Neal September

Well, it has been a busy September, with business appts., a family crisis, a trip out of town and helping someone move as well as landscaping the house, but my research, once again, Kat, mostly primary stuff right now, has not been completely amiss.  I include some stuff I got this week while working on Joe’s dissertation.  I also got library privledges for UNA, so I can ILL now and get some more scholarly/philosophical works for myself!

These first 2 include a great bibliography that I need to consult further and one on male homelessness as a special problem.

1. Homeless in Men, with a great bibliography.

“Homelessness Is a Serious Problem Among Men.”The Homeless. Jennifer A. Hurley. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2002. .

Table of Contents: Further Readings

Excerpted from “Where Do All the Women Go? Look Around the Streets and You Will See That the Homeless Are Almost Exclusively Male,” by Anthony Browne, New Statesman, December 18, 1998. Copyright © 1998 Paul Harris. Reprinted by permission of the New Statesman.

In the subsequent viewpoint, Anthony Browne, a writer for the British publication New Statesman, asserts that homelessness is primarily a male problem. Men make up the vast majority of groups that commonly experience homelessness, including the unemployed, former prisoners, veterans of the armed forces, and members of the foster care system. Furthermore, states Browne, men’s friendships tend to be less intimate than women’s, which makes men less likely to seek help from friends during times of financial trouble.

As you read, consider the following questions:

Why are women less likely than men to be officially homeless, in Browne’s view?
According to the author, why are foster care boys more likely than girls to leave care and end up on the streets?
How do men typically cope with their problems, in the author’s opinion?

John is not typical of the homeless. Well educated and articulate, he has slept rough for five years, ever since his wife died. Since his loss, John has sought refuge in the bottle; he has lost his job as a teacher and his home. He looks 70, with what can only be described as weathered features—but he is in fact 51. He clings to dignity by describing himself as a “park-bench poet”—with some justification: he hassles public librarians to get copies of Heinrich Heine in the original German (apparently the translations don’t convey the angst of the original). He gives a share of the money he gets from begging to some pensioners he knows. They need it more than him, he says, because he has no bills to pay.

In reality, John is actually typical in his atypicality. Homeless people are almost as diverse a group as the population at large. There is only one thing that almost all of them have in common, apart from the lack of a home: they are male.

A Male Problem

As any walk through any city centre at night will show you, homelessness is almost exclusively a male problem. According to the Homeless Network, an umbrella organisation for homeless charities, around 89 per cent of those sleeping rough are men.

Ask any housing expert to explain the discrepancy and, surprisingly, they will tell you that no research has been done on the subject. The housing charity Crisis has recently started addressing the gender aspect of homelessness; it’s just commissioned a report into “Homelessness and Women”.

One clear reason is that the street is a more dangerous place for women than men. All those sleeping rough are liable to be beaten up by drunk people leaving pubs, but women are especially vulnerable and tend to make more use of emergency accommodation. But even in these “direct-access shelters”, men still outnumber women four to one.

Four to one. Compare that to eight to one on the street. Like public toilets, direct-shelter beds are almost all allocated by gender, and there are roughly twice as many emergency beds available for women sleeping rough as there are for men. The end result is inevitable: while there are often vacancies for women’s accommodation, for men the shelters are usually full.

“There are nights when there are no male spaces available, so the men go rough, while there are still spaces available for women,” says Kate Tomlinson, manager of policy at Crisis. Put another way, it’s common for homeless men to turn up at emergency accommodation and be told, in effect, “If you were a woman, we’d have a bed for you.”

Women—particularly young ones—are also less likely to be officially homeless because they are liable to be drawn into prostitution or abusive relationships that have the one saving grace of taking them off the street.

The main economic cause of homelessness is unemployment. The destruction of male-dominated unskilled manual jobs and the creation of female-dominated service jobs have left many men at a disadvantage in the labour market. Government figures show that men are twice as likely to be unemployed as women, and three times as likely to be long-term unemployed. Homelessness is often only a step away.

Routes into Homelessness Are Dominated by Men

“The routes into homelessness are dominated by men,” says Tomlinson. “Whether it’s prisoners being released to the outside world, soldiers leaving the armed forces, young people leaving care, dependency on alcohol or drugs, or losing accommodation after the breakdown of a relationship, men outnumber women.”

There are 20 times as many male prisoners as female ones; and according to the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, half of them have no home to go to after release. The probation service does its best to arrange accommodation, but admits it often just can’t cope.

“The probation service is not an accommodation agency, and we can’t guarantee that people find a place to stay. We’ll try, but there are times you can’t even get emergency accommodation,” said a spokesman for the Inner London Probation Service, the largest in the country. He added: “It can happen that people spend their last night of their sentence in prison, and then spend the next night on the street.” This is not nice for the former prisoner—and especially not nice for society: it is difficult to think of any way more likely to make a former prisoner re-offend than chucking them out on the street.

The prison story is repeated with another great institution of the state: the army. Roughly one in five of those sleeping rough ended up on the streets after leaving the armed forces with nowhere to stay. Again, it’s almost all men. “You just don’t find homeless women soldiers,” says Tomlinson.

Soldiers need far more help than is usually realised, according to David Warner, director of the Homeless Network. “If you’ve been a squaddie for ten years and everything has been done for you and your life has been organised for you, then what you need is rehabilitation.” The army isn’t totally oblivious, according to Tomlinson: “It gives them a book,” she says ironically.

The picture is similar, if less extreme, in care: young men in foster homes or institutions outnumber young women by roughly three to two; of those who leave care and end up on the streets, boys outnumber girls by about four to one. Peter Hardman, the director of First Key, sees many reasons for this. Boys, for one, are more likely to fight and then fall out with their foster families than girls. “Young women leaving care are more readily accepted back into the immediate or extended foster family,” says Hardman. “There are more young women who have converted the foster placement into lodging.”

Pregnancy, too, plays its part. Various studies show that between one-seventh and one-quarter of young women who leave care are already mothers, and local authorities are legally required to give them accommodation. Hardman says: “All sorts of child-protection issues come to the fore—they’re in the safety net. Many local authorities have mother and baby units. Young men who are fathers don’t tend to stay with the children and don’t get accommodation.”

Many of those involved with the homeless mention this legal assistance in explaining the difference in homelessness rates between men and women. Nicholas Pleace of the Centre for Housing Policy at the University of York says: “Homeless women are far more likely to be with children, and thus tend to get assisted under legislation. The only other way of getting statutory assistance is by being classified as ‘vulnerable’, such as having mental health problems—but that’s so much more difficult to identify.”

Men’s Inability to Help Themselves

Yet institutional and legal issues alone don’t explain the extreme disparity between the number of homeless men and women; what does emerge from this grim picture of gender inequality is men’s inability to help themselves in times of crisis.

Megan Ravenhill, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, has recently been interviewing homeless people about their lives, and says a clear pattern is emerging: women have better, stronger social support networks. “Women tend to spend longer sleeping on friends’ floors because they’re less likely to fall out with their friends. They’re more likely to have a network of friends from antenatal classes, the nursery or the school gate. For men, friendships tend to be based around work, so that once they’ve lost their job, they lose their social network.”

Men’s friendships tend to be less intimate and thus less supportive in times of crisis, says Ravenhill, whereas women are more likely to be able to help each other in practical ways because they know friends who have been through it all before and learnt the lessons. “Lots of the men just don’t know what to do, how to find hostels or help. They feel totally alone,” she says.

Instead of relying on friends, men have other—far more destructive—ways of coping. If marriages fail or they lose their jobs, pride often stops them asking for help, and they are far more likely to turn to drink or drugs. Homelessness beckons; the risk of suicide rises.

Children can also be a stabilising factor in women’s lives. Many people become homeless after their marriage or relationship breaks down; when children are involved, it is far more likely that it is the man who leaves and has to find somewhere else.

But social attitudes take little of this into account. Men are meant to be strong and should be able to look after themselves—otherwise it’s all their fault. “There’s a lot of stereotyping that goes on—it’s almost the Victorian idea of the undeserving poor, particularly with male rough sleepers,” says Pleace, “and because of the way we think about homelessness, they’re seen as an undeserving group.”
FURTHER READINGS

Books
G. John M. Abbarno. The Ethics of Homelessness: Philosophical Perspectives. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999.
Nels Anderson. On Hobos and Homelessness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Gregg Barak. Gimme Shelter. New York: Praeger, 1991.
Alice S. Baum and Donald W. Burnes. A Nation in Denial: The Truth About Homelessness. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.
Joel Blau. The Visible Poor: Homelessness in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Tina S. Bolnik and Jamie Pastor Bolnik. Living at the Edge of the World: A Teenager’s Survival in the Tunnels of Grand Central Station. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Namkee G. Choi. Homeless Families with Children: A Subjective Experience of Homelessness. New York: Springer, 1999.
Jodi Cobb et al. The Way Home: Ending Homelessness in America. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1999.
Deborah R. Connolly. Homeless Mothers: Face to Face with Women and Poverty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Kevin Cwayna. Knowing Where the Fountains Are: Stories and Stark Realities of Homeless Youth. Minneapolis: Deaconess Press, 1993.
Gerald P. Daly. Homeless: Policies, Strategies, and Lives on the Street. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Robert R. Desjarlais. Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Herbert J. Gans. The War Against the Poor: The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy. New York: BasicBooks, 1995.
Irene Glasser. Homelessness in Global Perspective. New York: G.K. Hall, 1994.
Mary Jo Huth and Talmadge Wright, eds. International Critical Perspectives on Homelessness. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997.
Interagency Council on the Homeless. Outcasts on Main Street: Report of the Federal Task Force on Homelessness and Severe Mental Illness. 1992. Available from National Resource Center on Homelessness and Mental Illness, Policy Research Associates, 262 Delaware Ave., Delmar, NT 12054.
Rael Jean Isaac and Virginia C. Armat. Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill. New York: Free Press, 1990.
Karleen Jackson. Family Homelessness: More than Simply a Lack of Housing. New York: Garland, 2000.
Christopher Jencks. The Homeless. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Elliot Liebow. Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women. New York: Free Press, 1993.
Dale Maharidge. The Last Great American Hobo. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1993.
Lawrence M. Mead The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Eungjun Min, ed. Reading the Homeless: The Media’s Image of Homeless Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.
Margaret Morton. The Tunnel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
National Coalition for the Homeless Shredding the Safety Net: The Contract with America’s Impact on Poor and Homeless People. December 1994.
Margery G. Nichelason. Homeless or Hopeless? Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1994.
Ralph DaCosta Nunez. The New Poverty: Homeless Families in America. New York: Insight Books, 1996.
Brendan O’Flaherty. Making Room: The Economics of Homelessness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Joanne Passaro. The Unequal Homeless: Men on the Streets, Women in Their Place. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Melanie Smith Percy. “Not Just a Shelter Kid”: How Homeless Children Find Solace. New York: Garland, 1997.
Peter H. Rossi. Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Michael Rowe. Crossing the Border: Encounters Between Homeless People and Outreach Workers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Paul G. Shane. What About America’s Homeless Children?: Hide and Seek. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996.
David A. Snow and Leon Anderson. Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.
Thomas Szasz. Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society’s Unwanted. New York: Wiley, 1994.
E. Fuller Torrey. Out of the Shadows: Confronting America’s Mental Illness Crisis. New York: Wiley, 1997.
Yvonne M. Vissing. Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Homeless Children and Families in Small-Town America. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
David Wagner. Checkerboard Square: Culture and Resistance in a Homeless Community. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.
Les B. Whitbeck and Dan R. Hoyt. Nowhere to Grow: Homeless and Runaway Adolescents and Their Families. New York: Aldine de Gruyer, 1999.
Richard W. White Jr. Rude Awakenings: What the Homeless Crisis Tells Us. San Francisco: ICS Press, 1992.
Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear. Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993.
James D. Wright. Address Unknown: The Homeless in America. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989.
Susan Yeich. The Politics of Ending Homelessness. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994.

Periodicals
America. “Homeless Children,” November 13, 1999.
Patricia Bailey. “Oh, Canada,” Toward Freedom, March-August 1999.
Skip Barry. “Homeless at Fifty-Five,” Commonweal, April 23, 1999.
Nina Bernstein. “With a Job, Without a Home,” The New York Times, March 4, 1999.
Warren Caragata. “Homelessness Is Fixable,” Maclean’s, January 25, 1999.
Patricia Chrisholm. “‘This Is a Human Problem,”‘ Maclean’s, March 23, 1998.
Lynne Duke. “Homeless and Hiding,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, December 20-27, 1999. Available from Reprints, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071.
Ralph S. Hambrick and Gary T. Johnson. “The Future of Homelessness,” Society, September/October 1998.
Bob Herbert. “Children in Crisis,” The New York Times, June 10, 1999.
Kari Lyderson. “Out of Sight,” In These Times, June 12, 2000.
Ralph Nunez and Cybelle Fox. “A Snapshot of Family Homelessness Across America,” Political Science Quarterly, Summer 1999.
William Raspberry. “Is the Homeless Crisis Over or Are We Indifferent?” Liberal Opinion Week, October 19, 1998. Available from PO Box 880, Vinton, IA 52348-0880.
Romesh Ratnesar. “Not Gone, but Forgotten?” Time, February 8, 1999.
Catherine Walsh. “Street Children Around the World,” America September 17, 1997.

2. MAGGS, JOHN. “BUT NOT ON OUR STREETS, PLEASE.(homeless populations).” National Journal 31.21 (May 22, 1999): 1414.

Homelessness has resurfaced as an important social problem as more urgent crises such as drug abuse and violent crime have decreased. This resurgence has fostered lower tolerance for activities such as panhandling, loitering or camping, similar to the ideological shift that prompted support of federal welfare limits. Housing and drug treatment may help mitigate but not eliminate the problem.

Full Text:COPYRIGHT 1999 National Journal Group, Inc.

PORTLAND, Ore.–In many ways, this city resembles damp and trendy Seattle, 170 miles to the north. It’s a fast-growing, high-tech center that has similarly become addicted to a better (and more expensive) cup of coffee. This latter point poses an unexpected challenge for some have-nots here. Jason, 20, his shoulders hunched and blond hair matted by drizzle, likes to start each day with a steaming triple latte, and lately it takes him one or two hours to collect the $3.50 he needs for the brew. “People have not been as generous,” said Jason, who says he spends most nights sleeping on the street. “`We don’t want any panhandling downtown,’ is what one guy said. Most people don’t say anything at all.”

The reaction he describes is increasingly common among people here, whose reputation for generosity and tolerance for the homeless has been challenged recently. Like most American cities, Portland has watched its homeless population swell in the 1990s, even as the local unemployment rate has reached its lowest level in a generation. Explanations for the high numbers vary from city to city, but another phenomenon is more uniform: Across the country, citizens and their leaders have become less tolerant of the sometimes difficult-to-escape public presence of the homeless. Ironically, part of the reason for their discontent is the overall improvement in urban life–with more-urgent problems such as street crime and drug use on the decline, homelessness stands out more in the many American cities that are on the rebound. There is frustration, to be sure, that more than a decade of civic effort in many places doesn’t seem to have returned many homeless to a normal and stable life. More than anything else, though, the homeless have been swept up in the same ideological shift that led many liberals to support time limits on welfare: a sense that well-intentioned, nostrings-attached social programs have often reinforced homelessness as a way of life.

In some of the nation’s largest cities–Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco among them–this shift has been accompanied by what some analysts see as an epidemic of new laws and stepped-up enforcement of old laws that criminalize homelessness. According to a report last January by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, a Washington, D.C.-based homeless-advocacy group, a survey of social service providers in 50 major cities found that in the past two years, 36 percent of the municipalities had launched “aggressive, intense enforcement of some or all applicable laws against homeless people” and that nine of the 50 cities had adopted new laws that restrict begging or the use of public space by the homeless.

Among the more recent innovations: Chicago acted to “privatize” its sidewalks, erecting fences on busy Lower Wacker Drive, issuing permits to businesses to use the areas, and thus handing the problem of eviction of the homeless over to the private sector.

New York may have started the get-tough trend in the early 1990s; San Francisco (of all places), which issued more than 16,000 “quality of life” tickets last year, is often mentioned as the place where “tough love” for the homeless is the toughest; but it is Portland, which was and remains one of the most conscientious cities in caring for the homeless, where even modest tightenings of the law have prompted profound soul-searching.

Portlanders agree on the event that marked the beginning of the city’s mobilization to help the homeless–the election of Democratic Mayor J.E. “Bud” Clark in 1984. Many cities were grappling with a sharp increase in homelessness after the 1981-82 recession. U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat who was then a member of the county commission that acts as Portland’s city council, said another factor was a decision in the preceding few years to release mental patients who for years had been institutionalized. “When the bottom fell out in the mid-’80s, and with deinstitutionalization, we had a major problem we hadn’t had before,” he said.

When the new mayor took office in 1985, “Bud Clark made helping the homeless part of his commitment” to the city, Blumenauer said. “And he put some not-insignificant resources into the problem.” Over the next eight years, Portland spent tens of millions of dollars on housing and social services for its growing numbers of homeless. “There’s a real tradition of community activism in Portland,” Blumenauer said. “We tackled this problem in the same way.”

By the mid-1990s, though, in Portland and other cities, a strong economy and increased spending on the homeless weren’t doing the trick. Here, the numbers of homeless continued to grow, and they were becoming more visible, setting up ever-larger encampments under Portland’s many bridges, on construction sites, and on city property. In the 1990s, the number of Portland’s homeless has more than doubled, according to Chuck Currie, community outreach coordinator for the First United Methodist Church. According to spot counts at city shelters, the number of those looking for a safe place to sleep has risen from around 1,000 a night at the beginning of the decade to around 2,500. (Currie says that the number of homeless is somewhere between twice and three times this number.)

Currie and other community activists say a major factor behind the growth in homelessness has been this city’s skyrocketing housing prices. From 1993-97, the median price of a home in the area rose 55 percent, about two and half times the national rate. The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department has identified Portland as one of the least affordable cities for housing in the country, and recently found that the city was short 35,000 units of lower-income housing, according to Janet Byrd, executive director of Oregon Housing Now! Coalition, a nonprofit group.

But the area’s rapidly expanding middle class–especially in the suburbs–tends to skew these numbers somewhat, driving up average and median prices by bidding up the prices of nicer homes. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty said that in 1998, 25 percent of Portland’s population was unable to afford the $409-a-month median rent here for a studio apartment. This sounds like a large proportion, but it is smaller than the share in 30 of the 50 cities surveyed by the law center–Miami was 34 percent, and New York 35 percent. Portland has seen its housing prices rise faster than almost any other city’s, but on a national scale, they are close to the middle of the pack.

As Portland’s homeless population was growing and becoming more visible in the 1990s, the city was enjoying a revitalization–what had been a regional manufacturing and resource-based economy was becoming an international tourist destination. Retail business emerged as the major economic engine for the city, and many merchants saw the homeless as a threat to city’s new image. They organized around homelessness and a few other “quality of life” issues to push for reform.

Currie says two laws have caused the most problems for the homeless, and each was adopted after Clark was succeeded in 1993 by Democrat Vera Katz. An anti-camping ordinance dating from 1981 but beefed up in the 1990s gave police new authority to break up homeless encampments. Currie claims the law has been used to harass the homeless and expel them from more-visible parts of the city. In many cases, the possessions of homeless people are confiscated, he said. In 1994, Portland began to enforce “drug-free” zones in some of the city’s most-trafficked tourist areas–the first was in the newly spruced-up Old Town section, now a major retailing and dining district. Under the pretext of enforcing drug-free rules, Currie asserts, the police stop and search many homeless people without probable cause. If drugs are found, the person is summarily banned from the area for 90 days.

The business group that spearheaded both these initiatives is the Association for Portland Progress. Rob DeGraff, vice president for policy at the association, shrugged off Currie’s portrayal of the two controversial laws. “First of all, it is just wrong to say that a law aimed against drug dealers is somehow targeting the homeless. And the anti-camping ordinance is not the harassment of homeless, it is saying to the small subsection that resorts to camping that they can’t do this in one place forever. No one owns the sidewalk, it is community space.”

Currie, who retorts that both laws were openly touted as addressing problems with the homeless, can point to one victory. The Oregon Senate in mid-May voted to tighten the notification requirements of the anti-camping ordinance, which require 24-hours’ notice before an encampment is broken up. The Senate’s amendment would prevent police from issuing fines to campers at the time of notification.

Erik Sten, a longtime housing activist and now the elected county commissioner responsible for the homeless, calls the drug-free-zone rules overly broad, but says that he, wouldn’t want to scrap the anti-camping ordinance. “Four or five years ago, I would have felt differently, but now I can see the perspective from the neighbors” of the camps, he said. “In an urban setting, it is just not appropriate to have permanent camps.”

That said, Sten doesn’t think the law will help much. “Not too many people would admit this, but sometimes the best thing you can do is just move people along.” As long as there’s not enough housing, and not enough drug treatment, and some homeless that refuse both, he said, “there’s not going to be an instant solution.”