as are direct service providers. Consequently, they are also not locked into the approaches of the disease or moral models. Their advocacy becomes the point of contact between individual’s needs and structural insufficiencies that recognizes the shortcomings of intervention efforts as they focus on one aspect of an individual’s problem while leaving others unaddressed. From this perspective, these advocates have the ability to then articulate a more humanitarian approach, moving away from seeing homelessness as the consequence of “sin” and/or “sickness.” Their knowledge and standpoint comes from and embraces that of the people who lack permanent housing and are in situations of homelessness, which violate their dignity and humanity. Taking the perspectives of my interviewees, drawing from the interview data, and my own analysis, I hope to present a human rights paradigm that sees homefullness as the antithesis of homelessness.
In this process of reframing the discussion from the ground up, the human rights paradigm emerges as the new and alternate frame to those establish by current paradigms on homelessness. According to George Lakoff, “when you think you just lack words, what you really lack are ideas. Ideas come in the form of frames. When the frames are there, the words come readily” (Lakoff 2004:26). Moving toward the idea of human rights with relation to homelessness, entails moving beyond the narrow scope of the current discourses and creating an alternate view that simultaneously sees the need for structural transformation and reconfigures the moral discourse based on “human rights talk” rather than “sin-talk.”
With respect to the previous discursive frameworks, the new approach focusing on human rights
includes a bio-structural component:
Bio- meaning of the individual- focused on finding out from people what is working, not working, and what are their needs. Also, investigating the common threads among homeless individuals in order to recognize the agency and abilities of an individual in transforming the situations of their own lives by building on these abilities and using them to increase their stability and health. In order to eventually come to a place where homeless men and women have actively, by creating their own plans and options, moved out of the situation of homelessness and into homefullness.
Structural- then looks at wider social problems and systemic inequalities that arise within social, political, and economic structures, such as the lack of affordable housing, employment without a living wage, access to quality medical care, and others. All which play a role in destabilizing the lives of people to the point where they become homeless, and make it increasingly difficult to move from homelessness to homefullness.
With this in mind, seeing homefullness as the fulfillment of human rights requires the redirecting of attention to the precedent set in 1948, at which time the United Nations General Assembly (consisting of 58 countries) drafted and implemented the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This declaration was to be disseminated and displayed without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories (the United States joined the UN on October 24, 1945). Among others, Article 25 of the Declaration deserves particular attention as it states:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his [/her] control (http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html, italics mine).
Furthermore, ten years ago, at Habitat II, a UN-sponsored conference, the United States and 170 other nations participated to reaffirm the basic principles of human rights and include a significant discussion of housing and homelessness. This was done to recognize “adequate housing as essential to the development of individuals and communities and the prevalence of problems associated with its lack” (NLCHP, 2006). This agenda, and the reasons why it is crucial to homelessness, is described in The Homelessness in the United States and the Human Right to Housing report conducted by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (NLCHP, 2006) . The neglect of these sanctions is seen around the world where human rights are continually violated. In this country, among other social issues, the neglect of basic human rights is exemplified through the growth of homelessness and poverty, witnessed by professionals, activists, and academics as a clear and ever visible violation of human rights. Homelessness should be a challenge to our social and personal existence because for one,
Insufficient shelter, supportive housing and permanent affordable housing are critical problems for homeless people. The short supply of shelter forces many homeless people into public areas, which, in addition to subjecting them to the health and safety hazards of living outdoors, also often results in their running afoul of criminal laws (http://www.nlchp.org/content/pubs/report.pdf).
However, people experiencing homelessness are not seen as entitled to those standards of living set out in Article 25. In particular because the focus on the disease and moral discourses makes it difficult to see beyond the problems of the individual in order realize the need to secure human rights that afford people the amenities which they lack (housing, food, jobs, healthcare, education, etc). Recent decades demonstrate that with continual cuts by HUD to anti-homeless programs and to McKinney-Vento Act provisions, homelessness is addressed through management practices such as “clearance and corral” (Gowan 2003). According to the interview with Terry Messman editor of Street Spirit, such actions do not recognize that,
Every person un-housed on the street is a victim of human rights violation. Not some poor, sad, soul, that is lost or unemployed or hard-up, but a fucking victim of a human rights violation that is a scandal and a disgrace in the richest country on earth. Every time we see a homeless woman on the street, a homeless person who has just been discharged from the hospital and they are sick and there is not a respite care facility for them, as there isn’t in the Bay Area, we need to see that as a human rights violation… [The US is] violating the rights of its citizens to live in decent housing and have health care (2006).
The debate of rights in the United States has moved from opening up access to structural benefits such as public housing to the shuffling of homeless men and women within the networks of welfare organizations. At one point, living shelter-less was a major problem that was addressed by the federal government in the 1930s with the development of housing opportunities and subsidizes housing. Today criminalizing the of the use of public space as “home” in situations where people have nowhere else to go makes the current situation of homelessness the “worst it has ever been” (Messman 2006). There is also ever-decreasing transference of government funding to fuel economic and social development in local areas and communities. Instead, programs exist that take away the humanity of and benefits from individuals because they are seen as being the fault for their situations of homelessness. Structural efforts have been replaced with practices of treatment, rehabilitation, and re-socialization, and seen by Paul Boden of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, as facilitating the “fit[ing] of people back into society, [which] does not create opportunities in society to address the growing number of [homeless] and poor people” (2006).
Homelessness in the United States is diminishing as a matter of priority. This, however, is not based on a lack of available resources. For example, the United States military budget requested by the Bush Administration for fiscal year 2007 is $462.7 billion (globalissues.org). There are continual tax breaks for corporations and the rich do not reflect that the United States is in a position marked by limited resources. With respect to housing, the expansion of suburbs and housing developments within rural and urban areas does not indicate that there is a shortage of housing developers (Boden 2006). There is however, a shortage of resources to create housing with the premise of human rights in mind. Here, the lack of willingness on the behalf of developers to build units for below-market rates affordable for people with no, limited, or low incomes demonstrates that building these types of housing at the magnitude necessary to absorb homelessness is indeed risky and unprofitable. It is understandable when building a unit of housing considerably below market rates in metropolitan areas will not yield nearly the amount of profit needed for a development company to grow. However, thinking about the profitability when creating new housing to be available at below market rates, actively fails to recognize that those markets rates reflect a standard of living of the middle to upper-middle classes in the United States, and precludes low-income, poor, and homeless individuals. Also, it does not consider that creating affordable housing is cheaper than providing emergency care, hospitalization, and incarceration (NLCHP, 2006) for people who would most likely otherwise be living more healthy and sustainable lives within permanent residences.
One model used in Berkeley, spoken of by Jane Micallef, Homeless Policy Coordination for the City of Berkeley, is creating case managers as liaisons between housed (formerly) homeless men and women and the landlord, removing the worry and vulnerability of the landlord by placing the case manager in charge of the situation. This agreement with landlords is part of the Shelter Plus Care (SPC) program in Berkeley and is an example of a model that makes it “appealing” to private and public developers to set aside units for homeless people, by providing case managers who can be called upon when/if there is a problem (Micallef 2006). In this case landlords are much more willing and amenable to the idea and process of renting to formerly homeless individuals because the accountability (at least for some time) to a case manager ensures that they are not simply going out on a limb. Although such an approach is important, the words “set aside” evoke ideas of charity to address homelessness, rather than focusing on the necessary parity needed to get at the root of the problem. Securing permanent, adequate, and affordable housing is fundamental in the face of poverty and especially homelessness. Here utilizing a human rights paradigm moves closes to conceptualizing homefullness.
VI. Human rights as the alternative.
The above three discourses each outline the basis for understanding, qualifying, and managing homelessness. Each model emphasizes either the individual or the system, and extends from its analysis a proposed set of solutions. Each discourse, thereby constructs a particular discussion of homelessness, and furthermore, together they create ways of seeing, talking, and approaching the problem. These discourses can be helpful in that they provide an outline for homelessness. However, what is problematic is when they become the basis of operation for organizations and social services. When this occurs, it narrows their scope of homelessness, and thereby does not reflect the complexities of homeless life. This narrowness is exemplified in the face of Jacqueline’s broad and complex story described above; there are many others that share in these complexities. Today homelessness gathers its identity based on the definitions emerging from the “sin”, “sick”, and “system” talk. Within these discourses “the homeless” are a socially constructed group that distinguishes one set of individuals from others in society. Formatting homelessness as a certain (sub)-population within society evokes the “othering” of men and women who face a particular situation, and consequently creates approaches that categorize and treat people based on their differences and what they lack. The discussion becomes about homelessness, around homeless men and women, and regarding their situation, silencing the individuals who experience homelessness daily as serves as an affront to their humanity and dignity.
Breaking through patterns of thought attributed to homelessness which have persisted for decades is quite challenging. Thinking in terms of beneficent care and support that includes one-on-one attention, relationship building, patience, and persistence despite failures and steps backwards, requires more resources and training than are available in services today. It is easier to then respond to homelessness with measures of “clearance and corral”, which partly entail the movement of homeless men and women into shelters, jails, treatment facilities, etcetera. Such regularly adhered-to practices see individuals as incapable, difficult to treat, and publicly intolerable. This looks beyond homelessness as the interplay between personal and structural factors and focuses primarily on the sin and sickness of individuals. “Sin” and “sickness” talk becomes a justification for the lack of structural (mainly housing, jobs, healthcare, and civil rights) availability for individuals. It also goes only as far as providing emergency care because people experiencing homeless are thought to have brought the situation on themselves are thus not deserving of long-term support and benefits. Also people want to believe these individual-based discourses because it allows for the justification of their personal hard work and accomplishments, especially that they are not homeless because they worked harder than those on the street. Here, taking the example of housing, even when a homeless man or woman adheres to the rules and regulations of social services and becomes stable in their “sin” and “sickness”, for them there is no housing to move into or maintain because of the lack of affordable/ available housing units.
Another pattern of thought to be broken break is one that creates a causal link between mental illness and/or substance abuse and homelessness presented by both the disease and moral models. This is problematic on two fronts. First, a causal relationship is mistaken for the development of one, a combination of, or all of the following: mental illness, physical illness, and substance (ab)use, when an individual becomes homeless, and in some cases contributing to their homelessness. This also excludes the potential ability of a person to maintain his/her life and views their perceived dysfunctions as contributing to their inability to keep jobs, afford rent, and access medical care. Janny Castillo, from Building Opportunities for Self Sustainability (B.O.S.S.) in Berkeley, who was once homeless, exemplifies this through the following the following statement,
A lot of people think it [the reason for becoming homeless] is because of drugs and alcohol. That is the one reason that people always seem to feel it is. But drugs and alcohol affect each and every household in America. There isn’t a family in America that hasn’t been affected. The reason that these guys [homeless men and women] are affected more is because there is not a support system under them. They have completely lost contact with their families, they have been separated from everything, and they have lost everything, so the street is where they go. Drugs and alcohol, let’s put it in perspective definitely is a prevailing element within the homeless population, but they are often one paycheck away, so of course if they are strung out, they lose everything… (2006).
Drugs and alcohol act as factors that occasionally push people into homelessness, or impede their movement beyond it. However, there is no direct causal relationship between the two despite common perception. Nevertheless, a disease (or moral) discourse has been established because it is often easier and makes more sense to qualify people as addicted or abusing before considering the possibilities of other deeply seeded and underlying factors that may have contributed to one’s homelessness.
Second, suggesting a causal relationship between substance abuse and mental illness denies the idea that for some people substance abuse occurs because of the inability to deal with hardships, the thinning out of safety nets, and networks of social support. Within homelessness, the lack of access to healthcare creates situations where self-medication with substances “helps” people to manage their everyday lives. In the case of mental illness, personality disorders such as depression, as well as more severe disorders—schizophrenia and bipolar—can be exacerbated in times of stress relating to and surrounding prolonged homelessness. In reference to the systemic discourse that presents external rather than personal factors to explain homelessness, it is wrong to establish that mental illness and/or substance abuse as direct causes of homelessness. Such a connection foregoes the possibilities that for a variety of reasons, for example, a person could not afford to pay rent and for other amenities
The main implication of establishing such a relationship is that it locks homeless men and women into a system that sees them solely as homeless and not as human beings experiencing a complicated situation. Furthermore, it promotes the reproduction of ideas and thoughts, which are largely based on misconceptions and are pervasive; ideas that become wrongly generalized to homelessness. Labeling individuals based on their disorders, problems, and disease also makes it difficult for others to see them, as well as them to see themselves, as capable, to develop a sense of trust, and build self-efficacy. These attributes are necessary to support the confidence and energy of individuals and help them traverse the homeless service industry, deal with life, and move toward homefullness. However, long waiting lists, endless visits to clinics, drop-in centers, hospitals, employment centers, each attest to the fact that while creating a massive emergency service system, long-term solutions, in particular housing, are not being introduced despite the demand. With this as the current climate in the homelessness arena, through her work at the Homeless Action Center, April Davis has noticed that after a while, many individuals no longer have “the stamina to keep going through the loop of services and get passed around through the process so they stop trying, then their lives become [solely] about managing their day to day situations versus trying to access benefits” (2006). Homelessness has been nestled into a sphere comprised of the moral and disease models, with structural attempts lacking large-scale support while the situation continues to expand. This problem will continue to be seen as an inextricable part of society as long as individuals remain carrying the blame for their homelessness, and as long as their choices and behaviors continue to be viewed as a justification for a lack of political, economic, and social will to end the problem.
This perceived inevitability of homelessness continues to exist today despite of the solutions created in 1930s, and carried out through the 1970s, to aid those experiencing homelessness. In the 1930s, these solutions consisted of systemic transformations (WPA, Social Security, Housing Act of 1937, First Food Stamp Program 1939), which were established to help local communities recover from economic strains and hardships brought on by the Great Depression. Up until the late 1970s, progress continued to be envisioned for the marginally housed in that they would eventually become fully housed (Boden 2006). Also, union (CIO) and community organizing within local communities put immense pressure on the government to take an active role and responsibility to create employment and other opportunities (education, class, childcare) to serve communities (Boden 2006). This was the window of time when the assurance of safety nets, community investment, and opportunities for people to escape situations of homelessness were activated even if personal and external factors had pushed them there. However, such strategies are quite different from the
Aspects we have [today] to screen everybody [and] rehabilitate everybody. I mean [then] it was very much that we needed to create an economic engine that was going to allow people not to be in the level of poverty we see today, and was going to create housing opportunities for people— that doesn’t exist today (Boden 2006).
Here, Boden suggests that the mindset of prioritizing people has shifted toward ensuring corporate welfare that contributes to increasing homelessness and poverty, while contracting the welfare state. The movement toward these strategies first occurred in the 1980s during a time in which policies of social austerity, put homelessness on the map as a problem that needed emergency services and in which people needed treatment and rehabilitation. Even with the establishment of the McKinney-Vento Act, its contraction years over reflects the idea that,
You can’t end homelessness, you can impact the poverty programs and the education programs, and the housing programs to the point that there are less homeless people…[Homeless people] exist because the other shit wasn’t working. But you can’t end homelessness until you’ve knocked down all those barriers. And by setting ourselves up the way we have…we’ve allowed ourselves to become another tier and another player in the fuckin’ arena (quoted in Gowan 2003: 51-52).
Since the 1980s, homelessness has largely been thought about, as previously stated, as a symptom of disease within the individual. The approach toward homelessness established two and a half decades prior has today been recycled. Neither the creation of a network of working models for individuals, nor the pressure once again for solutions rooted in systemic transformation reflecting the progress of the 1930s-70s, are evident. Reflective of this are the established definitions and bodies of knowledge on homelessness that see homeless men and women as hard pressed, “failing to cooperate” (Davis 2006), and difficult to explain or figure out. From these visions come models, formulas, and rehabilitative measures that seek to help homeless men and women. They do so without first having a solidified, working understanding of the people within homelessness. In an interview with Dr. Alan Steinbach, when talking about the current response to homelessness, he stated that,
Part of the problem is that anyone who has studied economics knows that most prevailing theories of the market economy say that you have homelessness as you must have joblessness, as you must have people without medical care, and that those are all integral to the market economy. And without them, without this sort of dark drain-like effect at the bottom, you can’t have the glowing brilliance at the top (2006).
Subsequently, “system-talk” runs into wider social problems that are overwhelming and less popular because “providing care for [the] homeless is not a very winning proposition” (Steinbach 2006). Addressing the lack of affordable housing, creating a living wage, and access to medical care, jobs, and education, opens up a Pandora’s Box. Not only does this mean that governments on various levels have to create solutions to address homelessness, but also poverty, and other social phenomena in which people run into structural barriers. Not addressing the system beyond providing emergency shelter, coupled with views of individuals within the disease and moral models has created a massive artificial relief industry supporting what Dr. Steinbach calls the “glowing brilliance at the top”.
The growing scale of homelessness reflects the non-prioritization of anti-homelessness policies. Throughout the past twenty five years, what can be seen regarding homelessness suggest that “public policy based on assumptions, fear, and paranoia about people forced to live on the streets will never create a plan that can work” (WRAP). However, rethinking this prioritization and emphasizing human rights rather than anti-homelessness measures has the potential to redefine the moral model in terms of “human rights talk.” Restructuring the moral model will create the necessity and pressure for structural changes such as an increase in affordable housing availability and other basic human rights provisions, it envisions moving toward ending homelessness, and has the potential to address issues of poverty.
What becomes clear is that hearing and seeing homelessness through the current lens that magnifies the sin and sickness of the homeless will not achieve a social movement based on progress toward homefullness for the marginally housed. The turning point for a new approach is coming to comprehensive conclusions from the standpoint of homeless individuals that will activate a social movement to address from homelessness. This alternate body of knowledge would be a reflection of people’s lives, dynamic and complex, and realize that people have only “chosen ” “their life on the streets [to the extent that] the alternatives were not appealing… [For example] if we tell somebody that they have to be clean before we are going to offer them housing there are going to be a lot of people that are going to say that I would rather freeze on the streets” (Micallef 2006). This reflection demonstrates that the lives of homeless people do not fit neatly into the formulas and models seeking to rehabilitate and restore homeless men and women without first listening, coming to a better understanding, and then proceeding to “help.”
While the homeless service industry manages homelessness, men and women have to manage their lives on the street. Many have lost hope in alternatives because promises of housing post rehabilitation and transitional programs have not been fulfilled. Homeless individuals return to the very environments and situations from which they had attempted to leave. It is not surprising that after twenty five years of “talking about [homeless] people and setting up services to meet the needs of those people, the system continues to be fucking dismantled as do other sustain[able] programs” (Boden 2006). Meanwhile, organizations continue to think that they “rescue individuals with great programs” but in the end “can’t stop homelessness” (Messman 2006) or prevent it from happening all together. In order to move from managing the homeless to creating options where homeless people are managing their homelessness via a “working” organization, a re-analysis of approach is necessary as previous discourses have proved inconclusive. To better explain homelessness, a new paradigm of (universal) human rights is needed, on that has largely been silenced within homelessness. Bringing voice and exposing the silence will occur when homelessness is no longer seen as just a violation of people’s rights, but worse a violation of people’s humanity and recognition as human.
A human rights paradigm operates largely from the standpoint of the homeless men and women. From their lived experiences and perceptions of the world that they face daily emerges the basis for political, economic, and social struggle. This is a simultaneous bottom-up/top-down transformation as it creates the pressure for organizations and services to transform the ways in which they contribute to anti-homelessness work. As well as pressures the government from the standpoint of those directly affected by policy.
Table 2: Human Rights Paradigm: Reframing the Current Discourses on Homelessness *
moral moral-disease disease disease-structural structural moral-structural
- the new moral model characterized by “human rights talk” based on the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) versus “sin talk” which stems from conservative ideas/ideals
- conceiving human rights as inalienable that recognize human beings versus conceptualizing people as “the homeless” based on stereotypes and perceptions
- encompasses the potential to rally people for a greater cause and the impetus for a social movement
- sees the importance of listening to people experiencing homelessness, basing understanding of the problem on their lived experiences and perceptions
example: The Homeless Congress held by the San Francisco Coalition for the Homeless
- recognizes the agency of individuals and ability to make changes and create options for themselves
- organizing people experiencing homelessness throughout cities and communities nationwide to rally for their human rights instead of seeing them as hopeless, helpless, and those who fail to cooperate – “human rights talk” as the basis for the moral model then sees “disease” as contributing to the complexities, barriers, hardships of homeless life
- sees homelessness as a human rights violation especially when people do not receive proper care for their “diseases”
example: non-existent detoxification facility for all of Alameda County
- individual faults that are highlighted in both these models are restored in the pursuit of human rights
- fault becomes relative
- what becomes emphasized is agency in moving toward homefullness over an individuals choices and faults that have lent themselves to defining the causes of homelessness in the past
- reflects the real lived experiences and complexities of homeless men and women that live experiencing mental and/or physical illness and/or substance (ab)use
example: Jacqueline’s story
- realizes the difficulties these factors present in when people attempt to move from homelessness when there are categorized by their “disease” and in the face of a lack of appropriate facilities or structural provisions does not see homelessness as symptom of individual downfall or dysfunction
- changing the case of criminalization, incarceration, the “clearance and corral” in shelters and jails to–
- creating
benevolent care facilities and organizations for those that are experiencing, one, a combination of, or all of the following: mental illness, physical illness, and substance (ab)use
- with the recognition of human rights building/creating tangible housing units, moving toward making systemic changes in order to open outlets for people to create options for themselves
- expansion versus contraction of the welfare state and acknowledging the pervasiveness and existence of racism, class disparity, economic polarization
- acknowledging the need for universal healthcare and a universal living wage
- “human rights talk” provides the basis for structural changes and social service changes that eliminate homelessness
- people experiencing homelessness are no longer seen as non-entitled or forsaking the available services because of their “sin”
- human rights creates the basis for seeing individuals as having the potential to “re-establish” themselves and creates the pressure for the provision of structural supports (housing, jobs, healthcare, etc)
- exposes existent inequalities and disparities within society (class, race, genden, etc)
- establishes society as nurturing versus disciplinarian (Lakoff 2001)
The Human Rights Paradigm operates largely from the standpoint of the homeless men and women. From their lived experiences and perceptions of the world they face daily emerges the basis for political, economic, and social struggle and transformation. This is a simultaneous bottom-up/ top-down movement and transformation because creates the pressure for organizations and services to transform the ways in which they contribute to anti-homelessness work, as well as pressures governments from the standpoint of those directly affected by policy.
* The Human Rights Paradigm has the potential to move from addressing homelessness to addressing issues of poverty.
Reframing homelessness within this paradigm requires moving away from homeless management and toward homefullness. The above graph and table explain the components of this new paradigm which ultimately redefines the current discourses on homelessness by converging on the basic premises of human rights as the amended moral model. It also sets up the disease model based on benevolent care, and seeing structural changes as nonnegotiable, as it considers the dialogue between each and (finally) all of these of these models. Human rights talk (re)creates the new moral discourse which has the potential to promote social, political, and economic will for structural and social service changes. This model incorporates the importance of (re)building an infrastructural base/foundation, as well as addressing individual needs by creating options within communities based on what is already working in order for individuals to move into homefullness. Such a model focuses on relationship building between the community, homeless agencies and organizations, and homeless men and women, in order to investigate common threads throughout each. In this way, dialogue or two-way communication is opened up which is fundamental for a human rights approach. Such an approach is premised on untangling the complexities of homelessness based on the experiences of those in the situation and builds trust between the parties involved. A concept of trust is important because within homelessness mistrust is found on various tiers of the problem. Homeless men and women lack trust (and faith) in other homeless people, the system, the community, and vis-a-versa, and consequently the approaches of “clearance and corral” are the manifestations of that mistrust. Opening up dialogue and first and foremost advancing “human rights talk,” overturns the alienation and process of “othering” through which homeless men and women are “forced” to occupy marginal spaces in society even as they are a visible part of the urban façade.
This new dialogue also contains the potentiality to move away from the narrow ways in which homelessness is approached and toward community building and changing social consciousness. The human rights approach reflects the golden rule of homeless organizing, which is “rooted in homelessness people… [Because] if it doesn’t start there, then it stays in an abstract and [/or] irrelevant mode” (Messman 2006). Reflecting the golden rule via the human rights paradigm, homelessness moves from being an inevitable and untouchable part of society, to a situation in which people have real needs and are seen as human. With this comes the listening and actually hearing of the needs of people experiencing homelessness and a more effective way of establishing the links between individuals and homeless networks of organization. This promotes the serving and referring of people in more accurate ways even in the midst of lacking resources. As well as, recognizing the humanity of people by promoting their self-efficacy, dignity, and rebuilding their trust. When making the best possible use of resources cannot provide for the most basic needs (food, shelter, care, etc) for people as outline in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it signifies a crisis. This is the crisis that exists today. The deprivation of resources contributing in part to the growth of homelessness creates a situation in which the governments can no longer displace this social phenomenon by justifying its existence via the disease and moral discourses. The occurrence of this displacement of homelessness by governments is a concept described by George Lakoff (2004) as the process of framing a discussion to fit the world view of the current (and in this case past) political structure. The language of these models in turn delivers the proposals for managing homelessness based on the ideas these discursive frames evoke. The human rights paradigm, as it reframes homelessness, also requires the active involvement of the federal government to achieve structural changes.
Deconstructing homelessness via a discussion of human rights, presents the idea that ending homelessness is a process of reframing—creating new frames. For example, for some individuals “ending homelessness” happens by providing then with a hot meal and a bed for a night, while for others it is requires long(er) term provisions and support, such as income supplementation and housing. What occurs is a fluid continuum starting by gathering information and establishing the common threads among homelessness to then linking people to organizations that can best serve their needs. Operating from “lived experiences organizations have the ability to open up their services and allow people to create their own plans and options. Instead of rigidity, people receive support which they need order for them to move themselves into homefullness. This “reframing” process creates a way of seeing that is radically different than seeing people as helpless and incapable. Micallef argues that working from a continuum will then ensure that “the resources that we have are really suiting the needs of those people that are actually homeless in our communities” and prevent other services from actively “precluding people in [certain] categories from participating [in programs] or [which] are structured in such a way that the procedures for getting into them are so full of barriers that they are not successfully serving people” (2006). This picture looks clearer and approachable than a convoluted web of proposals for the “rampant” (and complex) problems of homelessness. Shifting the focus from the organization (the director, funding stream, and outcome measures) to the client, and establishing accountability to the needs of the people utilizing services making room for a more humanizing model. In retrospect, this is the starting point for the recognition of human rights.
Using the human right paradigm further reframes the collection of established frames on homelessness as a challenge to those frames, and ultimately to the existence of homelessness. It does so by refusing to recognize homelessness as an inevitable condition and requires immediate, specific, and large-scale social transformation. What has occurred with homelessness is that policy makers over the years have come to see this social problem as necessary scapegoat because it promotes the dichotomy of normal versus abnormal social existence. Homeless men and women are categorized by their faults, deficits, and inabilities and are set up as the antithesis to those who succeed because of their determination, hard work, and strong values. This is why, as Dr. Steinbach points out, it is a not seen as winning proposition to help the homeless and provide them with benefits extending beyond emergency care. Being a “hard sell”, it is not surprising that neoliberal policies focus on expanding the free market that necessitates a “dark drain” in order to ensure the proper functioning of the market rather than expanding the welfare state and creating universal benefits. Constructing meritocratic systems, especially within education and employment, does not address poverty and homelessness. Many homeless fall through the cracks because they are not supported by low wage and service sector jobs within a global division of labor bent on efficiency, increased production, and acquisition of profit. Here, as Messman states, much as homelessness is an issue of human rights, it is also an issue of economic justice and political rights for people. Many of whom are disenfranchised, and most of who no longer want to be categorized based on their diseases and imperfections, asked why they are homeless, or are blamed for their situation. Shifting blame from the “system” and onto the individuals is pervasive and its questioning is necessary in order to start asking what were the alternatives that individuals, at the tipping point of homelessness, wished that they had or had chosen, and what opportunities were available (and not) for their choosing. Providing stabilizing alternatives and promoting non-judgmentally thinking can be utilized to support individuals in the improvement of their own lives and help them create option in order to move to more a healthy existence. Until this happens Boden states that,
We will be far away from seeing the end or solution to homelessness. We have shelters and all these other organizations because the fuckin’ federal government will do everything in its power to keep a revolution from happening… Because we need a revolution if anything is going to change (2006).
This idea of revolution does not often make its way into a discussion of homelessness for the obvious reasons that it evokes radicalism, rebellion, and action against the governing bodies of this nation. However, as far as human rights is seen as revolutionary, there is a body of knowledge, mainly the Universal Declaration, that makes the human rights paradigm in relation to homelessness practical in its “revolutionary” ideas. It makes practical the need of governments to prioritize addressing homelessness and reinvest in ameliorative efforts.
If not revolutionary ideas leading to a social movement, then what will it take to have such a prioritization that expands the welfare state and recognizes the violation of human rights as unacceptable under any circumstances or conditions. For example, conditions such as disabilities (mental or physical), substance (ab)use, and other problems or seemingly immoral behaviors do not make homeless people intractable from housing. When they are used as such, homelessness stands as a violation of human rights. Also, it is not the homeless person who is in reality different, but homelessness as an unacceptable state, that differentiates a person from those who are housed, despite the reality that people who are housed experience similar problems. According to Jessica Flintoft of Homebase the Center for Common Concern, this in turn “makes the homelessness the problem, the state of being homeless, and not their real problems” (2006) and partly deters the discussion from securing human rights. Focusing on the individual not homelessness as the problem makes the reality of ending their homelessness as seemingly impossible. A gentleman regularly comes into Suitcase Clinic and makes the same complaint to the coordinators week after week. His complaint is, “is it fair that I had everything and now I have nothing… what is fair about that.” This question of fairness is often heard expressed, and dealt with, in different ways among people who are homeless, each in a different way try to make sense and come to an understanding of their situation. It is not surprising that this complaint continues to surface week after week. The response simply is that it is not fair, and the problem, explains Flintoft, “isn’t with the person, the problem is everything that has allowed the person to get to that point.” The problem is not having human rights as a framework against which to juxtapose homelessness, leaving it to the current three discourses to explain and construct it as a problem. Which in turn highlights the weaknesses of people. Focusing on weaknesses leaves littler room to recognize the strengths and needs of people, and use this recognition to organizing the pressure necessary for social/systemic change.
The potential for a transformation in order to come to a better understanding of homelessness and simultaneously emphasize the strengths and capabilities of people is twofold. First, there is a need to focus on homelessness rather than on the “the homeless.” In order to begin to utilize a new language and create new frames of reference, it is important to see that,
Getting people off the streets is a negative stereotype, [and rather using] the paradigm of getting them housed. If they are homeless we want them to be housed, if they are penniless we want them to have money, if they are hungry we want them to be fed, if they are cold we want them to be warm, if they are wet we want them to be dry. So, rather than ever getting into a negative, we want to accomplish something that is the removal of this (Steinbach 2006, italics mine).
Demanding more from the “system” in terms of parity and implementing the mentality shift through language are both necessary to create the options that will promote the agency of individuals and the prioritization of structural changes.
Second, it is necessary to adapt models of “harm reduction” not solely within institutional settings, but attributed to the manner of approach taken with people who are experiencing homelessness. For example, creating opportunities for people in their communities to work with local organizations by conducting research, learning about the resources/tools available, and doing community organizing and/or counseling for others, while given them a stipend and place to sleep is a big step in building up and adding to the capabilities of individuals. This also creates networks of options/outlets, a resource base, and support for people. Boden uses the example, “when you have options and you’re doing the work… you have to stay sober so you can think and remember what you did, [and then] options open up” (2006). The mentality shift toward a working approach helps build the self-efficacy, trust, and will of individuals needed for homefullness. It also removes the “smoke screen” from homelessness that sees people in adverse ways rather that from positions of trust . Harm reduction strategies work well for those who experience mental health and/or substance use because they first try to gain people’s acceptance by supporting people in not hurting themselves rather than trying to stop them in doing risky behaviors. Rather than saying you must stop these risky behaviors and let’s see how you can live you life to the fullest. When individuals come to the place where they can say is there a way that I could not be doing what I am doing, you say “yes, these are the things you can do” and present them with resources (Steinbach 2006). For extreme cases of mental health issues and substance abuse, more coercive measures may be necessary if those added elements to homelessness keep an individual from even the minimal functioning. In other cases, presenting options and choices are more powerful agents and work beyond the mental health and substance abuse scope via which these models of help are normally implemented.
Investigating what works and finding out what is missing from the main discourses on homelessness, will also reframe the discussion of homelessness based on the voices of those who are living in situations of homelessness. This is where the implementation of an action-reflection component within agencies becomes integral to their effectiveness and to the accurateness with which they view homelessness. It is important from an agency perspective to know whether or not they are doing well or not, and if they are willing to change as they go along. Consequently, as propounded by Micallef, it is necessary to be able to remove the rigidity and inflexibility of an approach that may be “creating barriers to participation and then blaming the client—‘the client wasn’t ready’, ‘the client still has an active substance use problem,’ ‘the client can’t meaningfully participate because…’” (2006). That is the action. The reflection is then initiated when agencies come to see that, as stated again stated by Micallef, “maybe it is our fault because we are not engaging [the client] properly, and we are not understanding where they are and providing services that are inappropriate to the stage where they are in their own recovery” (2006). An example of shifting from seeing people as clients to consumers is given by Flintoft, who retells a statement made by man who said, “I don’t want to be a case, I don’t want to be anybody’s case, I am a person… I am not homeless, I’ve been living homeless in Palo Alto for 20 years, on the streets, I was never homeless, I just didn’t have a house” (2006). Looking at this example, thinking differently about the individuals who enter social services organizations and looking at the situation from their perspective allows for the engagement and recognition of that person. It helps to see homelessness rather than the homeless person as the problem.
Action-reflection works in a reciprocal fashion, without one necessarily preceding the other. It seeks to shift the philosophy of models by asking, “how can we expect [homeless people] to address [their] substance use, and to stabilize [their] mental health issues if [they] are not even stable in housing” (Micallef 2006). Demanding more to meet the needs of those voices by reflecting on the activity of an organization, and operating from the perspective of clients, has the power to exert the necessary pressure to, for example, redirect the agenda’s of policy makers to expand, not contract, public programs such as Section 8 and McKinney-Vento. Currently, it is difficult to proceed with such a reframing because service organizations are focused on particular issues concerning homelessness and,
No one is really talking about [re]-conceptualization because people do not think that it [the way we currently talk about homelessness] is a problem except as an individual problem relating to people experiencing homelessness, not structural… But at the same time, how can you not want a re-conceptualization (Davis 2006).
There has to be a starting point because promoting a re-conceptualization, two other crucial elements come into view. The first is that structural changes become seen as overtly necessary, and the second is that people do not fit neatly into prevailing discourses. This allows for the scales to tip the other way, so that moving toward systemic appropriations for homelessness start to outweigh the quantity of stopgap, “band-aide,” and emergency services that continue to expand. Reassessing what is tangible and quantifiable, and what can be done to move toward long(er)- term solutions is possible. To start, a more practical vision with human rights as the foundation, would start to recognize society needs to be
nurturing and that what we need to do then if we really want to address homelessness, is to set up structures that will convince people that they might have a chance, that they might be able to succeed, that they might be able to move from homelessness to [being] housed (Steinbach 2006).
This way those individuals who may simply need a hot meal or short-term shelter, an overnight stay, as well as those who are “chronically” homeless, are seen from under the same perspective, through the lens of society as nurturing. With nurturing societies that are devoted to taking care of its citizens, and securing human rights, agencies are able to work on a continuum relating to housing, with the eventual goal of permanent housing as a human right and the achievement of homefullness.
Moving toward this type of restoration for people would also require asking questions such as “’How do the homeless understand their [situation]? When we listen, which stories do we hear and which do we ignore?” (Wright 1997:15-16). This contributes to the action-reflecting necessary to also move close to reframing the discussion on more human and rights oriented terms. In reference to Lakoff (2004), activating new frames starts by using the aforementioned action-reflection model but also by focusing on active and engaged reflection, in this case, especially upon the language used to talk about homelessness. “Sin”, “sick”, and “system” talk are example of the use of language to describe people, and going back to their definitions it becomes clear how each is used to produce a specific description of homelessness. For example, saying “homeless people” is fundamentally different from “people experiencing homelessness”. The first use implies a subpopulation of individuals categorically different from others, whereas the latter presents the same individuals as experiencing a situation in life that is temporary.
From altering the language comes the next step of thinking commonsensically about the problem of homelessness. The main perception of people experiencing homelessness comes from those who are visibly noticed, however, according to UC Berkeley Professor of Social Welfare Policy, Paul Terrell, “a lot of the people are invisible, most of the homeless people are not on the streets, people identify the people they see on the street as the homeless, but that is a small fraction of the homeless…” (2006). Many people who are homeless are possibly in temporary housing situations, camping, in shelters, transitional housing, hospitals, jails, or in even in homed care, still they are homeless by their lack of permanent housing. Advocating for human rights beyond just basic access and for more substantial provisions is an example of the “common sense” necessary to create new frames, in this case conceptualizing permanent housing as a right. Another example is that many homeless people can be thought of as the “working poor, [because] more and more homeless people are employed” (Terrell 2006). Whether they are formally or informally employed, many people experiencing homelessness work for street vendors, as un-permitted vendors, do landscaping, recycle cans, run errands for people, and do other odd jobs. However, much of this work goes unrecognized and unappreciated by observers. Applying common sense to create new frames would no longer categorize homeless people within deviant, unemployed, and non-consumptive occupational frames. Rather, it would lead to the recognition that people’s skills and abilities as tools that are implemented to carve out a sense of respect and dignity, in an attempt to supplement their income based on what they are able to do.
A last example focuses on the question of housing, and thinking that it “does more to provide a refuge and sense of stability in [a person’s] life than anything else. This essentially shifts the philosophy of models by asking, “how can we expect [homeless people] to address [their] substance use, and to stabilize [their] mental health issues if [they] are not even stable in housing” (Micallef 2006). Terry Messman editor of Street Spirit, reflects that there is a “calamitous shortage of affordable housing” and that without “permanent housing as the very foundation as the first thing on our wish list” (2006) how can realistic, or any, expectations and outcome measures be established for individuals. Without housing as one of the fundamentals of human rights, there is ultimately no solution to homelessness. Rethinking both housing and employment by activating new frames, other aspects of the situation of homelessness can also be re-thought—the meeting of people’s health care needs, accessible and quality education, and protection of their civil liberties. These aspects, along with jobs and housing, work reciprocally with each other in the movement from homelessness to homefullness.
VII. Conclusion.
The aforementioned discussion is the type of reflective thinking that creates frames, which move away from utilizing language based on misconceptions and assumptions about people experiencing homelessness. It moves toward a new approach of the human rights paradigm, which recreates the moral model with “human rights talk” as its basis. This approach is the dialogue between individual and agency, and what structural inequalities and necessary changes are needed for people to move themselves from the situation of homelessness to homefullness. In these ways individuals experiencing homelessness are recognized as active and engaged members of society who do not just challenge the tenets of everyday life, are not simply part of the urban façade, or those who pose a quality of life or public space issue, but are human. Reframing the discussion alters the way homelessness as a whole is regarded, and moves toward more appropriate actions.
To start, positioning people experiencing homelessness at the center of service organizations works from the needs of the population they serve. This has the potential to both increase the effectiveness of organizations in providing services that aid individuals in positive and beneficial ways, and also develop the dignity, respect, and agency of homeless individuals. In order to come to a working understanding of the lives of homeless men and women, an investigation of the common threads among them is imperative and such an endeavourer was recently taken on by the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. This study was confirmed by the Homeless People’s Congress made up of homeless men and women who placed the finding of this report in order of priority within the categories of Housing, Economic Justice, Health Care, Civil and Human Rights. Randy Shaw in his section on homelessness in the Activists Handbook comments that one of the problems of responding to homelessness is a lack of strategy that presents tangible and implementable plans to prevent/ease/solve homelessness and,
Because the presence of homeless persons on city streets has persisted for more than a decade, the public may simply come to accept widespread homelessness as a disturbing but unalterable fact of life. It is therefore more imperative than ever that homeless activists regain the offensive and act aggressively to broaden public support for their constituency (1996:26).
Those common threads outlined in the Homeless People’s Congress are tangible and implementable. By identifying these commonalities, Paul Boden suggests “we can begin to make some assumptions and perhaps come up with a hypothesis about the causes of and potential solutions to ‘the problem’ of homelessness.” No longer would assumptions be based on generalizations about homelessness, but on evidence that comes directly from the people that are living homeless, and those directly impacted by the lack of provisions advocated for and prioritized in the Homeless People’s Congress. Nonetheless, a transformation toward the human rights paradigm will take time and effort until it is fully realized as fundamental to addressing and ending homelessness and poverty. Meanwhile, a more immediate and everyday approach reflecting the new moral model that will build such a movement is needed. A non-profit group in San Francisco that call themselves the Faithful Fools exemplifies this approach. This group, working in the Tenderloin, has vowed to suspend their preconceived judgments about people, especially the poor and homeless, and remove their expectations, in order to do what they call “walking” along side (both literally and figuratively) those people living homeless. By walking with individuals they support them in traversing and making it through the daily life of homelessness. All the while they are also transforming themselves and their personal judgments about homelessness and homeless men and women that arise in many individuals based on what they have come to know and what they have seen in relation to homelessness.
This team of Fools acts as the support network for many men and women living homeless in the Tenderloin. They assist homeless men and women by accompanying them to appointments, meetings, trying to help them find jobs, housing, medical/psychiatric care, and meet other needs. The Fools act without expectations of success, having learned patience in the face of failure. They do not measure their success by the number of people rehabilitated or housed; rather for them what is primary is acknowledging another person’s humanity. The Faithful Fools see homeless people as their equals, and as Messman describes them as “as smart as [anyone], they are just smart in a different way, because you cannot go through life on this fucked up planet without learning survival strategies…” (2006). Their approach reflects a social model that recognizes that it is time to start prioritizing the need for providing options for people who are caught up in the self-perpetuating problem of homelessness. The way of the Fools is working with those who make up the “dark drain,” and their organization, as well as others, are in what Boden describes as “the trenches trying to drain the fucking swamp” (2006) by doing what they know best– building relationships directly with the people whose voice they represent. Even while in the “trenches” they use the limited resources they do have to create/provide options for people. For many they have become family, friends, and community, for others they are a resource, and for some they simply have a place where they can have a hot cup of tea. The Fools and Messman have come to hope against the odds in order to see people have incredibly rich and important life experiences and if you get them to participate, for example, if you put them on the board of your non-profit, if you make them able to hire and fire the counselors that are coming into work, they will make sure that you do not hire social service workers that are paternalistic or condescending. Not that homeless people are any better than the rest of us, but they have experiences and if they are not represented then academic or professionally trained social workers will continue to fail to understand their lives and give them the services from which they can benefit. This is an approach contrary to the established discourses that organize the scholarship around and services that “fight” homelessness. However, such discourses are themselves caught up in a power struggle and debate amongst themselves over which provides the best explanation of the problem, adding confusion and disillusion to organizations.
Rethinking and re-acting to homelessness outside the discourses looks very different from what is widely accepting within the archipelago of homeless services and policies. Emphasizing the humanity and need for human rights for homeless men and women means eschewing outcome measures of success and value judgments placed on individuals based on their housing status. Dr. Steinbach states that the problematics of such an approach is that for many people,
The disconnect [from homelessness] is too great for them to even start to process [the problem]. They wouldn’t choose to work with the homeless because they are personally affronted by smells, their behaviors, and their looks. [The response is] ‘I don’t even want to go there.’ And certainly the homeless do not deserve that… As long as homelessness is viewed as anything other than “my problem” and “part of my life” it probably doesn’t have a solution. When it is viewed as part of my life, then it will be effectively solved. So in keeping with so many other things in society, as long as we can marginalize or push away or push down or clean up or move to another city the problem, and as long as people really won’t think of it as their problem, or even a social problem… (2006).
In some many ways this statement is true, however, people working with homelessness, such as the Faithful Fools, have filled the disconnect by viewing homelessness as part of their life and thus their problem because it directly impacts the communities in which they live. This does not mean that they have completely left their lives behind and dedicated themselves fully to “solving” homelessness. They continue to have independent lives, but have committed to walking with people, being their support, accompanying them, and using their skills to help those facing homelessness, many of whom literally live and sleep outside their doors. The Fools are also actively engaged and conscious of their language and actions in relation to homelessness. What they do is an example of reframing by breaking through the preconceptions, judgments, and stereotypes in the face of there being “at every turn example[s] of stereotypes that are based on ignorance, and which if you can’t point out in an effective way will just produce confusion, embarrassment, and angry retreat” (Steinbach 2006). What does occur is a model that is not highly favored, but that is practical when working with people. It is one that provides the support, lays out the options, “walks” with people and/or opens its doors to people in order to help them manage their own lives (despite mental or physical disabilities) in more healthy and sustainable ways. Even, when a person becomes housed, the book on homelessness cannot be closed because other components—income or supplemented income, healthcare, a support network, and/or education—are necessary to ensure homefullness. Otherwise a person may not be able to manage their housing, and they will once again slide off into situations of homelessness.
These are the new tangible, quantifiable, resource efficient, outcomes and ways of approaching homelessness. People’s beds may still be made of concrete, they still may be homelessness, but they are no longer the sick, sinful, or helpless because of system failure. They are once again seen as human, and in need of basic and substantial, as well as permanent amenities. Until those amenities are met and until their human rights are recognized, they should be supported in positive ways, ensuring their self-efficacy and success. From this homeless men and women will gain the strength to organize a movement exposing homelessness as a violation of human rights and as a social crisis, as well as pressure the federal government to rethink their position on the matter. No longer can homelessness be ignored and homeless men and women silenced.
Appendix A:
From Sin, Sickness, and the System: Discursive Construction of Male Homelessness in San Francisco and St. Louis by Teresa Gowan, 2003: 25.
The 3 discourses moral disease systemic
agency of homeless individual strong weak weak
focus of casual narrative individual individual structural
central cause of poverty sin sickness structural
analysis of the causes of homelessness
permissiveness & cultural decline create deviant individual who is lazy, opportunistic, pleasure-seeking, irresponsible, & often criminal sickness in the form of addiction and mental illness
family dysfunction in the form of child abuse, poor parenting, weak labor market attachment class version
economic polarization, low pay, inadequate health care and welfare safety net, lack of affordable housing for the bottom 20 percent race version
exclusion of African-Americans from middle-class education, jobs and housing, racist arrests & incarceration
primary strategies for managing homelessness – clearance
- corral
- removal of cash benefits – treatment
- sheltered housing – prevention
- emergency service provision
Table 1: the three discourses on homelessness
Appendix B: Interview Questions
1. How did you get involved in issues of homelessness?
2. What are the biggest barriers that keep people from getting off the streets?
3. How can social services be improved to better serve the homeless community?
4. What does it mean to serve/help? Are social services really working?
a. What are, or are there, other approaches that are more effective?
b. What can be done despite the shortage in resources?
5. How do we move beyond stereotypes, traditional thoughts on homelessness, and move into more appropriate and effective patterns of thought that are not stigmatizing?
6. How do you feel about what comes out of academia with regards to homelessness?
a. How is it similar/different from what is occurring among people experiencing homelessness today?
b. How is it similar/different from what you experience in your particular work?
c. What are other ways of analyzing the “problem” that are more humanizing?
7. Have you encountered different discourses of thought about homelessness that are more helpful and usable on the streets than some of the one we have heard (disease, moral, systemic models)?
8. What do you think about the debate on the use of public space by people experiencing homelessness?
9. What do you think are the most pressing issues concerning homeless people?
10. Where do we go from here? How do we address those issues?
11. How do we reframe our argument, namely how we discuss homelessness in order to be more effective?
a. What are better ways of defining “homelessness”
12. How do we increase social responsibility and concern?
a. How do we increase responsiveness to homelessness as a social problem?
13. How do you keep from getting worn out? How do you keep from getting desensitized in your work?
14. Is there anything else that you would like to add?
15. Is there anyone else you think that I should contact, or any literature that would be useful for my project?
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