The homeless
There are six vacant homes for every homeless person.
Having spent years in social work, I feel we are being misled. The homeless are portrayed as the ‘nation’s failure’, the ‘disenfranchised,’ who were ‘abandoned’ by the economy, ‘never had a chance,’ and have ‘fallen out of the mainstream.’ They are ‘victims’ who are owed food, lodging, clothing, and services, with little or nothing asked in return.
Some are shown on a food line with bizarre mountains of hair and dirty, matted beards. No one would hire them; yet they’re never asked to get a haircut and shave in return for meals and lodging.
We are rarely given the views of those who deal directly with them bus depots, blood banks, merchants, neighbors, thrift stores, parks, libraries, burned-out relatives, and burned-out public servants. We rarely hear, ‘90% of them don’t want help’ (from one shelter worker), or ‘onethird are crazy, onethird lazy, and onethird drunk’ (from one of the formerly homeless). We’re told nothing can be done about skid row. We were told the same about prostitution in Los Angeles before it was cleaned up. Free food is supposed to be temporary, yet one patron of a mission didn’t miss a meal in 30 years. Shelters in New York were for temporary housing, yet the average stay was 11 months. One skid row drifter won a huge jackpot, blew it, and returned to skid row. Another thought he would ‘go on welfare, when it began to rain’.
The subject needs realists to cut through the rhetoric, emotion, and finger-pointing, to contact the neglected sources above, and to come up with recommendations like:
– Study what has worked in various cities and countries. – Clarify rights: the homeless have a right to provide their own shelters in some areas under certain conditions, when the city doesn’t and a right to pay for safe parking for sleeping. The public has a right not to be panhandled and not to have vagrants sleeping about. – Find out why there were homeless during a labor shortage and why few undocumented workers become homeless. – Find out why one homeless man said it’s easier to be homeless than to work for low wages. – Promote private solutions. – Encourage non-professionals to run shelters. Make it profitable. Let them use campgrounds, farm labor camps, abandoned buildings, parts of military bases, and fallout shelters. – Let businesses hire the homeless for sub-minimum wage plus room and board. – Require each community to provide shelter for only their share of the homeless. Let the homeless homestead abandoned homes and buildings. There are six vacant homes for every homeless person. – Allow tents and shanties in certain areas. Allow the homeless access to thrown-out material. Wave liability for food from restaurants, markets, and other outlets that is safe, but unsalable. – Permit powdered milk and donated or homemade food in shelters. – Require volunteer work in exchange for food, clothing, shelter, and services. – Never reward the non- working with more than what the working get. Nothing is more discouraging.
Such an approach in general with the homeless would: Show some people prefer to live near destitution. Make the homeless accountable for their hygiene, grooming, clothing, manners and participation in selfhelp groups and volunteer work. – Make shelters safer and more sanitary. – Bring responsibility, which would separate the motivated from the freeloaders.
We shouldn’t be misled by idealists and guiltmongers. They give the homeless reasons for selfpity, and never look for nor credit the few good shelters. They blame society, yet tie its hands. If poor immigrants with limited English can get ahead, the motivated homeless, who speak fluent English, can get ahead, when the responsibility is imaginatively and firmly put on them.
Patt Morrison of the L.A. Times liked this, some years ago.
