Homeless Families : ‘This Is Not a Home. You Always Have to Be on Your Guard.’
Cyndra Ferris is 33 but the lines on her face bespeak a lifetime of stress. Still, it isn’t immediately apparent that she is a member of the nation’s burgeoning legion of homeless.
“I have a roof over my head, but I still consider myself homeless,” she said, balancing her 2-year-old daughter on her hip.
For eight months, Ferris and her three children--Lee, 8, Robert, 7, and Shana, the toddler--have been living in a tiny, squalid room in a San Francisco shelter.
The hallways and stairwells are dingy. Rooms smell of meals cooked on hot plates. Mouse droppings and mildew stain carpets and mattresses.
Cheap locks on thin wooden doors do little to stop robbers and rapists, and drugs are sold openly. A recent police department study shows that there were 942 reported crimes in San Francisco’s 33 homeless hotels in a one-year period ending June, 1987. Eighteen percent were rapes, robberies and other assaults.
“This is not a home,” Ferris said. “You always have to be on your guard.”
3 Million Homeless
Families account for an increasing number of homeless in America, although estimates on the number vary dramatically.
The Washington-headquartered National Coalition for the Homeless estimates that there are 3 million homeless people and that one of every six is a child. Families make up 40% of those on the streets.
Federal officials say the number is lower than coalition estimates, citing a 1984 study suggesting that there were between 200,000 and 350,000 homeless at that time.
“But we feel the number has increased since then,” said William Glavin, spokesman for Housing and Urban Development in Washington.
Families lose their homes because of layoffs, broken marriages, drugs and medical problems. Minimum-wage salaries, too low to support a mortgage or city rent, cause some families to slide into poverty and keep others from climbing out.
Many of the homeless are mentally ill, but more and more are families for whom homelessness is a new and devastating experience.
“We’re stuck in a hole we’re never going to get out of,” said Ferris, who lives in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district and had hoped to have an apartment by now, eight months after leaving an abusive husband.
Larger Tasks Impossible
Just getting a welfare check and food stamps is a time-consuming chore that illustrates, for her, the impossibility of accomplishing larger tasks, like looking for a job.
Each month Ferris receives a check for $753 and $92 in food stamps from the government’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The money is enough to keep them in a homeless hotel, but not enough to rent an apartment in San Francisco, where an average two-bedroom apartment rents for $895.
“There are no shortcuts,” she said. “In the system it’s a fluke if something good happens to you.”
The ease with which people can lose jobs and homes makes homelessness one of the most intractable social crises in the United States. It has not, however, become a major issue in the presidential race.
“We’ve gotten commitments from the candidates to adopt a program addressing homelessness, but we haven’t gotten any specific ideas of how the program would be implemented,” said Maria Foscarinas, chief counsel for the National Coalition for the Homeless.
The coalition, which asked all presidential candidates early in the campaign to commit to working toward a solution for the homeless, received responses from all Democratic candidates and very few from Republican candidates.
But even Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson, the two remaining Democratic candidates, have not specifically said what they would do to improve the situation, Foscarinas said.
“It really involves a substantial commitment of federal funds, and they are reluctant to pin themselves down to that,” she said. “They are afraid it will mean fewer votes.”
Among the Republicans, Vice President George Bush has been virtually silent on the issue. “He’s really said nothing about it and that’s a disappointment,” Foscarinas said.
Bush’s wife, Barbara, has been active in a group of congressional wives addressing the homeless issue, “but so far, his wife’s concern has not been transmitted to the vice president’s agenda,” she said.
“The Reagan Administration has been notably unresponsive to the issue,” Foscarinas said. “Its policies have been the major cause of the mass homelessness we’re now facing. It seems that he (Bush) is carrying on that legacy.”
When the numbers of homeless families began increasing in the early 1980s, city officials across the country responded to what they saw as a temporary problem, building shelters that were expected to act as bridges from the street to permanent housing.
City, state and local governments increased spending on temporary housing and self-help programs. Thousands of hotel rooms in cities such as New York became stopgap dwellings, at nightly fees often astronomical compared to the price of ordinary housing.
As early as 1982, San Francisco was pouring $12.5 million in federal, state and city funds into the problem. The level of spending has increased since then despite other pressing needs, such as AIDS research and health care for the city’s more than 5,200 AIDS patients.
Still, experts agree that government efforts have failed to make a dent in the problem. The number of homeless Americans, they say, will rise at least through the next decade.
“It’s going to be a really big problem,” said Jerry McMurray, director of the federal congressional subcommittee on housing. “There is going to be more homelessness and more housing overcrowding, increasingly so.”
The number of homeless in the nation’s capital has increased by a third to 15,000 in the last year. Other cities that have had increases of 25% or more in their homeless populations include Chicago (30,000), Atlanta (6,000-10,000) and Los Angeles (50,000), said the National Coalition for the Homeless.
On any one night, most U.S. cities can shelter up to one in three of their homeless citizens, except for Chicago, where there are beds for roughly one in nine.
Many beds are taken by the mentally ill, their situation partly the result of a massive exodus of patients from mental institutions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Still others are the emotionally fragile. Many have deteriorated into mental illness through lack of treatment, including Vietnam veterans suffering the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
“Shelters have become--aside from the asylums of the 1980s--kind of a clearinghouse for the mentally ill,” said Dick Clark, a social worker at St. Anthony’s Shelter for women in San Francisco.
“We don’t have psychological support services here. Battered women come here and it’s horrible for them because they’re not used to the regimented life of the streets. Battered women have no place to go.”
San Francisco Supervisor Nancy Walker said the city’s shelter program “hinges on full-service shelters” that provide food, laundry services and showers, a system she said makes it easy to remain homeless.
A better solution than shelters would be to put government funds into job training, child care, substance-abuse programs and programs that create permanent and affordable housing, Walker said.
“We have to deal with breaking the cycle of homelessness,” she said.
The biggest barriers to breaking that cycle are the lack of affordable housing and the difficulties of renting or buying the housing that does exist.
$2,400 May Be Needed
Renting an apartment frequently means paying first and last month’s rent and a security deposit equivalent to another month’s rent to compensate for any property damage that may occur during tenancy.
Under these terms, a renter must plunk down $2,400 for a $895-a-month two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco--a minimum requirement for a family of four--before moving in.
Steve LaPlante, assistant to San Francisco’s Mayor Art Agnos, believes the city will have to build a large apartment complex to serve as transitional housing for homeless families. People could live there until they find reasonably priced housing or until the city renovates city-owned apartments.
But even this solution would be inadequate to meet existing demand, let alone the needs of the future.
San Francisco placed 190 families in city-owned and newly renovated apartments last year, said LaPlante, “but those families have already been replaced by 190 new families looking for homes.”
Children are becoming an increasing focus for experts who despair of a short-term solution to homelessness and now worry about the future.
Unhoused and undernourished, children who are homeless face a plethora of medical, social and intellectual problems in the years ahead--if they survive.
A 1987 survey of eight cities across the country showed that 43% of homeless children do not attend school. “We have people out on the streets--we’re talking about whole families, young kids out on the street,” said Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Merced).
“What type of situation are we forcing these kids into in terms of their future?”
‘Silent Victims’
Pearl Pritchard, director of Oakland’s Salvation Army shelter for women and their families, calls children “the silent victims of homelessness.”
“I’ve seen children come through our meal line whose eyes are 100 years old,” Pritchard said, noting the mothers of such children are often too occupied with their worries about jobs and dwellings to provide adequate parental care.
“One of the things they do is lose their touch with reality,” Pritchard said of homeless children.
“They live in limbo--’Where am I going to be tonight? Where am I going to be tomorrow? Am I going to have shoes on my feet? Do I have to go to school tomorrow?’ And nobody’s saying ‘Yes, you do.’
“They have no connection with society.”
