How often do you see a great review of a great movie? Joanne Laurier has written extensively about film, bringing to the task more intelligence and wisdom than most of her fellow critics.

For the World Socialist Web Site, she wrote about “an honest picture of American life,” the indie film titled Wendy and Lucy. It’s about a young woman experiencing homelessness with only her dog for company, and it will break your heart.

Wendy and Lucy was directed by Kelly Reichardt, who wrote it with Jonathan Raymond. It reflects today’s reality even more than the situation in 2008, the year of its release. We don’t learn a whole lot of Wendy’s backstory. Apparently, she was staying with her sister and brother-in-law before she hit the road, heading for Alaska, to try for a fish-cannery job. But then her car dies in Oregon.

While shoplifting some food for Lucy — and you can tell it’s not something she enjoys at all — Wendy gets caught and is taken away to be fingerprinted, and so on. When she gets back, Lucy is gone.

It turns out that the car would just plain cost too much to fix. Now Wendy is no longer even a rubber tramp, just a close-to-the-bottom-rung homeless person, carrying all her stuff around. And guess what — no booze, no dope, no psychosis. This woman wants to be a productive citizen and make a living wage. She was willing to drive all the way to Alaska to do that. Wendy is just a regular person who can’t catch a break.

The film set out to portray the growing chasm between the upper and lower classes in America. Laurier repeats and discusses some of the things that were said by writer-director Kelly Reichardt in an interview with the Providence Phoenix:

Reichardt notes that the film was intended to test out the notion that all one needs to succeed in America is ‘gumption.’ She continues, ‘Is that all you need, if you don’t have the benefit of an education or a social net or a financial net or health insurance or anything? I think that that’s implied all the time, and I think that’s a farce.’

Wendy often hums, as if there is a soundtrack of celestial music always playing in her head, and sometimes it leaks out. She searches in vain for Lucy. Without shelter and terribly vulnerable, Wendy is victimized. But that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is, her companion is still gone.

Finally, Wendy locates the dog fenced into a backyard, and recognizes that it’s a good home. Knowing she will be hopping freights or worse, Wendy does not bust Lucy out. Like so many fathers, mothers, and lovers confronting the brutal imperatives of economics have done, Wendy makes the hard decision. She leaves Lucy there, promising, “When I make some money, I’ll come back.”

Separating from a pet is a terrible decision to be faced with. A while back, we talked about Becky Blanton, who had experienced homelessness. When she inadvertently ended up living in her van, she couldn’t afford to rent an apartment that demanded security deposits for her cat and dog, and wouldn’t give them up, so she remained in the van.

The good folks who run Pets of the Homeless tell us that about 10% of the homeless have pets, which generally makes their situation more problematic:

Most people who experience homelessness are homeless for a short period of time, and need help finding housing or a rent subsidy. Unfortunately for those with pets it becomes more difficult.

The nonprofit organization, which extends across the U.S. and Canada, helps with food and vet bills. They would love to teach you how to start a pet food pantry in your town!

Reactions?

Source: “Wendy and Lucy: A picture of American life,” WSWS.org, 02/20/09
Source: “What We Do,” PetsoftheHomeless.org
Image by Beverly & Pack, used under its Creative Commons license.

Here’s an interesting fact of modern life. If you set up a Google Alert for the words “assault + homeless,” you can amass quite a collection of incidents in a very short time. Let’s review the recent past :

November 7, 2010: In Youngstown, Ohio, John W. Goodwin interviewed a witness to the beating of a homeless man by a bunch of preteen and early teen boys, two days before. This young mother came outside to watch for her son to get off the school bus, and witnessed the apparently reasonless attack on a man who hung around the neighborhood and sometime slept in an empty house where his mother used to live.

November 24, 2010: In New Hampshire, Maddie Hanna reported on how a formerly homeless man was sentenced for his part (with two others) in assaulting a homeless teenager and throwing him in the river to die, last year. The other two attackers were also residents of an impromptu camp, and they say it was just revenge, because the teenager had stolen a pair of boots from yet another homeless man.

This is an example of the kind of news that causes some people to say, “Fine, as long as the bums stick to killing each other, the more, the merrier.” It is also an example of what society doesn’t need. Society needs people under roofs and within walls, and for them to be able to afford to stay there because they have a Universal Living Wage for being productive citizens.

December 1, 2010: From Eloy, Arizona, Lindsey Collom reported on how a 71-year-old man living in his car was attacked and severely beaten by as many as eight men.

December 7, 2010: Dana Treen and David Hunt reported on the stabbing of a 28-year-old homeless man, Jason Jerome, by a “dapper” 17-year-old boy acting out who knows what kind of sick fantasy. The kid was wearing a suit and tie, for heaven’s sake. We know this because he was videotaped by the security camera of a nearby business, which it appears the victim was savvy enough to lead his attacker within range of, before things got serious.

Jerome ended up with knife wounds in the neck, chest, stomach, hip, and hand, with a finger nearly severed. The sheriff wasn’t sure whether the stabbing was a hate crime, because it might have resulted from some kind of dispute. Treen and Hunt say,

At Shands Jacksonville where he was refusing surgery, Jerome told police he was asleep and woke to someone standing over him with a knife. He said he didn’t know the attacker who he described only as having long hair and glasses.

December 15, 2010: In Australia, like many other places, there is a public perception that people experiencing homelessness somehow “ask for” any violence that comes their way. They deserve to get beaten up or set on fire, and it’s their own fault for having such a risky lifestyle. Several institutions got together on a project to try and do something about the widespread misunderstanding of the voluntary nature of homelessness, among other things.

Dr. Catherine Robinson of Sydney’s University of Technology has completed a report titled “Rough Living: Surviving Violence and Homelessness.” The sections on “Violence during Homelessness” and “Violence in Institutional Care” have some harrowing stories. The dispatch says,

New research into trauma and homelessness uses ‘biographies of violence’ to understand how homeless people manage and survive repeated episodes of violence throughout their lives.

In-depth interviews with a dozen people experiencing homelessness revealed histories of physical and sexual abuse in childhood, parents with multiple problems including housing instability, and parents practicing domestic violence on each other. The study included six men and six women. A PDF file of the entire 70-page report is available online.

There are plenty more examples to choose from, and violence against people experiencing homelessness is no new phenomenon. In Looking Up at the Bottom Line, Richard R. Troxell talks about a man who was shot for asking for a cigarette, and a man set on fire, and taser attacks, and all kinds of senseless savagery against people who don’t have a place to live. Here is one of Richard’s narratives:

I remember clearly how I felt that morning when I heard that two of our guys had been beaten with two-by-four boards… In the middle of the night, two college-age boys driving an old Chevy raced to a stop, jumped from the car, clutching two-by-fours. They then proceeded to whale on the guys. They broke one arm of each of two men who lay sleeping. One man suffered a fractured hand and a skull fracture. The other had three broken fingers. The assailants then jumped back into the car and were gone. The event really had no beginning, only an end. It was a senseless beating. No one knew why it had occurred. We only knew that if our guys had not been sleeping on the street it probably would not have happened.

Reactions?

Source: “Witness: Kids who assaulted homeless man are ‘menace,’” Vindy.com, 11/07/10
Source: “Man pleads to homeless beating,” ConcordMonitor.com, 11/24/10
Source: “Up to 8 sought in attack on homeless man, 71, in Eloy,” AZCentral.com, 12/01/10
Source: “Stabbing of homeless man in Jacksonville could be a hate crime,” Jacksonville.com, 12/07/10
Source: “Violence Faced by Australia’s Homeless,” ProBonoAustralia.com
Source: “Looking Up at the Bottom Line,” Amazon.com
Image by Vincent Bernier, used under its Creative Commons license.

People often ask Lars Eighner whether he became homeless in order to have something to write about. After all, he wouldn’t be the first aspiring wordsmith to have launched himself into the world in search of material. But no. The author of Travels with Lizbeth says,

I cannot imagine deliberately exchanging a gentleman’s attire for rags, sleeping on a bench when I had a good bed of my own, or doing any of the other things the other authors are said to have done merely to get a book. Whenever I had the opportunity of improving my situation, I took it, and if I had found the chance to get off the streets, my book would not now exist.

The thing about writers is, they are unable to not write, and they will continue to write any time, anywhere. So, naturally, Eighner wrote letters to a friend, knowing he would hold onto them. This stratagem is commonly employed by impoverished artists in shaky circumstances. The friend, historical novelist Steven Saylor, thought there was a book in it.

Eighner recounts the long, excruciatingly difficult process of squeezing out a publishable manuscript on a $10 manual typewriter, in a building without heat, water, or electricity. He sometimes had trouble endorsing the project himself, because being homeless was simply his everyday life. If he could have done so, he would have swapped it for a different one, preferably with a better class of accommodations.

Picaresque memoirs inhabit a long and honorable tradition. Sometimes, a wanderer sets out to roam the world and endure hardships for a greater purpose. Sometimes, a person who was perfectly all right where he or she was is plucked up by the hand of fate and set down on a road. Either way, might as well get some good copy out of it.

We live in a time when the minimum wage won’t house an individual, let alone a family. No longer can a living wage be lived on. An awful lot of people are in dire straits, and the more their individual voices can be heard the better it is for everybody.

The book we often mention, Richard R. Troxell’s Looking Up at the Bottom Line, is not just a history of his own activities in the cause of social justice, and it’s not merely a history of social phenomena in Austin, Texas. (Where, incidentally, Eighner also lives.) Nor is it only an activist how-to manual. It is also the repository of the individual stories of many, many of the people experiencing homelessness.

We have mentioned the Ace Backwords’ classic Surviving on the Streets in relation to the Thermal Underwear Drive that is currently underway in Austin. (Yes, there is a connection.) Backwords has played the role of a recording angel on behalf of many stories other than his own. His profiles of the street people of Berkeley, California, are valuable documents in the story of our millennia-straddling era.

The very vocal, eloquent and noticeable personality of Eric Sheptock is penetrating the nation’s consciousness as he keeps his promise to “enlighten, empower, engage, enrage, entertain, and explain.” Here’s a man who is unlikely to shop online, is probably not many women’s idea of a dream date, and can’t help anybody find job. Yet, nearly 5,000 people have signed up to be his Facebook friends. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be because he has something to say? The “homeless homeless advocate” in our nation’s capital could become a man to reckon with. In fact, he is already, as Nathan Rott demonstrates in his Washington Post profile of Sheptock.

Alexandra Jarrin is making news at this very moment by encouraging people across the country to write letters about what it’s like to run out of unemployment benefits and stare the specter of homelessness in the face, if they’re not already experiencing homelessness. She prints out their individual stories and delivers them to the office of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is one of the good guys.

Photo Note: Photographer Aaron M says,

This guy used to be an industrial painter (bridges, that sort of thing). He lost his job 18 months ago, and hasn’t found anything since. Once he went through his unemployment benefits and then his savings, his home was foreclosed and his vehicle repossessed. So now he panhandles in suburban Seattle.

Reactions?

Source: “About Travels with Lizbeth,” LarsEighner.com
Source: “DC’s ‘homeless homeless’ advocate,” The Washington Post, 12/13/10
Source: “Alexandra Jarrin, Homeless Unemployed Woman, Writes To Bernie Sanders for Help,” The Huffington Post, 12/12/10
Image by Seven_Null7 (Aaron M), used under its Creative Commons license.

The names of certain celebrities are inevitably linked with the causes they embrace, and one of the most prominent examples of that is Bruce Springsteen. He has always been a compassionate friend of the underdog, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, and anyone who sees the possibility of making a living wage as a mirage in the desert. He has especially supported people experiencing homelessness.

There was his work in Philadelphia, back in 1985, with the Committee for Fairness and Dignity for the Homeless; the 1987 All-Star Benefit for Homeless Children at Madison Square Garden in New York; the 2005 concert in Los Angeles to benefit PATH (People Assisting The Homeless) — well, you get the picture. He has made generous donations to food banks, and helped homeless groups not only in the United States but other countries as well.

There are the songs, like “Brothers Under the Bridge” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” and many others with similar themes. Springsteen’s 2007 album Give US Your Poor carried on with the tradition of raising awareness about homelessness, and included the work of homeless musicians.

Biographer Dave Marsh, speaking of one particular period of intense work on homeless issues, wrote,

Springsteen processed the information he received as an artist, not a politician. In all his meetings, he felt that he received at least as much from the community group as he gave to them.

Many people share the feeling expressed by Richard R. Troxell, who says,

The travails of homelessness are easier experienced through the songs of Bruce Springsteen… To so many working stiffs, and especially to those of us who have hit rock bottom, he is simply, ‘The Boss.’ His words always seem to hurt us and at the same time free us.

We all have at least one “I almost met” story, and Richard has one about almost meeting Springsteen. It was a wild time in Austin, early 1996, when the city’s ordinance against “camping” went into effect, and there was citizen unrest. Richard and other advocates for the homeless and the working poor were making speeches and organizing the Coalition to Repeal the Ban. At a homeless campsite, writer Molly Ivins and musician Steve Fromholz caroused all night in defiance of the ban. From a local monastery, Brother Michael hit the street to declare,

This ordinance would have put Jesus in jail.

Here is Richard’s account, from Looking Up at the Bottom Line:

Bruce Springsteen was in town that night. He was performing at the Austin Music Hall… He had sent word that he wanted to meet me. When I heard this, I felt a validation for our efforts even beyond our own belief of our right actions. But all night I struggled with small rolling skirmishes between the guys and the police. Heckling words of antagonism were used like swords all night, and they needed to be calmed. I spent the night stamping out flaming ducks. I never made it to meet The Boss, but the fact that he had dedicated the T-shirt and concession sales to House the Homeless satisfied me that night.

More than once I have thought of that as a missed opportunity, and more than once I’ve wished that I had a chance to meet him and share with him our plans, even today, to turn this thing around.

A person who doesn’t live inside must live outside. If living outdoors is defined as “camping,” and camping is against the law, then living itself is illegal for these people. Imagine being officially declared as having no right to live. It’s no wonder that the ignorant yahoos feel entitled to assault and kill people experiencing homelessness. It’s like the authorities have declared open season on them.

And now Austin is gearing up for another confrontation between the homeless and the housed. Its Sit/Lie ordinance is seriously flawed, and, in fairness to human dignity, probably should not exist at all. Many medical conditions that people might be suffering from are not taken into account. House the Homeless did a survey to illustrate the problem. A staggering 94 % of the respondents said that when they needed to sit down, they were unable to find a bench, and some of these folks have long-standing, debilitating physical illnesses or disabilities.

The law is so loosely written that people waiting for buses could technically be ticketed for violations. By strange coincidence, the ordinance particularly applies in the part of town where a number of agencies and services that help the people experiencing homelessness are located, and the whole thing is a big mess. So, watch for further developments on that front.

Reactions?

Source: “Bruce Springsteen: two hearts : the definitive biography, 1972-2003,” Google Books
Source: “Looking Up at the Bottom Line,” Amazon.com
Image by Tim Van Schmidt, used with permission.

We just have to share this amazing photoessay, the pictures taken by Getty Images staff photographer Paula Bronstein (and erroneously credited here to Paul Bronstein.) In Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, the winters are long and very, very cold, and many homeless people survive by living underground in tunnels that are not actually sewers, as the headline states, but channels for heating pipes.

Really, this is fascinating. Someone has taken the trouble to translate (from another website) nearly 100 comments from “Chinese netizens” as well as, apparently, European expats in China, and people from other countries too. Some cruelly anti-Mongolian sentiments are expressed. The country used to belong to China, then became a satellite of the USSR, but now Russia is kaput, so things don’t go well in Mongolia. But many points of view are represented. One person says,

Beijing isn’t lacking either — If you have the chance, go to the Beijing Film Academy campus gates and look under the manhole covers…

Another says,

There is in fact a tradition of cave dwellings in northern provinces such as Henan and Shaanxi. The soft loessial soils allow cave dwellings to be excavated, providing homes that are spared the worst of baking summers and freezing winters. Getting enough natural light into the cave dwellings however is one problem that is shared with living in a sewer. There is simply never enough sunlight or daylight.

In case you’re thinking, “This could only happen in Mongolia,” think again. Or rent Dark Days, a documentary directed, produced, and filmed by Marc Singer, and released in 2000. It’s all about homeless people living in an Amtrak tunnel under New York City, amid construction debris and terrible noise from the trains, with plenty of rats for company. They build shelters from scrap wood, cardboard, tarpaulins, and whatever else they can get hold of.

Many of the residents have managed to pull electricity into their subterranean shacks. Sometimes they go “up top” to find food and things to sell. Many have pets, for protection or companionship. The sanitary arrangements vary. One resident says that if you’re homeless, this is the best place in the city to be.

But it’s not safe down there. One guy demonstrates for the camera how he sets up a noise trap, so if anybody approaches his place while he’s sleeping, a bunch of frying pans will fall down and wake him. Another claims that 80% of the tunnel dwellers are crackheads. A woman named Dee tells how someone tried to burn her hut with her in it. Still, most of the tunnel dwellers look out for each other and engage in cooperative efforts, and some of them have been down there for 20 years. It is a weird but not totally dysfunctional family.

Then, along come the armed Amtrak police, telling everybody they have 30 days to get out. Not one person wants to go to a shelter, where everything you have including your clothes will be stolen. With the aid of the Coalition for the Homeless, they negotiate the Section 8 bureaucracy. With the promise of housing, they demolish the cozy shelters that were built with so much care. The film ends by showing the various formerly underground people in their new apartments, with real beds, and windows with trees outside.

Now, check out “Lost Vegas” by Pete Samson, who explored the unknown world underneath America’s capital of gambling and glitz. He says hundreds of homeless people live in parts of the 350-mile flood tunnels beneath Las Vegas:

Rather than working in the bars or kitchens they ‘credit hustle’, prowling the casinos searching the fruit machines for money or credits left by drunken gamblers.

But the competition is stiff. Sometimes there is day labor, and there are always dumpsters to recover food and useful items from. Sampson interviews several residents, including a woman named Amy, who says,

The main dangers are the floods and the Black Widow spiders. But it’s not a terrible place to be if you’re homeless… It’s much cooler than on the streets, we get a breeze coming through and the cops don’t really bother you. It’s quiet and everyone helps each other out down here.

Clearly, something is amiss, not only in the United States but throughout the world. Despite all the promises humankind has made to itself about a brighter future, conditions are getting worse and worse for more and more people. What can alleviate the situation? The Universal Living Wage might be a good place to start.

Reactions?

Source: “Mongolia’s Homeless Living Underground In Sewers,” ChinaSmack.com, 11/06/10
Source: “Dark Days (2000),” IMDb.com
Source: “Lost Vegas,” TheSun.co.uk, 09/24/09
Image of Dark Days, used under Fair Use: Reporting.
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Studying up on homelessness in America, a person is constantly astonished by both the magnanimity of some of our fellow citizens and the cluelessness of others. Today’s excursion into the realm of the media turns up a story titled “To Test Housing Program, Some Are Denied Aid.” When it appeared on the front page of the print version of The New York Times, it was called “New York Study on Who May End Up Homeless Called Cruel.”

Put them together, and they sum up the gist of a rather bizarre story reported by Cara Buckley, who has written hundreds and hundreds of pieces for this most venerated newspaper. Buckley starts with a brief reminder for those of us who might have been sleeping in class one day:

It has long been the standard practice in medical testing: Give drug treatment to one group while another, the control group, goes without.

That method is infinitely adaptable and used in all the sciences, but anybody can do it. If you play classical music to half of your plants and no music to the other half, and then measure all the plants’ heights and compare the results, you have just done an experiment according to the scientific method of empirical testing.

Now, apparently, a New York bureaucracy known as the Department of Homeless Services is messing around with people’s lives and touting their actions as useful science. The first impression is that somebody is playing God in a particularly nasty way, with questionable ethics, treating desperate families like guinea pigs or lab rats. So let’s hit the high points of Buckley’s story and see if it gets any better.

The program is Homebase, which is supposedly preventative. Among other things, it supports people who are about to be evicted, so maybe they won’t end up joining the homeless population of the city, which is already quite substantial. The officials put on their “research” hats and implemented the experiment. Buckley writes,

Half of the test subjects… are being denied assistance from the program for two years, with researchers tracking them to see if they end up homeless.

The first thing that comes to mind is that the intolerable delays are already an integral feature of social welfare programs. We hear constantly about the waiting periods, roadblocks, the uncertainty of funding, and myriad other factors that make help so slow in coming for so many of the people who need it most. There is never enough help available, so it seems like there would be plenty of unserved people to study, in the natural course of events, without purposely creating a situation where available help is denied to some for capricious reasons.

Where this particular program was concerned, there did not seem to be any need for such evaluation because it had already been judged efficacious. As Buckley notes,

Advocates for the homeless said they were puzzled about why the trial was necessary, since the city proclaimed the Homebase program as ‘highly successful’ in the September 2010 Mayor’s Management Report, saying that over 90 percent of families that received help from Homebase did not end up in homeless shelters.

As the old saying goes, “If it works, don’t fix it.” And especially, don’t use it to hurt people who could be helped when there is so much other useful work that could be done instead. Plus, the study itself is costing nearly $600,000, for which a better use could have been found. Like paying rent for potential evictees.

Buckley quotes a University of Pennsylvania professor Dennis P. Culhane whose field is social welfare policy. He says there is widespread doubt over the effectiveness of eviction-prevention programs, and there is no evidence that people helped by the Homebase program would be homeless otherwise. Say what? I may be missing something here, but I suspect that a large proportion of the New York City’s homeless population just might be living in temporary shelters or on the streets because people couldn’t pay rent and got evicted.

The Coalition for the Homeless website states,

Surveys of homeless families have identified the following major immediate causes of episodes of homelessness: eviction; doubled-up or severely overcrowded housing; domestic violence; and hazardous housing conditions.

What part of “Immediate cause of homelessness = eviction” does the New York City bureaucracy not understand?

The Coalition for the Homeless also notes that in October 2010, 38,000 people were sleeping in New York City’s municipal shelter system each night. There are probably more by now. And how many are there on the streets? No way to know how many thousands, but the Coalition says that the official numbers are consistently underestimated. And the overall situation can only get worse with the lack of affordable housing even for those who are supposedly making a living wage, which becomes more of a joke every day.

As we suspected, the first impression doesn’t get any better. It gets worse. Buckley says,

New York City is among a number of governments, philanthropies and research groups turning to so-called randomized controlled trials to evaluate social welfare programs.

Reactions?

Source: “To Test Housing Program, Some Are Denied Aid,” NYTimes.com, 12/08/10
Source: “Basic Facts About Homelessness: New York City,” CoalitionfortheHomeless.org
Image by Dr. Savage, used under its Creative Commons license.
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The microcosm reflects the macrocosm. In other words, one way to get a real grasp of a national problem such as homelessness is to look at a snapshot of a particular place at one point in time. That is exactly what Elliott Blackburn, a reporter for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, provides. In a piece called “Homeless committee braces for quick pace, tough problem,” he outlines the position this Texas city of about 220,000 souls finds itself in at the end of 2010.

In Lubbock, there is a new homeless committee, and Lynn McClendon is chair. There are 16 other members, including church custodian and former homeless person Toby Billings. The group plans to meet twice a month. What they aim to do first is figure out exactly what kind of problem Lubbock is faced with because, as Blackburn notes,

Homelessness can include everyone from someone forced to live on the streets to a person who has to stay with friends and family for some period of time, making it difficult to put a firm figure to the problem in the city.

A mutually agreed definition isn’t always easy to come to, but anyone staying in a shelter or a transitional housing facility, or any other place not intended to be a permanent home, is generally defined as homeless.

A survey was conducted, which identified 719 people experiencing homelessness in Lubbock, with three-quarters of them newbies and relatively unfamiliar with the world of homelessness, because they just entered it for the first time within the last three years.

As in most places, the homeless population of Lubbock includes a good number of the working poor. About 20% are day laborers or some other kind of part-time workers, and about another 20% work regular, full-time jobs. And yet, they are homeless! Obviously, a paycheck is not the same as a living wage, not even for people who are actually working 40 hours a week or more.

This is something that housed people with good-paying jobs often fail to wrap their heads around. Some folks complain or rage because they have to give up their vacation home. They don’t have a clue what it’s like to have no home at all, and certainly find it difficult to understand that it is possible to work full time and still not be able to afford housing.

Richard R. Troxell, president of House the Homeless, has written a document called the Protected Homeless Class Resolution. The full text is found in Looking Up at the Bottom Line, and here are a few of the points he makes:

— There is a shortage of affordable housing stock nationwide.
— The national minimum wage is an insufficient amount of money to secure safe, decent, affordable housing even at the most basic financial level.
— More than the minimum wage is required in every state to be able to afford a one bedroom apartment at Fair Market Rent, as set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
— The combined effect of these and other circumstances create a group of people that have no alternatives to living on the streets of our nation; and
— It is estimated that nationwide, there are at least 760,000 persons living without a permanent, fixed, individual residence on any given night.

As in any other city, resources for the homeless are not always easy to access. In this particular city, food is not a problem, but shelter is, and there is a need for a day center. One thing that almost everyone agrees on is the need for more centralization and coordination, and Blackburn captured a marvelous quotation from committee member Doug Triplett, who likened the various efforts to a bunch of free-range horses, saying,

If somehow we can harness all these, put the horses behind one thing, we can pull a stagecoach.

Coordination appears to be the trend in the state, with the Texas Homeless Network showing the way. THN is a nonprofit organization that provides training and technical assistance to the people and agencies working to end homelessness. Its mission is,

Providing solutions to end homelessness in Texas communities through education, resources and advocacy.

THN also keeps track of statistics, recording, for instance, the fact that this summer 719 people were identified as experiencing homelessness in Lubbock.

One of the training programs is Stepping Stones to Recovery, or SOAR, where staff members and benefits specialists learn how to help homeless individuals apply to receive federal social security and disability benefits. This is no easy task, especially for people who are mentally affected. Even a person with ordinary mental capacity can be so jangled and confused by finding themselves homeless that dealing with a bureaucracy and a pile of paperwork is a daunting task.

Holding onto all the necessary and required paperwork is no easy thing either. When you have to carry around everything you own, even paper gets heavy. Rain falls, and everything is soaked, and all your documents turn to pulp. Or somebody steals your backpack.

THN holds an annual conference, and mostly it trains the providers of homeless services all over the state. There is a training manager — the job is currently open — who travels about 1/3 of the time, teaching the local workers how to help the homeless.

Reactions?

Source: “Homeless committee braces for quick pace, tough problem,” LubbockOnline, 12/07/10
Source: “What We Do,” THN.org
Image by quinet (Thomas Quine), used under its Creative Commons license.

At Stone Soup Station, we find an eloquent description of compassion fatigue, which anybody who helps the homeless is prone to. It’s written by Veteran’s Services Coordinator Steven Samra, who puts together Operation Stand Down Nashville. Here it is:

The rate of burnout for those of us in street outreach and case management is high, and a large part of the responsibility of this is vicarious trauma; that is, suffering trauma from hearing, feeling and dealing with the trauma of our clients, consumers, customers, fellow human beings. It takes its toll on the soul, the psyche and the spirit, chipping steadily away until one day you awaken with irreversible compassion fatigue and basically, you just can’t take any more trauma.

There is a good reason why the average person can benefit from hearing about this. The reason is, it enables us to realize what it means when we send in a check, or donate a pair of socks, or volunteer for a shift at the soup kitchen. See, we’re used to thinking, “I’m glad my donation could help that vet,” or, “It’s not much, but at least some homeless person got a meal.”

But there’s more to it than that. Every time we pitch in to help, even if the contribution seems small, keep this in mind, and don’t forget it. Our contribution doesn’t only help a person experiencing homelessness, or even a whole bunch of them. It also helps the people who do this work full-time. Every kind of social services worker, whether paid or volunteer, is a soldier at the front. They are in the line of fire, day after day, week after week.

Any little bit that we can help, it removes part of the burden from the people whose lives are immersed in helping. It takes some of the weight from a compassionate, hard-trying person who wants to hang in there but fears the approach of the breaking point.

Samra talks about the frustration of having to tell needy people that you just can’t do anything for them because the resources simply are not there. And even worse is knowing — absolutely without a doubt — that just a small amount of help could get this person’s life back on track.

Fortunately, now there is a program that looks promising, SSVF or Supportive Services for Veteran Families. The details are on the website, and there’s also a link to the same information in a PDF file. Here is what Steven Samra says about it:

I’m holding my breath and crossing my fingers that those holding the purse strings have finally figured out what those of us in the field have known for a long time now; help those folks before they are considered ‘chronically homeless’ and once they get back on their feet, just get outta their way…

Meanwhile, we learn from Alexandra Zavis that veterans are one of the major subgroups of people experiencing homelessness that the city of Los Angeles is determined to help. Government and private enterprise have gotten together and come up with a five-year plan. The chronically homeless and homeless veterans, two groups that have a large overlap factor, are the focus of this effort.

Their plan seems to involve reallocating existing funds, and that type of decision must be so hard to make. When there are only x dollars, who gets them? The person in worst shape, who has been suffering the longest? Or the person who is just on the verge of losing his or her dwelling place and belongings, and could be saved by the application of some ready cash? The word “reallocate” is a scary one. Reallocate from where? Being in charge of decisions like that could give you a pretty good case of burnout, too.

Looked at from one angle, there is sound economic common sense behind the decision to put $230 million into supportive housing for the most long-term and seemingly hopeless street people. As Zavis explains,

Although the chronically homeless make up just a quarter of the homeless population, they use up a disproportionate share of services, including beds in emergency shelters, hospitals and jails.

She quotes an official who says it is 40% cheaper to create supportive housing with treatment and counseling than to abandon the chronically homeless to the streets. Other cities have found this to be true. Hopefully, the tax dollars freed up will then provide more services to the other three-quarters of the homeless population.

As always, there are several sides to the issue. The most extreme form of the “housing-first” philosophy insists on just that, taking people as they are, getting them housed first, and then dealing with other problems such as alcoholism and drug addiction. The opponents would prefer that the clients clean up first, and show that they deserve housing. And a strong faction believes that veterans of our armed forces should be given any and every kind of help, immediately, unconditionally, and with no questions asked.

And, of course, as always and everywhere, Los Angeles would have to deal with the “Not In My Back Yard” problem, or NIMBYism. But that’s a post for another day.

Reactions?

Source: “Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) Program: Finally, “Sumthin Comin” To Those Who Need It NOW?,” Stone Soup Station, 12/03/10
Source: “Plan to house homeless vets and chronically homeless gains wide support,” LATimes.com, 12/02/10
Image by foxtongue (Jhane), used under its Creative Commons license.

People experiencing homelessness are all over the news, and it’s too easy to feel hopeless and discouraged about the overwhelming amount of need in every corner of the nation. And then a bright ray of meaningful progress shines from the gloomy prospect. Back on My Feet (BOMF) is a super-organized, super-regimented running-based program for helping people reenter the world of the employed and the housed.

It appears to be a mixture of boot camp and Life College, and there are chapters in several U.S. cities. Philosophically, BOMF seems tuned into the ancient wisdom expressed in the saying, “Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” BOMF is not the place to get a bowl of soup or a blanket, but it just might be the place to get a new life.

Building self-sufficiency is the name of the game, and the building blocks are confidence, strength, and self-esteem. The nonprofit organization’s self-description talks about teamwork and leadership, equality, respect, and discipline. And, of course, it’s not for everybody. BOMF is not the answer for a mentally ill, chronically homeless person who has been on the streets for a decade.

But for someone who is physically healthy and alert enough to benefit from education, it sounds like a dream come true. Participants have to make a commitment and get up early in the morning. BOMF teams are formed at homeless shelters, they go out running three times a week, and many of these energetic, determined achievers enter marathons. They attend financial literacy sessions and finish up their high school education through GED if they don’t already have a diploma. They collect letters of recommendation.

Through the Next Steps program, they connect with various agencies that have the power to move lives forward. The organization is so thorough, it collects donations of suits, shirts, ties, and other necessary business-type clothing for participants to wear to job interviews.

What happens next? In most cases, a degree of success the person might not have been able to imagine. According to the BOMF website,

On average across chapters, BOMF has a success rate of over 50 percent in helping members move their lives forward; this metric is a testament to the efficacy and sustainability of the program.

For more revealing statistics, let’s look at the BOMF blog that tells us that the Philadelphia chapter alone has 59 formerly homeless members who have obtained housing, 73 members who have enrolled in either school or job training programs, and 97 members who have gotten jobs. Via the Baltimore chapter, 48 entered training or re-education, 57 have found jobs, and 21 have found housing.

The website doesn’t go into detail about what the jobs are, or how close they come to providing an actual living wage, but even if some of these folks are still stalled at the level of the working poor, that’s better than being unemployed. In the world of work, it’s always been axiomatic that it’s easier to find a new job if you’re already employed than to find a job if you’re not working. So any job is a move in the right direction. In fact, it may be true now more than ever. I’ve heard that nowadays potential employers only want to take applications from, or schedule interviews with, people who are already working.

The Philadelphia Inquirer says there are about 3,000 people experiencing homelessness in the city. Another source says there are 5,000 homeless children in Philadelphia, and that’s not even counting grownups. Without attempting to determine the exact number, let’s just say, thousands. So, when Philadelphia BOMF and its Next Steps program succeed in getting 59 people housed, a pessimist might be tempted to say, “A mere drop in the bucket. What is that, compared to thousands in need?”

But an optimist would say, “Hot damn!” Because these people who have joined up with BOMF and fulfilled the expectations will probably stay housed. They probably will not wind up in the revolving-door syndrome, in and out of shelters. This will probably stick.

As long as we’re in the area, here’s a magnificent Philadelphia story reported by Christine Olley. The subject of this profile is Nikki Johnson-Huston, who spent part of her childhood in homeless shelters with her alcoholic mother, then later blew a great opportunity by flunking out of college, and still managed to turn her life around. Eventually she earned three degrees and is now an attorney for the city, and a volunteer with Project H.O.M.E.

Reactions?

Source: “The Back on My Feet Program,” BackonMyFeet.org, 11/15/10
Source: “Once homeless, city attorney tells her story to inspire others,” Philly.com, 12/04/10
Image by esbjorn2 (Esbjorn Jorsater), used under its Creative Commons license.

Bumfights — A Video Too Far, produced and directed by Bruce Hepton, chronicles the regrettable history of a disgusting phenomenon. The film that started it all was Bumfights: A Cause for Concern (don’t you love the pretense of a social conscience?). Basically, a bunch of affluent teenagers paid some down-and-outers to assault each other and degrade themselves for their prurient camera.

Hepton’s documentary features an interview with Ryan McPherson, who claims the dubious honor of inventing the genre. The former skateboard dude got together with several accomplices and bribed homeless men to perform dangerous stunts, fight each other, and, in the case of Vietnam veteran Donnie Brennan, to have the Bumfights logo tattooed across his forehead. When Brennan’s leg was broken and he ended up in the hospital,
who do you suppose paid the bill, “producer” McPherson, or the taxpayers?

Publicity supplied by Fox News spread the notoriety of Bumfights around the world and spawned a whole subculture, with an endless stream of imitators. Teams of inspired copycats went into the business of inciting and orchestrating violence between and against people experiencing homelessness. In an Australian town with only one homeless person available to persecute, a gang of teenagers tried to get him to participate in their videotaping fun, and burned him to death for refusing.

McPherson and his band of toxic youths made money off their revolting enterprise, then got screwed by some other thug entrepreneur. (Ha ha.) “It’s a disgusting video,” he says, “but you can’t keep it from selling.” What? Yeah, you can, or at some point could have, by not making it in the first place. He says, “It may not be the right thing, but… whatever.” Now, there is some insightful commentary.

The documentary also interviews social workers, journalists and cops who have to deal with the results of the fad started by McPherson. Then it’s back to him again, saying, “There’s no exploitation, it’s just good friendly filming…” With a philosophy that’s way beyond libertarian, he believes that no crime was committed, and these homeless men had opted in. A person might also choose to sell one of their own kidneys, too, but does that mean a civilized society ought to allow it?

McPherson defends his opus as “very truthful.” What’s truthful about inciting alcoholics to do revolting things like pull out their own teeth with pliers? In the old days, when sleazy carnivals traveled from town to town, the show might include a geek, a burnout case who would bite off the head of a live chicken or snake, or do some other gross thing, for a payment of moonshine and a quiet place to drink it. You may have seen a 1947 film called Nightmare Alley, where Tyrone Power portrayed an overly ambitious man who ended up being a sideshow geek. In the years since then, society has apparently made very little progress.

One of the seminal works that sparked the civil rights era was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a novel which won a National Book Award in 1953. The protagonist, a Southern black youth, is class valedictorian, but before he can claim the scholarship offered by the rich white folks, he is forced to get in the boxing ring and fight another black youth. At least he gets an education out of it, not just a bottle of beer.

Truthful of not, Bumfights upset a lot of people. In Looking Up at the Bottom Line, Richard R. Troxell relates how the National Coalition for the Homeless mobilized protests against many retail outlets that sold the film. A partial victory was achieved, but Bumfights and its numerous imitations are of course available online.

Of the two Bumfights “stars,” Donnie Brennan is still on the streets (and still bearing the forehead tattoo). But the life of Rufus Hannah, formerly known as “the stunt bum,” took a radically different turn, and he went on to publish a book called A Bum Deal. This autobiography is reviewed by Cali Zimmerman, social media guru and Communications Coordinator for PATH Partners, a group of agencies concerned with helping people experiencing homelessness, and others in need, in Southern California. Zimmerman writes,

Co-written with Barry Soper, the man who helped Hannah escape the exploitation of Bumfights and turn his life around, A Bum Deal is a story of confronting personal demons and journeying to recovery.

Zimmerman recounts the story of how Hannah and Soper have met, before the Bumfights film was made, and how when they came into contact again, Soper helped both Hannah and Brennan get legal representation, to try and win some compensation for the permanent injuries they have suffered through cooperating with McPherson’s reprehensible manipulation of their vulnerable state.

Zimmerman says,

With Soper’s help, Hannah has since taken legal action against the creators of Bumfights and has been sober for eight years. He is employed full-time, remarried, has worked to heal his relationship with his children and get his life is back on track.

The review finishes up with some words from Rufus Hannah:

I just hope that somebody can read this and see that it doesn’t matter how low it gets, you can always get up again.

Reactions?

Source: “Bumfights – A Video Too Far,” YouTube.com
Source: “Nightmare Alley,” Dusted Off, 05/04/10
Source: “A Bum Deal: One Formerly Homeless Man’s Journey,” Poverty Insights, 10/21/10
Image by PinkMoose (Anthony Easton), used under its Creative Commons license.