A Student of the Mean Streets : Advocate for Homeless Fears U.S. Playing With ‘Social Dynamite’

Jonathan Kozol is walking up Main Street on Los Angeles’ Skid Row when a man with only a shirt wrapped around his waist sprints by, looking over his shoulder and shouting, “In the name of Jesus, I’ll make it. In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus.”

People stop, heads turn on the crowded sidewalk, some guffaw.

But Kozol, well-known writer, social activist and student of mean streets and hard neighborhoods, doesn’t break stride.

“That’s a little strange,” he comments. “It’s like there’s a whole class of people who are expendable. You don’t see many people like that in New York City, they’d freeze to death. This is like tropical destitution . . . tropical poverty.”

It’s all in a day’s grim work for Kozol.

For the last couple of years, Kozol has been immersed in the netherworld of this country’s homeless people, who he estimates number between 2 million and 3 million.

The former schoolteacher is the author of the just-published “Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America,” a generally well-received book that reports on impoverished New York families living in the city’s vermin-infested, drug- and crime-saturated welfare hotels, some only blocks from centers of wealth and power.

In Magazine, Bookstores

Excerpted in the New Yorker magazine and with 40,000 copies ordered by bookstores, “Rachel and Her Children” is Kozol’s best-selling book since he attracted national attention more than 20 years ago with “Death at an Early Age” about inner-city schools.

At 51, he is an intensely energetic man whose hands move constantly when he talks, who never seems to stop moving even when sitting down. He even eats on the run, downing an apple and a bowl of frozen yogurt on the drive from his hotel in Beverly Hills to downtown Los Angeles.

For the last two weeks Kozol has been touring the country and wherever he goes--Washington, Denver, Chicago, Seattle--he ends up in that city’s homeless district, comparing local versions of impoverishment with the Big Apple’s wormy core.

On the seamy side of Los Angeles, Kozol watches as the nearly naked man dashes up to a bus about to pull away from the curb and bangs on the door. The driver refuses to open up and the man, a desperate look on his face, turns down 3rd Street and disappears, pursued by private demons.

Kozol shakes his head and continues up the street, past a liquor store, a bar, men slumped against walls.

This hot February day Kozol has covered only a few blocks but he has seen enough to form powerful impressions.

“This is really something out here,” he says. “This looks like a Third World country. The sections of our major cities, they look like little Third World colonies or refugee camps.”

Earlier, at a food line set up in a Skid Row parking lot, he watched as people scrambled for greasy remains when the chicken and rice ran out.

“Look at that man with the cap on,” he said. “Now he’s just spooning it in. Look at that. Look at that. The only other place I’ve seen that is Haiti--where people would get on their knees and scoop up some juice from the bottom of the pot.”

A few minutes later he stops to talk to Jose and Jennifer Garcia at a taco stand. Jose cradles their infant daughter, Lianne. Drawn out by Kozol, the shy young couple say they are on the verge of homelessness, certain of an apartment in Boyle Heights only until the end of the month. Jose says he is working at a garment factory but the pay is low.

Later, Kozol reflects on this encounter:

“This is kind of a classic situation--mother, father, infant, father apparently working virtually full time and coming out of the month with $400 or $500, which would barely pay the rent in Los Angeles with no money for food, no money for diapers, no money for clothes . . . Increasingly the face of homelessness in America is the face of that little 38-day-old baby we just saw, not the face of a middle-aged alcoholic.

“A lot of good working people in the United States are just three paychecks and one bad operation, one cancer diagnosis, one emergency away from homelessness.”

Similarity of Homelessness

Across the country, Kozol says, he has been struck by the similarity of those areas in cities where homeless people gravitate.

“If it weren’t for the sunshine and the palm trees, this could have been the men’s shelter at East 3rd Street in New York,” he says.

There is another, perhaps more sinister, similarity in every part of the country, he says.

“In Washington people said to me, ‘If homeless parents can’t afford to pay the rent for their kids in Washington, why don’t they go someplace else?’ And I said, ‘Where should they go?’ and this guy said, ‘Maybe Boston or New York.’ And I said, ‘Rent’s higher in Boston and New York even than in Washington.’ He said, ‘Well, let them go to Chicago.’

“OK, a week later I was in Chicago. Someone said, ‘Well, if poor people can’t make it in the cities, maybe cities are too expensive for poor people, let ‘em go out West.’ I said, ‘Where?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know. Nevada or Colorado, isn’t there cheap land out there?’

“About four days later I was in Denver and I repeated that story on a radio show and somebody called up and said, ‘If poor mothers can’t afford to feed and house their kids, they ought to be sterilized.’ This was a woman, actually. She said, ‘Poor people are breeding like minks in the United States.’ Like minks . And I said, ‘Gee, I haven’t heard anything like that since the early ‘60s, in the days of George Wallace, in the United States.’ And then someone else called up and said, ‘Well, why don’t they just go to California?’

“And now I’m in California and this is where people propose putting them on a ship,” he says, referring to a proposal once made here to house homeless people on moth-balled boats.

Kozol has his own prediction of how the homeless will be treated.

“The question is whether they’re going to live with us or in internal colonies. Increasingly it looks like internal colonies, more vividly so perhaps here because so many of these people are Hispanic. But even in New York City, or Chicago, or Denver, where most of the homeless people are white, native-born Americans, it looks and smells like a colony.”

Kozol says that in New York City’s welfare hotels--particularly the Martinique where he spent most of his time and came to know many families--the conditions, including the high infant mortality, often resemble those in a less-developed country.

“Diseases that you don’t see in the United States are common in the buildings now,” he says. “Whooping cough. You get measles . . . tuberculosis. Kids aren’t inoculated . . . So you get a whole building of terribly sick children. Congenital diarrhea. The rooms smell terrible, filthy. Shared bathrooms, often with other sick families and they’re cooking in the same bathroom.”

If children are lucky enough to make it to school age, Kozol says, prospects don’t brighten all that much. About a third of homeless children never go to school, he claims, perhaps because of the psychic toll of homelessness. “A psychiatrist told me you see children more depressed than you’d see in psychiatric clinics. Those who do go to school feel dirty and the fact is they are dirty. They bring a certain smell of filthiness into school with them,” he says.

“By the sixth grade, homeless children often show signs of failure and within a couple of years they are on the streets on their own.”

Unless there’s a national effort to alleviate homelessness and care for homeless children, Kozol believes that the country is playing with “social dynamite.” At best, he says, children from places like the Martinique Hotel “will end up on the streets, in crime, in prison. . . . But prison isn’t going to seem very strange for these kids. It’ll remind them of the Martinique.”

Kozol finds it ironic that most federal funding for the homeless comes from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, created to deal with natural disasters.

“(Homelessness) is a man-made disaster. It’s interesting that there’s no federal provision for man-made catastrophes and we have to fund this as if it were an act of God. It’s an act of man. It’s an act of (New York Mayor) Ed Koch or (New York developer) Donald Trump or the rest of us, but God didn’t do that.”

Fate Can Be Cruel

But Kozol is well aware that fate can be cruel. While working on “Rachel and Her Children” he met an acquaintance he had known as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin. A former high school teacher, the man had gotten sick, lost his job and his wife had been hospitalized for depression. His money gone, the man had become homeless and was living in the Martinique when Kozol began researching his book.

“When I see that, I figure it could happen to you or me,” he says. “. . . I have nightmares of waking up and finding I made some terrible mistake, I’ve done something terribly wrong and suddenly all the support systems are gone. I talk to people I used to know and they don’t acknowledge me and I bring a check to the bank and my account’s been closed, credit card doesn’t work any longer.

”. . . I imagine a lot of people have frightening dreams like that and I think that’s one reason we react with such revulsion to the homeless. . . . I think the fear is seeing our own nightmare acted out in front of us.”