A Sociologist Lives among the Homeless and Returns with a Surprising Tale
For a few years in the early 1980s, I spent part of each summer at the University of California at Berkeley. I always stayed in San Francisco and rode the subway back and forth. It was there, in 1983, that I first discovered street people. The streets were full of them, crying “spare change, mister?” and lying in doorways and alleys. They were a real puzzle to me because until then I thought I understood the homeless.
I had been looking at homeless transients for a long time as part of my professional concern. In the early 1970s, I began teaching a course at Middle Tennessee State University on the sociology of alcohol, and as part of the course I often took the students to the Nashville Union Rescue Mission to see the situation firsthand and to hear Reverend Carl Resener lecture on alcoholism. Until about 1980, I could predict who would be at the mission and what kind of people they would be. Any careful observer could.
Then things changed — and quickly. The numbers of the homeless exploded and women and children, totally absent until now, were seen from time to time. They spilled over the boundaries of the old Skid Rows and out of the missions onto the streets and into the parks. And, exceedingly important, a group of people who were virtually ignored by the media suddenly became the darlings of the press.
The media now presented a problem. Since I had been studying the residents of the streets for years and was closely watching the changing scene, newspaper articles and TV specials on the homeless did not ring true. University students who have a special need for unadorned, factual information (for they will make the next cycle of decisions about our social world) were being partly informed and sadly misinformed.
Joining the Ranks
In order to study the situation from a firsthand vantage point, I began posing as a street person. First, in San Francisco on the sly, then over Christmas vacations in Texas and Tennessee, until finally I had the nerve to do it officially with the support and blessing of the university. The support and blessing of Carolyn, my wife, was much more difficult to obtain, and even then was offered a bit grudgingly. Our domestic tranquility was fractured by her reaction to my statement, “Hey, hon, I think I’ll go down to Nashville and lie around on the streets for a few days. Sorry I can’t be at your Christmas party.”
I stopped shaving and let my hair and beard grow again. Beginning last spring, I roamed from Charlotte to Richmond to Washington to New York to Chicago to Omaha to Denver to Cheyenne to Billings to Salt Lake City to Las Vegas to Los Angeles and back, posing as a street person.
Scholarly Limitations
One of the major reasons we are so badly in-formed — or, more precisely, misinformed — about the homeless is the separation of neighborhoods and the increased compartmentalization of social life in American communities. Once, not so long ago, almost everyone in a community knew a little of how other residents lived. This was especially true of community leaders. They often wandered through the poorer sections of town, to and from work, or went there on business—to collect rent, heal the sick, or to make a pastoral visit.
No longer. Neighborhoods of different economic character have dividing lines as distinct as national borders and are less often crossed. Thus, one group in a community almost never sees — firsthand, anyway — how the other groups live and get along. This unfortunate situation holds especially true for the advantaged (the community leaders) and the disadvantaged (the poorer members of the community).
Even in small communities, neighborhoods are now isolated, and the consequence is that different groups have very little factual information about the living conditions of their fellow residents. Policymakers who make decisions which significantly affect the lives of residents know a great deal more about the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” than they do about their poor neighbors.
College professors are, for the most part, in the same boat as ministers and other community leaders regarding the lack of factual information about the poor. These leaders are often even more isolated from the poor in their communities and even less reliably informed than local community. In addition, there is near total disregard for the most disadvantaged groups by serious scholars and current college texts.
A committee in my department adopted a new sociology text for this year which contains in the subject index “hermaphrodites” and seven entries for “homosexual” but not a single listing of “hunger” or “homelessness.” There is “sexism” and “sexual arousal” and “sexual behavior” galore, but not “street people.” Thus, not only community leaders and college teachers but students as well learn about the poor in their communities by watching the evening news or by reading a paper from a city a hundred miles away.
The gap in our knowledge of the poor that was once filled naturally is now filled to the brim by ABC, NBC, and CBS, and daily newspapers. They cannot, as we should be acutely aware of by now, give us all the information we need on any significant topic. This is especially true of street people and the homeless. By their very nature — transient, disadvantaged, disorganized — they resist in-depth, objective reporting, should it even be attempted. Thus, since we have little firsthand information about the poor and homeless, we learn about them from the nearest and best teachers: television and newspapers.
This, then, is how we learn about street people and the homeless. But television and newspapers are not enough — or maybe they are too much. It is altogether too easy — and tempting — to show only the most heart-wrenching or bizarre scenes from the streets. Most of the really significant forces which are crucial to understanding the plight of the homeless are nearly impossible to grasp by a TV camera or by a five-minute swing-through by a reporter.
It appears that the members of the U.S. Catholic Conference’s Committee on Social Development and World Peace also acquired their knowledge of the homeless through these means. This is reflected in their recent statement, “Homelessness and Housing: A Human Tragedy, A Moral Challenge,” where the sole concern with street people is “housing,” and all of their recommendations for a national policy on homelessness are concerned with housing. In a six-point proposal they say that policies should be aimed at preserving housing, producing more low-cost housing, encouraging participation of the poor in housing decisions, and creating a partnership among nonprofit groups to build low-cost housing. In addition to the four p’s of policy, the statement stresses that affordability is a necessity of housing for the poor and that since opportunity must be available to all, stronger efforts must be made to curb discrimination in housing. There is not a mention of the three real causes of homelessness in America.
Three Major Causes of Homelessness
Let me tell you what I have learned. To begin to understand the homeless crisis, let me point out three cataclysmic changes in American social life over the past few decades. In a very real sense, these may be considered the major causes of homelessness.
Family breakup: A small, but rapidly growing group of researchers and observers have identified as the most important element in the explosive growth of homelessness the change in the cohesiveness of the American family. More precisely, the change has been the sudden devaluation of the family in America. Divorce and the increasing unpopularity of marriage have wreaked havoc among the poor.
Most studies fail to recognize the impact of family dissolution on homelessness. Divorce adds a far heavier burden to poor families than it does to families at the social level from which those who conduct the studies come. It is difficult for middle-class observers to recognize, to say nothing of to understand, the impact that the disruption of family ties has had upon the poor during the past two decades.
The results of divorce among the affluent is perhaps ulcer-producing stress, a little rumor around the office, and great concern for the impact on career and finances. (We may receive a few disturbing, late night phone calls from some of our many friends who are experiencing the trauma.) But to assume that these are the effects of divorce on poor families is to misunderstand completely how vital families are, and have always been, to the poor.
This surge of divorce has produced among poor Americans a dissolution of family structure having pathetic consequences far beyond our middle-class comprehension. For these people, family and friends have always meant, not camaraderie and companionship, but survival. These are the ties that bind. Families cling together for the same reason soldiers cleave together and small children hold hands in the dark. But many poor families no longer feel required, or even expected, to care for their own when the situation involves sacrifice or commitment.
A case involving one of the friends I made on the streets clearly shows the impact of ruptured family bonds. His name was John. I met him on the steps of a mission. His face was severely beaten. He needed help. I bummed a cigarette for him. He was from a small town in Georgia. I took him to Traveler’s Aid, and they said they would gladly buy him a bus ticket home if he would give them the telephone number of someone who would say he had a place to come home to. He said he would come back later with the number. Once outside, he told me that we would have to find another way to help him. I asked why. He said he could not furnish them with a telephone number. He said that he had a current wife, two ex-wives, a mother, a stepfather, an uncle, and three married children, but none of them would say “yes” to the Traveler’s Aid question.
One morning in Gallatin last spring, I talked with a shelter director preparing to meet that afternoon with two sisters, aged 19 and 21, who between them had five children and no husbands and were being kicked out of the house by their mother, who also had no husband. “What am I to do?” he asked me. “What I can do is try to adjust things to keep them there, or put them up in a motel for a few nights, but then they would drift from there to the streets.” In the silence that followed, we both knew that whatever he did wouldn’t fix what was broken.
De-institutionalization: Obviously, a transient mission cannot be a hospital, but if you’ll agree that it can be an institution, the Nashville Union Rescue Mission is the largest mental institution in the state. A conservative estimate is that of the 450 inhabitants who stay there on a cold night, 270 are mentally disadvantaged. A few years ago there were 7,800 patients in the mental facilities in Tennessee; now there are fewer than 1,200. Those who have survived have become the huge, intractable core of the more than 7,000 homeless persons estimated to be in the state.
De-institutionalization and non-institutionalization of people who are incapable of caring for themselves and others in their charge, in particular their children, and whose uncivil actions often bring tears and tragedy to defenseless communities, is the most cruel of the causes of homelessness. It is these human cast-offs who are portrayed as the hungry on the street, when the reality is that they are incapable of finding the end of the food line.
Alcoholism: There have been two recent changes in the way in which alcoholism and alcohol abuse “fit” into our society that have resulted in a very large number of alcoholics living on the streets of our communities. First is the decriminalization of public drunkenness, vagrancy, and other affronts to civil life. At one time, not too long ago, such rules acted as fingers in the social dike — keeping our public spaces, such as streets, parks, and waiting rooms generally organized and predictable. Many alcoholics who, by the very nature of their condition, could not adhere to these rules, had to keep free of the avenues of public access. Now they are free to make their homes in “cardboard condos” on the sidewalks and in subway entrances.
The other change is the steep increase in the number of alcoholics, especially among the young, both male and female.
The problems of their homeless are almost always a tangle of personal pathologies combined with fractured relationships. In one of the best empirical studies of the homeless (Rossi et al., The Homeless of Chicago) it was discovered that about eight of ten had experienced some form of institutionalization for either drugs, mental problems, or crime. It is almost never alcoholism alone, or mental illness alone, that produces homelessness. Likewise, it is not poverty alone. Those of us born during the Depression know that. And in most cases, alcoholism combined with poverty, or mental disadvantage combined with alcoholism are not enough to land the unfortunate out on the street. The proximate cause of homelessness, and what accounts most for the explosion in their numbers, then, is fractured relationships.
Blind Observers
Caring and concerned citizens in our community learn from television that the pressing needs of street people are food and shelter. As a consequence, they go downtown, and as Reverend Carl Resener says, “they throw blankets and sandwiches at the homeless.” Since students at the university are told in their sociology classes that there is an epidemic of hunger and that “Americans are starving to death in the streets,” their charitable efforts will go into stocking food pantries and starting hot lunch programs. It is now becoming clear to objective observers across the country that this is ineffective, some say harmful, therapy due to a false diagnosis.
Those of us who have conducted firsthand investigations have been unable to find this mammoth problem of hunger on the streets of America. Two years ago, a group of Harvard physicians dedicated to documenting the problem of hunger described Pickett County, Tennessee, as “one of the hungriest spots in the nation.” I have investigated this claim with the director of human resources and others, and they have been unable to locate any hunger in the county. I even went to the place that was designated by the Harvard physicians as the “number-one hungriest spot in the nation,” Eureka County, Nevada, over in cat house country. What I found there was shocking to a little old country boy, but it wasn’t hunger.
In Nashville, I gained four pounds in five days while living — and eating — on the street. In Murfreesboro, records from the Food Bank indicate that about 25,000 of the 40,000 citizens receive some extra food during the year! In Denver, the Rescue Mission is actually in the food brokerage business. They have trucks to pick up the tons (and I mean tons—I was there) of dented and day-old food and to sort and distribute it. If it wasn’t a nonprofit agency, an operation like that could make millions.
Food is not the problem, then, at least in the way we are led to believe it is. If anybody is hungry among the homeless, it is because of the inhumanly cruel policies of a society that insists upon including among the civil rights of its citizens the freedom for the most helpless and dependent of them to freeze to death on the streets, while their advocates sleep in warm beds.
A noted Sovietologist said in a recent interview that it is little wonder that we have trouble understanding the Russians. They label their deviants and dissidents as insane and hospitalize them. We call our insane citizens “deviants, and allow them to freeze on the streets.”
Practical Solutions
What to do? The first and most urgent task is to begin humane, civil care for those who are mentally and emotionally unable to care for themselves on the brutal streets. Forego the current legal test of their having to be a clear danger to others. The most pathetic symptom of mental illness is not so much danger to others, although it commonly exists, as it is actions which lead almost inevitably to danger to oneself.
Between one-third to three-fourths of the most needful homeless — depending upon the definition of “mental illness” used and the type of care that is intended — will be covered by a program to care for the homeless mentally disadvantaged. National Institutes of Mental Health psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey says in his excellent account of the homeless mentally ill, Nowhere to Go, that there is already enough space and enough money — $17 billion — to care for them decently. What is required, Torrey says, is a reordering of priorities and the recognition that “decent, affordable housing” is not a solution to their problem.
Then, if we really believe that alcoholism is a disease, its victims need attention, not negligence. The most difficult symptom of alcoholism to treat is denial, a condition that prevents the person from knowing that he is sick. Denial is an understandable attitude for the alcoholic, but our society should not practice denial. I know from personal experience that there is hope for alcoholics, but only if someone cares for them, and exhibits that care in “tough love.” Another third of the homeless street population can be aided if their alcoholism becomes the primary target of aid.
That leaves a core of poor, jobless, lonely people who can be identified and who can now receive aid that is available but had previously been deflected by the mentally ill and the alcoholics surrounding them. Adult education, job training, and veterans programs are aimed at these people. There is room for them.
Two important caveats. First, the shelter system is at the point of institutionalizing the homeless as a permanent underclass; it must be capped now. Shelters should be considered temporary, a last resort, and communities should admit it is shameful to have to warehouse their citizens in impersonal, usually run-down, filthy buildings. As soon as the residents have been helped back into the community, the shelters should be dismantled. There should be a single measure of determining what aid should be funneled to the homeless: Will it help the people move toward independence and increased self-reliance, and away from the streets.
Second, the energetic and big-hearted volunteer movement must be gently moved from providing only survival services to the more difficult task of helping the homeless to help themselves. As difficult as it is to comprehend for those of us who grew up poor before 1950, adequate survival services for the homeless exist. What the unfortunates do not have, however, are teachers, friends, role models, and buddies who will urge them on. Without these necessities, all the food and clothing in the country will not ease their plight.
Brother Charlie Rescue Center is a mission, a transient lodge, a domestic violence shelter, and a thrift store in Tifton, Georgia. It occupies what was once a church and so it is the only thrift store in the country with stained glass windows. The director, big, boisterous, and efficient, Reverend John Gibbs, ended our interview by declaring, “You can give the homeless shelter and all the food and all the clothing, but if you don’t minister to them spiritually, you haven’t done anything.”
It is ironic that Reverend Gibbs makes this realistic but compassionate assessment, and that the U.S. Catholic Conference ends their policy statement with “We know that in reaching out to them [the homeless], in standing with them in defending their rights, in working with them and their families for decent housing, we serve the Lord.” Serving the Lord? Maybe so, but they aren’t doing much for the needs of the homeless.