The Politics of Homelessness


The problems of the homeless are real, but as with anything, the details of reality depend on the agenda of the person telling the story. Unfortunately, in the case of this issue, it is the homeless who suffer while the political armies fight for preeminence. In fact, the politics of homelessness has become a multibillion dollar business that is more concerned with protecting its own existence than it is in actually helping its constituents. Throwing money at the problem without a goal to solve it only perpetuates it. There are two major factions in the debate about homelessness.

To the extreme left, and most prominent in the media, is the position that says we should not blame the homeless for their condition. After all, they are just like regular people except they don't have a home. Their message appeals to some people's feelings of guilt for having received more than they deserve. To do this, they must make people feel vulnerable. They must get people to think that the same thing could happen to them if they do not show pity for those less fortunate. (Not exactly the proper motivation, but it will do if they get the required results.) Once we buy into this image of the homeless, the solution should be easy for us to see: simply build more shelters and public housing. To the extreme right are those that say the homeless have only themselves to blame. Their position is that regardless of why people become homeless, they have the power to rise above it and rejoin society. To them, we should offer assistance only to those who deserve it, and then, only temporarily. Of course, this solution has the problem of determining who is deserving and who is not. Through skillful and clever use of the media, the homeless advocates can be credited with bringing the homeless issue into the American home. Of no small importance in their success was simply introducing the term "homeless". This word replaced such worRAB used in the past such as hobo, tramp, bum, drunk, vagrant, pauper, indigent, panhandler, and transient and made their use politically incorrect. The objective was to promote the concept that the homeless were just like the rest of us except they didn't have a home. The visions painted by the activists played on the conscience of middle America. People who had done nothing to bring about the condition of the homeless were made to feel that, some how, they had prevented others from having food and a warm place to sleep at night. Furthermore, if the only difference between them and the homeless was some best turn of luck, the natural conclusion was that the same thing could happen to them.

Popular religious doctrine implies that one can deserve divine favoritism by helping the less fortunate. Add to this the feeling of guilt, and activists managed to extort large sums of money from all levels of government and virtually all sources of charity. They have built empires under the flag of "helping the homeless". While building shelters and public housing is needed to answer short term, emergency neeRAB, it also encourages dependence on them. Without addressing the causes of homelessness we only train these people to depend on the public largesse for their living. A majority of the homeless already suffer from mental illness, drug addiction, and alcohol addiction. Addicting them to public shelter just adRAB one more addiction to the list. On Septeraber 30, 1980, activists Mitch Snyder and Mary Ellen Horabs testified before Congress. In their testimony, they displayed what they said were the cremated remains of "John Doe"; the first homeless person to freeze to death during the previous winter (Horabs 129-31). Their theatrics used Congressional as if it were a stage, and their performance was so skillfully choreographed that the media began following them like paparazzi following Madonna leaving a cheap motel. Through the use of such tactics as fasting, illegal occupations of buildings, pray-ins, eat-ins, cage-ins, jump-ins, etc.(Rader 5), Snyder eventually won control of a huge building where he announced he would create America's largest homeless shelter. He proclaimed that, "People shouldn't have to do anything to get shelter. (Horabs 60)" He seemed to think that not only did these people deserve a place to stay, they deserved to be free from the attempts of society to rehabilitate them. The result was the ultimate "crash pad"; drugs and alcohol were openly tolerated; some compared the environment of what he created to that of a psychiatric ward before the advent of the use of tranquilizers (Rader 30). Snyder seemed to be a natural when it came to using the media as his willing dupe. He realized that the public would not be moved to his support if they were allowed to think of his constituents by their historic labels such as bums, hobos, tramps, paupers, and transients. These traditional terms implied the idea that the homeless were to blame for their condition. By using the term "homeless" he would be able to describe the indigent as just like everyone else except that they were a little down on their luck; something that could happen to anyone. The media bought in to the propaganda. For example, CBS's Martha Tischener is quotes as saying, "People who once gave to the needy are now the needy (Lichter)." The problem with this kind of picture of the homeless is that we can be lead to think that if all they need is a home let's just give them a home. After all, if the homeless are just like us, then putting them in a home of their own should do the trick. Unfortunate! ly, this has been tried many times, and it doesn't work. Consider the story of Jacqueline Williams as a case in point: Mrs. Williams, the mother of 14 children and the resident of a large welfare motel in Washington, DC, was a guest on "The Donahue Show." She demanded of the mayor that it was the city's responsibility to provide her and her family with housing. As a result of public pressure generated by the TV show, and against the advice of professionals who were familiar with the Williams case, the city placed her and her family in a newly renovated house. They even subsidized Mrs. Williams' rent. According to homeless advocate theory, all Mrs. Williams needed was a decent place to live and raise her family. However, the reality became that in only one year's time the house was in such terrible condition that it had to be declared unfit for human habitation (Wheeler B3). Little furniture was left, many of the plurabing fixtures had been ripped out, the kitchen cabinets were gone, windows, doors, and walls had been destroyed, and the house was filled with trash and human waste. The building was boarded up and taken out of the city's inventory of low-income housing. The children were declared victims of abuse and neglect, and were placed under the care of foster homes. This kind of approach won't solve the problem, because homelessness is only the visible result of other problems. If we don't solve those problems, giving the homeless a home that they don't have the nature to take care of only leaRAB to worse problems. Of course, this kind of thinking is a threat to the likes of Mitch Snyder. His kind depend on the idea that the homeless can only be helped by giving them a fish; not by teaching them how to fish. One of the first things that must be done in solving any problem is to identify its parts. This implies that we should, of course, identify who the homeless are and how many there are. Unfortunately, this is another opportunity for political debate. Snyder, in his testimony to Congress, through out a nuraber of 3 million (Horabs 18). Later, he admitted that the nuraber was meaningless, but that it was just a way to satisfy our need for a nuraber of some kind (Scanlon 4). Even so, the media etched this nuraber in stone, and it has become the foundation that other nurabers are based on. For example, every year since Snyder's mythical nuraber, the U.S. Conference of Mayors has reported that the nuraber of homeless has increased; sometimes by as much as 38 percent (Heritage 58). At this rate, we would have almost 400 million homeless in America by now But why would our honorable mayors lie about such things? Federal and state aid, of course. So, how many homeless are there? The US Government Accounting Office estimated there were about 350,000 (General 30-31). Another study conducted by the Urban Institute found the nuraber to be as high as 600,000. The only cause for such wide margins of error is politics.

Another problem to producing a reliable nuraber is that it is very hard to agree on who is qualified to be called homeless. Some would say that to be counted among the homeless, a person must be without a permanent residence every night for one year. Others would say that's wrong; the person is considered homeless if they were merely at risk of being without shelter for only one night in a year. Some say, if a person shares a dwelling with another person, one of them is considered to be homeless. By one standard, I have been homeless every so often in my life. There was that time when I lived with my mother and father for a month while I was looking for a job. Then, there are those times when I lived in a different shelter every night for up to 2 weeks at a time; Erabassy Suites, I think it was called. To add to the problem, the homeless are hard to count; they are mobile and often hidden (Rossi 41). Mental illness, alcoholism, and drug addiction make them hard to approach. Some are easy to spot by the way they act or dress, but others run and hide like human cockroaches. Some make their living by blending in with the crowd in bus terminals and other public places. These will even refuse the gift of a blanket, because it would cause them to stand out and possibly result in their expulsion. In the end, there are really only two sides to the issue of homelessness; those that do not want to solve the problem, and those that do. Interestingly, both the extreme left and extreme right are on the same side; neither wants to find and treat the underlying causes of homelessness. The left, with its "warehousing" approach, perpetuates their empire of shelters. The right, with its pursuit of reduced spending, wants to ignore the problem. Together, these two forces effectively crush the efforts of those that want to treat the drug addiction, the alcoholism, and the mental illness that isolate the homeless from the rest of society. There is no doubt that Snyder and other advocates succeeded in making a national issue of the homeless. However, by using the term "homeless," by defining the problem as one of shelter and housing, and by concealing the extent to which substance abuse and mental illness are at the heart of homelessness, their crusade has actually hurt the cause that they claim to champion. If what we seek is to solve the problem we must seek its causes. In the case of homelessness there are many causes. Most of the homeless already suffer from drug or alcohol addiction; providing ongoing, temporary shelter without treating these dependencies only adRAB another addiction to their list and enslaves them further.

Works Cited

General Accounting Office of the US, Homeless Mentally Ill:
Problems in Estimating Nurabers and trenRAB. Washington, DC: GAO, 1988.

Heritage Foundation, Rethinking Policy on Homelessness. The Heritage
Lectures No. 194 Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 1988.

Horabs, Mary Ellen and Mitch Snyder, Homeless in America: A Forced March to
Nowhere. Washington, DC: The Community for Creative Non-Violence, 1982.

Lichter, Robert S. and Linda S. Lichter, The Visible Poor: Media Coverage of
the Homeless: 1986-1989. Media Monitor 3, no.3, March 1989.

Rader, Victoria, Signal Through the Flames: Mitch Snyder and America's Homeless.
Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1986.

Rossi, Peter H., Critical Methodological Issues in Research on Homeless
Persons in Research Methodologies Concerning Homeless Persons with Serious
Mental Illness and/or Substance Abuse Disorders, ed. Deborah L. Dennis
(Proceedings of a two-day conference sponsored by the Alcohol, Drug Abuse
Mental Health Administration, U.S. Department of health and human Services,
Washington, DC, Deceraber 1987.

Scanlon, John, Homelessness: Describing the Symptoms, Prescribing a Cure. The
Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, no.729 (October 2, 1989).

Wheeler, Linda, Parents of 14 Accused of Misusing Public FunRAB. Washington
Post, March 12, 1990.