A news article about events in Denver summarized the situation in many American cities:

Currently, urinating outside is an inevitability for people who are homeless, yet it exposes them to police citation and ticketing. What is more, when an individual fails to pay a citation, or appear in court for it, they become subject to arrest. Thus, simply fulfilling a basic human need ultimately results in arrest. This greatly stalls that individual’s ability to extricate her or himself from homelessness.

The title of a piece from TheDailyBeast.com stated the case even more succinctly: “Homeless People Have to Pee, Too. Find a Place for Them & Stop Complaining About It, You Monsters.”
It quotes Shawn Shafner of The Poop Project, who agrees that prosecuting people for public urination criminalizes homelessness.

He says:

People who get dogs and don’t take them out to pee — we call them abusers. Those dogs get taken away. But for people with Crohn’s (Disease) or colitis or IBS, or those who develop incontinence with old age, or even pregnant women who need that space— we don’t afford them those same privileges a lot of the time.

And then there’s food poisoning, always a risk among people who depend on discarded food. Research confirms that a large number of people experiencing homelessness also suffer from a multitude of medical problems including traumatic brain injury.

People are walking around out there who are not even sure what year it is or what planet they are on. It is unlikely that such deeply disconnected people will go far to line up at a single restroom that is only open during certain hours of the day.

Not using a toilet is wrong, but using one is, too. Last March, in Santa Monica, CA, a burglary was reported at an apartment building with an untenanted unit. Inside, police found a man who just wanted to use the bathroom of an empty apartment whose door, he said, he had found unlocked. He had even brought his own toilet paper roll. Arrested for trespassing, he was taken to jail and his bail amount was set at $5,500.

A little farther south, in Orange County, an elementary school located next to a park has apparently been troubled by years of intrusions by people who need the facilities. The reporters don’t mention anything about any proposals to set up a port-a-potty or washing facilities. However, the District Superintendent has promised that a fence will be built and police patrols will be increased. Farther north, in Berkeley, where public elimination is of course outlawed, activists discussed the idea of mass break-ins at municipal administration buildings — not to steal, vandalize, or take hostages, but simply to use the porcelain facilities.

In Tucson, where people could sleep on sidewalks but not on grass, fast food outlet manager Nathan Hauser characterized a downtown encampment as “counterproductive,” particularly because a nearby park, used as a restroom, was a blight and a burden on the taxpayers. He said:

We pay to maintain that grass. We pay to maintain that park so people can enjoy it and right now nobody can enjoy it.

He was talking about townspeople and visitors, of course, but chances are, the people who are forced into this kind of behavior don’t actually enjoy it either.

The perceived need for debate stalls a lot of projects, as local officials seem unable to get past the stage of mulling over the pros and cons of public conveniences. They say things like, “We don’t have a definitive yes or no response on this issue at this time. There are a lot of variables that need to be considered.” Bathrooms, they say, need to be maintained, monitored, and managed. (So do golf courses, but cities that have them don’t seem to suffer from paralysis of the will over that topic.)

Last year in Fort Wayne, Indiana, there was discussion over whether to keep a downtown park’s restroom open all the time, rather than just during civic events. The Parks Director reminded the public of the expense that would be incurred by cleaning and maintenance, and liability insurance, and constant police attention. Compassionate City Council candidate Rev. Terry Anderson called a press conference, and brilliantly chose for its location a railroad overpass that traditionally served as an open-air latrine.

Reactions?

Source: “Downtown Denver Public Toilet Inventory,” DHOL, 8/17/14
Source: “Homeless People Have to Pee, Too. Find a Place for Them & Stop Complaining About It, You Monsters,” TheDailyBeast.com, 07/19/15
Source: “Homeless man arrested for trespassing needed to use restroom (crime watch),” SMDP.com, 03/21/15
Source: “Parents Worried About Kids Safety as Homeless Use OC Elementary School Bathrooms,” NBCLosAngeles.com, 05/13/15
Source: “Berkeley City Council Approves Crackdown on Homeless, Prohibits Urination in Public,” NBCBayArea.com, 11/18/15
Source: “Downtown business says homeless camp brings problems despite city crackdown,” KVOA.com, 03/10/14
Source: “Lack of public toilets gives city’s homeless no place to ‘go’,” News-Sentinel.com, 10/17/15
Photo credit: Dave Conner via Visualhunt/CC BY

In 2014, a California town of Manteca announced its intention to outlaw virtually everything that a person experiencing homelessness could possibly need or do. An ordinance was put in place to forbid the removal of shopping carts from stores, and, granted, that is theft.

On the other hand, good, housed citizens don’t all have cars, and in some places it’s accepted for a regular customer to walk a cart home and bring it back next time. Quite possibly, elderly and low-income housed people in Manteca have suffered from the necessity for this rule.

But when ordinances are voted on, one of the selling points is that they are fair, and apply to everyone. For instance, it is just as illegal for a housed resident or a homeless person to lie down on a table in a park. They are equal under the law.

They are not equal in circumstance. A local resident who visits the downtown area and doesn’t feel well, or suddenly needs a nap, can probably duck into a business establishment or a friend’s house, or be taken home quickly. A homeless person who feels ill or suffers from sleep deprivation is out of luck.

The Manteca homeless are vigorously discouraged from hanging around the library, where they are said to intimidate the patrons. Police Chief Nick Obligacion gave quotes to the press:

My officers understand that this (the homeless in Library Park) is a big issue with me.

There are two types of homeless. There are the ones down on their luck and there are the ones that chose that lifestyle.

My goal is to make it as inconvenient for them as possible.

If we arrest them and drive them to French Camp (the county jail) enough, sooner or later they will get tired of walking all the way back to Manteca…

Of course this pavement-therapy tactic is not unique to the town, or even the state. It’s the sort of life-hack tip that law enforcement officers all over the country enjoy sharing via their professional websites. Police can do a lot of things to penalize homelessness.

In Manteca, sleeping outside or “camping” was made illegal on both public and private property, which leaves no slack. It seems strange that homeowners would acquiesce to such a rule, which would include kids in tents, in their own backyards.

Of course, an non-discriminatory ordinance that applies equally to peasant or king banned public urination and defecation. City workers started locking whatever public restrooms existed (which, again, is probably inconvenient for the housed locals, but higher principles are at stake here). On the plus side, Chief Obligacion assured journalist Dennis Wyatt that officers are careful not to violate the rights of the homeless, because…

We don’t want to create expensive litigation for the city.

That is, for the locals, perhaps enough of a benefit to compensate for the loss of courtesy grocery cart loans and even public restrooms. However, such reticence was too late to help a parole violator who was shot 13 times (fatally) by a Manteca officer back in 2011. In April of 2014 a settlement was arrived at, in which the city agreed to pay the deceased man’s family $2.2 million. The new, stricter anti-homeless ordinances were proposed the following month.

Also in May, a police officer rousted a sleeping homeless veteran named Robert Olvera, inflicting serious injuries, and the whole story sounds pretty sketchy. Olvera is also suing the city, with a trial set for next April. That’s right, this matter will not come to court until 2017, and a lot of things can happen to a homeless plaintiff between now and then.

In November of 2015, four homeless men sued the city for civil rights violations. All the plaintiffs have received citations for camping, and claim that the ordinances target homeless people. Robert Schuknecht says he has lived in Manteca for more than 30 years, including residence in an SUV which the police towed away in 1995 because he was trying to feed other homeless people.

The law firm of Morrison & Foerster, and California Rural Legal Assistance, say that the area offers few shelter options, and most applicants don’t meet the eligibility standards.

In May of this year, the local news published an uncredited article titled “Conceding Manteca to the homeless?” which characterizes the people experiencing homelessness as brazen and bold, with an “in-your-face-I-can-do-whatever-I-please” attitude. By expressing gratitude that pedophiles, gang members and drug dealers have not yet sued the city for civil rights violations, the writer indirectly yet unmistakably equates homeless people with those groups.

Reactions?

Source: “Strategy: Inconvenience homeless,” MantecaBulletin.com, 07/22/14
Source: “This City Criminalized Homelessness, So The Homeless Are Fighting Back,” ThinkProgress.org, 11/20/16
Source: “$2.2 million settlement ends lawsuit over Manteca police shooting,” SacBee.com, 04/07/14
Source: “Manteca police: Below the belt attack led to officer’s clash with transient,” Recordnet.com, 05/31/14
Source: “Homeless suing Manteca over civil rights,” Recordnet.com, 12/05/15
Source: “Conceding Manteca to the homeless?,” MantecaBulletin.com, 05/16/16
Image by PH

Many cities are on the “sweep” bandwagon, and newspapers across the country are full of “sweep” news. Somehow the idea has become popular that the best thing to do with people experiencing homelessness is keep moving them around.

Citing the frequency of fights, fires, and drug overdoses in a 31-acre encampment, Brockton, Massachusetts, swept the area last month. The former residents, who were given a week’s notice before the place was bulldozed, are now scattered throughout the city.

Reporter Benjamin Paulin talked with Leigh Fuller of Church in the Woods, which provides clothing and tents, and feeds about 50 people every Saturday. Fuller told the reporter that the Tent City settlers “brought it on themselves” with unacceptable behavior, and expressed his disappointment that so few of those who could use rehabilitation are willing to accept the available programs. Some people moved to available shelter, while others returned to a roaming existence, sleeping in alleys.

West Coast

What happens when the city with the nation’s fourth highest homeless population gets ready for its biggest-ever month of tourism? Looking ahead to the Major League Baseball All-Star Game and the many events surrounding it, San Diego, California, started months ago to shuffle the homeless out of sight. Back in April, the city attracted unfavorable publicity by piling $57,000 worth of jagged rocks along the walkways of a pedestrian underpass, to prevent people from sleeping there.

In late June, hundreds of campers near Petco Park were given 72 hours notice before city crews cleared the area to wash sidewalks and throw out trash. A woman who was camping two blocks from the ballpark told a reporter that she and others had been threatened with arrest, while a city spokesperson said that most of the people who had been moved for the cleaning would end up back in the same place.

Early in July, a group of protesters made their displeasure known. A local pastor reported that he had been threatened by the police and a civic group, and told to stop serving weekly meals. Word on the street is that at least two other organizations were asked to stop feeding the homeless during July.

Reporter John Magdaleno says:

During a February 12 meeting with the San Diego Police Department and Clean & Safe, police officers allegedly threatened to “bring the hammer down” on [Pastor James] Merino if his non-profit hosted one of their meals during the week of the All-Star Game.

While the local police department declined to comment about procedures or the number of “encroachment” tickets it has distributed, homeless activist Michael McConnell gave the reporter his point of view:

“It’s a process of criminalizing homelessness,” says McConnell, speaking about the city’s protocol when it comes to its clean-up sweeps. If you have outstanding tickets, you’re liable for arrest, and one of the bargaining chips police might use in that case is a stay-away order for the area you were ticketed in, according to McConnell, who regularly interviews the homeless. “[It’s] the ultimate displacement because if you come back to that area, then you just continually get arrested,” he says.

Earlier this summer in Portland, Oregon, the city carried out a cleanup in an area where an estimated 300 people camped. Apparently the people just moved eastward a bit along the Springwater Corridor to join up with an existing camp in a wildlife refuge, making it one of the largest homeless settlements in the country. But no one is proud of the statistic, and now, that patch is scheduled to be depopulated of some 500 residents between now and August 1.

Like many other politicians, Portland’s mayor speaks of “public safety and environmental issues” as if the people experiencing homelessness are somehow not part of the public, and as if the environment is more crucial to housed residents than to the people who actually live out in it.

Meanwhile, in the city, a 200-bed shelter is expected to open next week — but a 267-bed shelter will close on the same day, making a net deficit of 67 beds. The really sad part is that Portland is an open-hearted and forward-thinking city that tries a lot harder than most. If it is capable of dislodging 500 people in a single action, imagine what goes on in worse places.

Recalling the old saying, “Everybody’s gotta be someplace,” reporter Rachel Monahan obtained from homeless advocate Israel Bayer a very eloquent quotation:

The situation on the Springwater is the direct result of not having any physical locations for people experiencing homelessness to be.

Reactions?

Source: “Brockton homeless advocate worried for those kicked out of ‘Tent City’,” EnterpriseNews.com, 06/27/16
Source: “No Action Taken Against Downtown Homeless Ahead of MLB All-Star Game: City,” NBCSanDiego.com, 06/27/16
Source: “San Diego’s Controversial Push to Hide Its Homeless Before the All-Star Game,” Citylab.com, 07/11/16
Source: “Mayor Charlie Hales is Evicting Hundreds of Homeless Campers from the Springwater Corridor,” Wweek.com, 07/15/16
Image by Michael McConnell

For a lot of Americans, their mental picture of a person experiencing homelessness is a scruffy man standing on a corner with a cardboard sign. Few stop to consider that close to half of the homeless population is made up of people who probably won’t be seen in such a public place. They are families with children, who now comprise 41%, or about two-fifths of the homeless total, and who are considered to be the fastest-growing homeless demographic.

Aside from visibility, there are other differences of course. Individuals, especially those termed chronically homeless, are more likely to suffer from mental illness or have substance abuse issues. But among displaced families, unemployment is the major cause, with low-paying jobs running a close second. Somewhere between one-third and one-half of homeless adults actually are employed.

To form a comprehensive picture of the situation, just go to the search box on this page and enter the term “living wage.” Plenty of people work, even full-time, and still can’t afford a place to live. When children are in the picture, things get complicated, because obviously someone needs to take care of them.

While it seems incredible that this should even need to be spelled out, Martha T.S. Laham notes:

People who are living in poverty are at greatest risk of becoming homeless. Demographic groups that are more apt to face poverty are also more vulnerable to homelessness.

Since 2010, Laham reports, family homelessness has been reduced by 15% thanks to “Opening Doors,” the Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness. (The chronic and veteran improvement rates are higher.) This is discouraging, because the program’s stated goal was to eradicate child and family homelessness within 10 years. Since it’s been 6 years already, a 15% reduction is not the number we might have expected, and certainly hoped, to see at this point in time. Why is child and family homelessness such a seemingly intractable problem?

It is easy to say, as decent people do, that safe, affordable housing is a basic human right. But we don’t seem to be making it happen. Homeless families face multiple barriers, one of which is transportation. We always seem to hear so much about the trend-setting places like California and New York, both of which have their own distinct cultures, but this illustration comes from a more modest place — Asheville, North Carolina.

When journalist Mark Barrett reported on local conditions, he talked with a mother who lived with her four children at the Western Carolina Rescue Ministries shelter. To coordinate with the city bus system, they all had to wake up at 4 AM on school days. Barrett also spoke with shelter’s executive director, Pastor Michael Woods, who confirmed that:

[…] a shortage of child care and the amount of time involved in using city buses to get to school or work make it much more difficult for homeless parents to find work… A mother “has to be there to put her daughter on the bus to go to school and she has to be there to pick her up, so she can’t get a job.”

 

Even when government money is available for rent vouchers, many landlords just don’t want formerly homeless families for tenants, and won’t rent to them. Another hitch is that landlords can be as picky as they please, refusing anyone who has ever paid a single utility bill late, or who has had a run-in with the law for even the most minor, victimless violations. Homeless families can rarely boast of spotless credit histories, especially if they took on debt in a desperate but failed attempt to stay housed.

Richard R. Troxell, co-founder of House the Homeless, reports that contrary to the mantra “Family First,” many shelters, starting with the Salvation Army in Austin, will demand that the homeless father and mother be separated in order to get services. “Mother remains with the children, Dad is sent to another facility clutching his wedding license and holding back tears,” says Troxell. “It is when they are down and out that the family truly needs the comfort and support of one another.”

Along with all the obvious practical aspects of living in a shelter, a single mother worries about less tangible issues. Because of the public nature of their lives in shared spaces, a mom can’t shield her kids from unwelcome influences. With no private space to retreat to, it’s hard to have intimate family moments, or sentence a child to a needed “timeout.”

Kids also can’t be protected from the foul language or wacky ideas of adults in the environment, or from the bullying of other children, or even their cold germs. If one kid gets sick, the whole shaky structure of coping mechanisms can fall apart.

What kind of a country are we building, when so many children grow up with instability, insecurity, and downright chaos? When they are grownups, 10 and 20 years from now, how will America look? As a nation, we really need to ask ourselves more often, “Are the kids all right?”

Reactions?

Source: “Fastest-Growing Segment Of The Homeless Population May Surprise You,” HuffingtonPost.com, 06/07/2016
Source: “Homeless families face multiple barriers, speakers say,” citizen-times.com, 06/30/14
Photo credit: Bryon Lippincott via Visual Hunt/CC BY-ND

The housed people of San Francisco, and the businesses they run and patronize, are upset. For one thing, they pay for the weekly removal of an estimated 12.5 tons of garbage from homeless encampments. That sounds like a lot, but it turns out to be not even a truckful, according to John a. Bates via Answers.com:

The truck I drive is a 2005 Mack LE600 with a McNeilus 32 cubic yard packing body and I average weights ranging from 14.5 tons (multiple bulky items) to 18 tons (little or no bulky items). The most weight I have put on this truck in one shot is 21.74 tons.

A skeptic could formulate questions. How much of every ton of “trash” actually consists of wanted and needed personal property like blankets, sleeping bags, and tents? Are the garbage numbers ever padded, like, for instance, the notoriously inflated drug raid totals that turn up every now and then, just to make a better story?

The crews remove a lot of human waste, too, and steam-clean the sidewalks for sanitary purposes. All this costs the taxpayers $4.7 million per year, and a reasonable person might ask why the beautiful and exquisitely civilized city by the bay doesn’t use some of that money for restrooms, or at least port-a-potties.

The SF Homeless Project is part media blitz, part conceptual “human catastrophe” prevention effort, around which many events were planned by numerous agencies and charities. Over 70 media organizations pitched in to raise awareness, starting last Wednesday, and Alissa Walker of Gizmodo has collected information on numerous aspects of the citywide campaign.

Remember our post about Airbnb? The company was founded in 2008, the same year that is generally acknowledged to have launched the recession that pushed homelessness to the top of the problem list. Only the most adamant conspiracy theorist would see a connection, but still…

The company ferociously resists any attempt to curb its voracious appetite. Proposed legislation known as Proposition F sought to impose a few restraints, and to require hosts to report their taxable income. But Airbnb reached into its $30 billion pocket and bought enough influence to defeat the attempt.

Maybe San Francisco’s current wretched housing situation stems partly from the fact that “the city is Airbnb’s most avid user.” Michael J. Coren writes:

A new Statista analysis found San Francisco has nearly double the listings per capita (9.8 per 1,000 inhabitants) versus any other city, based on InsideAirBnB data. (Airbnb cited its own similar statistics on San Francisco when we asked for confirmation.)

This fall, the city’s voters will have the opportunity to approve even more drastic anti-homeless measures. They will decide whether to pass a referendum designed to banish all homeless camps and tents from the streets. Kriston Capps cuts to the heart of the matter:

The ballot is a heinous way to decide the fate of San Francisco’s nearly 7,000 homeless residents. A referendum enables the city’s most callous voters to indulge in indifference, but that’s not even the worst of it. A referendum asks many more voters to accept a short-term solution to homelessness by pushing them out of sight and out of mind, which helps to foreclose on the possibility of a viable long-term structural solution.

And now the words from Richard R. Troxell, President of House the Homeless:

This week in LA a drunken woman drove onto a sidewalk and ran down a person experiencing homelessness.

After he crashed through her wind shield, she drove for a mile with the man collapsed in her passenger seat. Sound familiar? In 2002, Gregory Glen Biggs met a similar fate when a nurse’s aid, after a night of partying, did the same thing. However, she drove all the way home with the man still impaled in her windshield.

She parked in her garage and lowered the door. For three days she talked to him explaining her sorrow. Upside down and bleeding out for three days, he finally died. The nurse’s “aid” then got her cronies to dump his body in a park where homeless folks gather, knowing he would not be noticed too quickly.

Then while at another party, she retold the story in a cavalier fashion. Aghast and disbelieving the story, a listener contacted the police. The story was uncovered and the judge set her bond at $10,000. We were incensed and got the bond reset. Mr. Gregory Glen Biggs was an unemployed bricklayer in Fort Worth trying to turn things around at the time.

Post Script: The Coroner later said that the original injuries were not life-threatening and that had Mr. Biggs been brought to the hospital he would have, in all likelihood, survived.

I am saddened beyond explanation. So little has changed in so many years.

In longer form, this dark story also appears in Richard’s book, but to offset the grim realities, Looking Up at the Bottom Line is packed full of positive and uplifting accounts of many amazing accomplishments.

Reactions?

Source: “Tons of waste removed from San Francisco Homeless Camps Weekly,” ABC7news.com, 06/29/16
Source: “How much can the average American garbage truck hold?,” Answers.com, 2016
Source: “The Best and Worst Ideas from San Francisco’s Big Homelessness Project,” gizmodo.com, 06/29/16
Source: “San Francisco has a love-hate relationship with Airbnb,” qz.com, 06/30/16
Source: “One More Threat to San Francisco’s Homeless: San Francisco Voters,” CityLab.com, 06/29/16
Photo credit: Franco Folini via Visualhunt.com/CC BY-SA

The 2015 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, available as an 80-page PDF file, is the most recent and comprehensive federal report on homelessness in America.

In any discussion of homeless statistics it is important to remember that information-gathering in this area is not an infallible science. House the Homeless has discussed the many difficulties before. All statistics come with caveats, or should, but for the purpose of this post, we take the AHAR numbers on faith.

Another problem connected with such endeavors is expressing the final numbers in meaningful ways. One person experiencing homelessness may belong to many subgroups: female, veteran, Hispanic, family member, disabled, and so on. It is beyond the scope of this post to thoroughly examine the numbers in all groups and all their implications.

Perhaps most worrisome is the subcategory known in the report as “Chronically Homeless Families with Children.” Almost two-thirds of people in this classification were staying in shelters (64%, or 8,412 people), and the rest lived in unsheltered conditions (36%, or 4,693 people).

Since 2007, the overall “families with children” number decreased in 32 states while it increased in 18 states and DC. More than half of all the homeless people in families with children are accounted for by five states: New York, California, Massachusetts, Florida, and Texas. It is said that between 2014 and 2015, the “chronically homeless families with children” number by 14%.

Veterans

Of all homeless people in families, 48.7% — that’s almost half — are African American. Of that number, almost exactly half live in shelters. Different as they might seem, families have something in common with veterans. A total of 12.8% of the people in the U.S. identify as African-American and 15.45 as Hispanic, yet 56% (well over half) of homeless veterans belong to one of those two groups. The technical term for this is “over-represented.”

Children are relatively easy to keep track of because of mandatory education. But the census-availability spectrum has another end. Veterans who don’t want to be counted, or are so far out of touch that they don’t even think about it, are a slippery and elusive bunch. In some of America’s gnarliest backwaters small bands of dedicated vets search for their lost comrades in order to connect them with services.

Nationally, since 2009, the total number of homeless vets is said to have decreased from 73,367 to 47,725, which is encouraging. On the other hand, the percentage of homeless women vets has risen disproportionately to their number. Female vets are twice as likely, or even three times as likely, to be homeless as any other population group.

Particularly worrisome is the fact that “About one-half of all veterans experiencing homelessness who have participated in VA homeless assistance programs are involved in the justice system.” This overlap is the basis of the vicious cycle that many veterans are caught in. Their lives alternate between incarceration and the streets in classic “revolving door” fashion.

It’s hard to discover whether incarcerated vets and VA hospital inpatients count as homeless. On the darkest side of the equation, it has been pointed out that many vets have evaded showing up in the homeless statistics by committing suicide.

Older and Elder

Almost all housed Americans hold some kind of mental stereotype that probably doesn’t match up with who the people experiencing homelessness actually are. Many picture a brash young panhandler, or a teenage girl who meets men at truck stops. Shockingly, more than half of the homeless population is older than 50, but the distribution across decades is not smooth. “Older” persons between 50 and 64 constitute a big demographic bulge. The National Coalition for the Homeless says:

There is a relatively low percentage of ‘elder’ (aged 65 and over) homeless persons’ among the current homeless population. This smaller proportion may be due to the increased availability of successful safety net programs, which only kick-in at a certain age including:

• Subsidized housing — Available at age 62
• Medicare — Available at age 65
• Social Security benefits — Available at age 65

Still, the waiting lists for subsidized housing are long, and a basic problem faced by many people lack of documentation. A person can spend decades on the street with no paperwork, but for many, the attempt to hook up with services sets off a chain reaction of bureaucratic demands and Kafkaesque frustration.

Reactions?

Source: “The 2015 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress,” HUDexchange.info, November 2015
Source: “Veteran Homelessness Facts,” DVNF.org, undated
Source: “Breaking the Cycle of Veteran Incarceration and Homelessness: Emerging Community Practices,” USICH.gov, undated
Source: “Elder Homelessness,” NationalHomeless.org, undated
Photo credit: Ben Tavener via Visualhunt/CC BY

Granted, the situation described in Fort Worth, TX, in May was dire, with residents being attacked by “transients,” especially after a tent city in nearby Dallas was forcibly depopulated. But still, this headline is worded in a pretty offensive way: “Families, business owners ‘fed up’ with homeless in Fort Worth.” According to this insensitive phraseology, both business owners and families are totally separate and distinct populations, not overlapping with “homeless” at all.

True, there are not many homeless business owners. But there are plenty of homeless families, despite this headline pretending that “homeless” and “family” are radical opposites like “acid” and “alkaline.” This headline implies that they are mutually exclusive terms. It tries to give the impression that families are never homeless, and people experiencing homelessness are never families.

And another thing: If housed families are “fed up” with homelessness, imagine how homeless families feel about homelessness. Would “fed up” be an adequate term to describe how a parent feels about being unable to shelter and protect and nurture his or her own children? Would “fed up” be strong enough words to describe how it feels to see no future?

A matter of interpretation

Then, there is the type of headline that makes false promises. “Solve homelessness by addressing its root causes” gives the impression that some hard-hitting journalism will follow, pointing a finger perhaps at the cabal of bankers that caused a worldwide recession in 2008, or the cynical mortgage brokers who allowed the housing market to lose all semblance of sanity, or the businesses that refuse to pay their workers a living wage.

But at what is the finger pointed? What are the identified root causes of homelessness? Mental health issues and substance abuse, and people. Journalist Richard R. Bebout writes, “People with persistent mental illness and substance-use disorders make up a disproportionately high percentage of the District’s homeless population.”

Well yes, they do. But is it possible that isn’t where the real blame lies? Rather than people with mental health issues, maybe the problem is a system totally unequipped to handle mental health issues. Maybe the problem is a country that, unlike every other developed nation in the world, staunchly resists the idea of creating a universal healthcare system.

Maybe the problem is a government addicted to war. Maybe the problem is a society that alienates more and more of its members every year, to the point where they shun reality in favor of a drugged stupor.

There are a lot of candidates for the causes of homelessness, and somebody out there can make a pretty good case for any one of them. But mental illness and substance-use disorders are not simply causes of homelessness. Those two conditions are equally the result of homelessness. Substance abuse and mental illness are symptomatic of much larger problems that are the true causes of homelessness.

In the old days there were workhouses, insane asylums, orphanages, and prisons where society’s unwanted members could be warehoused, and mostly they were horrible places. At the same time, for many families, a lower cost of living and more spacious homes allowed for options. In the old days, more families could afford to donate a spare room to an ailing relative, and maybe even shelter another relative to help care for the first one.

Here is another eye-popping, jaw-dropping piece of news, this time from Great Britain. After one sentence of run-up, the important part is in bold print:

Section 21 eviction notices served on 3 February at the block, which also contains owner-occupied flats, state:

All tenants are being asked kindly to leave Carpenters Place and find alternative accommodation so that the company can continue with helping the ever growing need of homelessness.

At least here there is no doubt about what is happening, and no blame is directed at medical conditions. Alon Aviram writes:

Termination of private-sector tenancies was the leading cause of homelessness in Bristol last year according to government statistics…

Reactions?

Source: “Families, business owners ‘fed up’ with homeless in Fort Worth,” KHOU.com, 05/20/16
Source: “Solve homelessness by addressing its root causes,” WashingtonPost.com, 05/20/16
Source: “Bristol firm profiting from housing homeless — by kicking other tenants out,” TheBristolCable.org, 05/27/16
Photo credit: Ben Tavener via Visualhunt/CC BY

At the beginning of this year Seattle, Washington, already had a couple of safe-parking zones in the Ballard, Interbay and Sodo areas of the city. People could park their RVs and live there on a permit that was renewable each week. The city provided trash removal, portable toilets, and case management (if the person chose), with money made available after the mayor declared a state of emergency. It cost the city around $270 per month per vehicle to run a “zone.”

Also, in January, the city announced that it would open two “safe lots.” Unlike the “zones,” the safe lots would allow people to stay for a month at a time. Rather than optional, case management would be mandatory. The “safe lot” concept is different from the “zone” in other ways. The safe lot comes with water, electricity, a communal cooking tent, and full-time security staffing.

Opening the Ballard safe lot in February had consequences. One was that the Ballard “zone” closed, making its residents homeless again. The Ballard safe lot was never meant to be permanent, and indeed the land is only available until August, when the safe lot may be relocated or the idea may be abandoned entirely.

And the unexpected cost of the first safe lot changed the city’s mind about opening a second one. The planned second site, in Delridge, would have cost nearly the same amount, but would have held only half the number of vehicles.

Two safe zones had their time extended for two months. All in all, the net gain, in terms of improving the lives of actual humans, was not very impressive. Daniel DeMay writes that “city staff didn’t know exactly how much such a project would cost”:

[…] about a month after the Ballard lot opened […] it became clear that the cost was a lot higher than anyone expected.

 

[…] one parking lot, with about 20 vehicles in it, was costing the city $35,000 per month, and that’s on top of the setup costs of $24,689

[…] the city is renting the lot from Seattle Public Utilities at a rate of $7,522 per month

[…] the largest cost is staffing — almost $19,000 per month, due to the need to have 24-hour staff on site…

The monthly cost pencils out to about $1,750 per vehicle — more than the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle.

This story quotes city official Sola Plumacher as saying, “We have never done a safe lot. We didn’t really have a sense of what the costs were.” But why? How can this be? Has no other city ever undertaken a similar project? Doesn’t shareable information exist about the costs on some government website? Why is it necessary to reinvent the wheel? Couldn’t someone have made a phone call to learn the hourly rates for whatever type of rent-a-cops were needed? Isn’t the pay scale of a case manager a known element?

More questions: Why can’t Seattle Public Utilities take $1 a month instead of more than $7,000 a month, for land that nobody else would pay to rent anyway? For decades, the film industry has trained experts to estimate the cost of a project with pinpoint accuracy. Couldn’t a city hire one of them?

Seattle is a big place, with many homeless interventions going on. The Safe Parking pilot project started back around 2011 and yielded a grand total of seven parking spaces,  provided by two churches. At the time, it was estimated that between 500 and 1,500 people lived in vehicles on any given day, so the scale of the problem is evident and has only become worse.

This year, while bemoaning the unanticipated cost of one safe lot with a 20-vehicle capacity, the city was also planning to clear out “the Jungle” and evict 300 people  without even vehicles to live in. Guess what happened in May? On the Interbay land where 25 RV-dwellers had been living, the lease ran out and a call was issued to friendly mechanics to come and help the people with un-drivable vehicles get out of there within a week.

Sure, it’s always easy to “Monday morning quarterback” the other guy’s mistakes until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes, and so on. But really, Seattle? Really?

Reactions?

Source: “City had no idea ‘safe lots’ for homeless would be so costly,” Seattlepi.com, 03/31/16
Source: “Program to help homeless living in cars off to slow, steady start,” SeattleTimes.com, 12/25/12
Source: “Homeless in Seattle’s Interbay area have one week to leave RV ‘Safe Lot’,” q13fox.com, 05/26/16
Photo credit: tiffany98101 via Visual Hunt/CC BY