Homeless in the Cities of America

Walking through any metropolitan area, especially downtown areas, one will discover people living on the streets with no particular place to go. When people spend any amount of time in a city, they will become aware of the homeless. They are men and women, young and old, and they are of all ethnic origins and backgrounds. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, about a quarter of them are veterans of war, but all homeless people live in a war just to survive on the streets.

Passersby have differing views of those who dwell there. Some offer them the change in their pocket, while some totally ignore them or cross the street to avoid them. Typically, homeless people are not dressed very well and may not be as clean as one might expect; but, it is important to understand the kind of conditions in which they live and the difficulties they face on a daily basis. Finding gainful employment is difficult when one does not have a shower, nice clothes, a cell-phone, a kitchen, formal education, a support network of people upon whom they can rely, or any of the other stabilizing factors that people need to get a job.

When sanatariums (or bedlams) were closed in the last century, although it was done to treat those who are mentally ill more fairly, what happened was that the mental illness population was simply turned out to the streets. What creates the vast number of homeless people in every city in the United States, when historically, it was not as common? Basically, there was an incongruity between a person being a ward of some mental sanatarium, in which provisions were secured, despite brutalities, and being a person who was mentally ill and wondering on the strange streets of a modern city. Homeless people dwell in the midst of traffic, pollution, expensive amenities--expensive necessities--with little or nothing and no one to secure their lives beyond the day.

The streets are not a clean place to live. They may not look so filthy at first glance, but try sleeping on them for a few days. Every major city in the United States is a dirty environment when a person is doing more than driving down streets, walking to work, shopping, or eating in restaurants. To go to sleep on the streets-to wake there-is a difficult and uncertain life. There is no morning coffee, no shower, no bed, only a struggle to eat, to bathe, and to find a place where one will not be bothered. Money is assumed to be the answer for homeless people, because it is elusive; but, money is never the answer. A good Samaritan can give money to a homeless person daily, yet the person remains poor. It is never enough to secure the necessities they need.

Stress is inescapable for anyone, but especially for homeless people who are broke and lack resources. Oftentimes, they are constantly trying to gain basic necessities for every day; it is only that there are always barriers and new difficulties to meet them that keep them feeling as if they are trying to tear down a wall with their bare hands-failing every day. There is a range of self-destructive behaviors commonly used to cope with the feeling and attitude of hopelessness. Self-destructive forms of consoling one-self are not "coping" as much as they are "escaping". And, who would not desire to escape such an environment in one way or the other?

Homeless people often feel isolated, and actually they may be isolated. Homeless people feel isolated because of the reaction of passersby, angry shopkeepers, or suspicious police. Isolation occurs when relationships are burned or other problems affect a person's social network, such as chemical dependency and/or mental illness. The homeless may even experience "learned helplessness" due to the seeming futility of escaping the streets once they have grown accustomed to the rawness of that existence. They may trust no one, or only a very small circle of people.

It is true that a large portion of the homeless population suffers from mental illness disabilities and/or chemical dependency; veterans comprise members of both these populations. Oftentimes, people on the streets suffer from mental illness and chemical dependency simultaneously; poverty, however, is the most-common denominator. Both mental illness and chemical dependency may contribute to poverty, but poverty is what nearly all homeless people have in common. Lack of education also predominates, and this is also likely related to the common poverty and lack of resources the homeless population endure.

While on the streets, homeless people find that they are typically unwelcome just about everywhere. They are ushered away from doorways, tossed out of public parks, cited for minor offenses they can hardly avoid, refused the right to the use the bathroom in public facilities-unless they "pay" for something in the store or café, which they cannot-and shunned in general by most of the population who treat them as if they are invisible or as if they are not even human. There are "camp cities" in various cities that have been shut down for various reasons so that even in public spaces, homeless people who "camp" are ordered to leave. To whom do public spaces and places belong? Who decides who can be there, stay there, or sleep there?

Because of the harsh conditions of living on the streets, most of the homeless population functions on a minimum level of daily living skills. In other words, they bathe if they can find a day-center. They eat if the garbage dump has something edible or there is a facility in the city that serves meals to them, oftentimes in exchange for engagement in some form of treatment, whether for psychiatric issues or substance abuse. To sleep on a square of cardboard, covered by one's own jacket, in the crevice of a doorway, or behind a bush, does not provide the quality rest that people need. Not knowing if someone-or an animal-is going to interrupt one in the night contributes to poor sleep and a poor mood the next day-every day.

There are resources in most major cities for the homeless population, although for them, there never seems to be enough. There are centers where people can register to get a mailbox, work on a computer to fill out applications, use telephones to call employment services, take showers, eat meals, even sleep in a bunk, but the needs are so great and on such a vast scale that there are never enough resources. If there are, the homeless people never see them or do not know about them.

There are also various forms of community assistance that help transition homeless people into half-way houses, low-income housing, group homes, etc. There is a sense that in order for housing to "succeed" for the homeless population, there must be a number of factors at work and the specific person must be "ready" for housing. Ironically, if one talks to them, then there is not one homeless person who is not ready for housing. For the various forms of it, there are always "waiting lists" and "criteria" that qualifies or excludes them from the possibility. It is never as easy as it sounds, and poverty imposes a network of demanding conditions against which homeless people-for example-fight every day and have to fight even in order not to give up.

Obviously, housing is not free, and income is always a necessity, at least to some extent. There are also various forms of monetary assistance, although state-aid is not enough to pay the rent; more commonly, people apply for disability of one kind or another with the federal government, who eventually approve or deny the request based on interviews, applications, doctors' notes, and other biographical factors. Without it, people have almost nothing. Even with federal aid, they still have almost nothing. It is not enough, and after paying even reduced rent and buying food for a month, the money is gone.

What seems necessary to address the homelessness issue in the United States is an understanding of its underlying causes or the underlying conditions that lead people to live on the streets. Roughly, these are poverty, lack of formal education, mental illness, chemical dependency, trauma (as with veterans), criminal histories, and poor social networks or people skills. To live on the streets demands a certain kind of lifestyle just to survive, yet to get off the streets demands one that can be even more difficult.