Lazy, Crazy or Just Like Us? : How We See the Homeless

Drinking, dime novels, laziness, war, discontent, socialistic ideals, shiftlessness, vice, love of roving, lack of manhood, imbecility, Chinese, the devil.

In the years since the National Conference of Charities and Correction catalogued these “causes of homelessness” in 1886, we have gone to the moon, learned how to transplant hearts, invented computers that can outperform man and harnessed the power of the atom. But as a new stream of spirited and sometimes zealous books on America’s underclass reveals, we are still no closer to unraveling the root causes of homelessness than we were in 1886.

True, newspapers recently have hailed an encouraging new consensus between liberals and conservatives about poverty, consensus between liberals and conservatives about poverty, born out of conservatives’ acknowledgment that America’s underclass has mushroomed in the last two decades (one child in five now lives in poverty, the highest rate in the industrialized world) and out of liberals’ admission that welfare may indeed be sowing the seeds of dependency. As Bill Clinton’s stump speech puts it, “It’s time to move beyond old ideas of ‘something for nothing’ on the one hand, and ‘every person for himself’ on the other.”

The problem is that this “new consensus” is hardly new: “A hand up, not a handout,” was, after all, the central idea behind Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s. And when we venture beyond election-year rhetoric into the nitty-gritty policy dilemmas that animate these books, the sweet consensus dissolves into a kaleidoscope of often bitter factionalism.

It’s no secret why we can’t “just get along.” The reason, as these authors’ disparate conceptions of the homeless make clear, is that we all project profoundly different images onto that faceless abstraction, “the poor.”

* The homeless are crazy.

The notion that most readily strikes casual street observers can be summarized somewhat crudely as “the homeless are crazy.” Homeless advocates are quick to point out that the woman being assaulted by an invisible adversary or the alcoholic sleeping away the afternoon on a sidewalk represent only the sickest segment of the population. But many conservative writers remain incredulous when homeless advocates claim that there is an invisible majority of mentally healthy homeless who dress and behave in ways that hide their predicament.

In his impressively pragmatic, if politically incorrect book “Rude Awakenings,” for instance, Richard White, a federal anti-poverty program administrator from 1964-81, argues that “there are far fewer homeless than advocates claim, but their problems are much worse than is commonly admitted. Serious mental illness, substance abuse, and family breakdown are the norm rather than the exception.” Many of these homeless, White believes, are casualties of “deinstitutionalization,” the mass release of mental hospital inpatients in the 1960s and ‘70s. The patients were to be cared for by a network of community mental-health centers (CMHCs), but because of a fiscal shell game played between Washington and local governments, and of a preference among some mental health officials for treating what psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey has called “the worried well,” many of the seriously mentally ill were abandoned to the streets.

* The homeless are lazy.

The second commonly held notion about America’s poor--best summarized as “the homeless are lazy”--can be seen in a provocative book by the former deputy research director of the Republican National Committee, Lawrence Mead. “Most of the poor do not work, so they cannot take advantage of most of the benefits that government and the economy offer,” Mead writes. Mead is not entirely without sympathy for the homeless; in part, he writes, they are victims of “dependency politicians” who grimly tell the underclass, “You are powerless victims of an oppressive society.” “A ‘closed opportunity structure’ does not exist for most people in America,” Mead writes, “but it does for those who believe it does.”

* The homeless are us.

The third notion found frequently in these books--”the homeless are us”--is the one most favored by homeless advocates for its power to compel even the staunchest conservative to support social welfare spending. After all, if anyone can fall off the ladder of opportunity, no one can doubt the necessity of a safety net. While “lazy” and “crazy” theorists believe homelessness is the product of character defects, this school points to baneful social, political and economic forces.

In her book “The Women Outside,” journalist and homeless-shelter director Stephanie Golden champions this school most poignantly. “Even when the women (I treated) had delusions or heard voices,” Golden writes, “the better I knew them, the more such symptoms seemed a response to circumstances rather than an indication of illness within.” Golden’s feeling of kinship with the homeless women she treated at her Brooklyn shelter is clear from the opening page of her book, which carries this quotation from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Upper Broadway”:

Now I must write for myself

for this blind

woman scratching the pavement

with her wand of thought

this slippered crone

inching on icy streets

reaching into wire trash baskets

pulling out

what was thrown away

and infinitely precious.

All three of these hypotheses, not surprisingly, have their own spirited detractors.

The “crazy” concept is persuasively debunked by liberal social-welfare professor Joel Blau in his thorough, astute overview, “The Visible Poor.” Citing studies which show that “the great majority of homeless people do not, prior to their homelessness, behave in notably bizarre or unusual ways,” Blau contends that psychiatrists’ and psychologists’ “diagnostic skills . . . breed tunnel vision when they are employed without some attention to their social and economic context. The principal reference book of the American Psychiatric Assn. says that ‘collecting garbage, hoarding food, and a marked impairment in personal hygiene and grooming are residual effects of schizophrenia.’ Perhaps they are, but perhaps they are also the not-so-residual symptoms of lacking a home.”

In “Over the Edge,” Martha Burt of the centrist Urban Institute explains how in the late 1980s she too came to doubt explanations that see character defects as the cause of homelessness: “I knew that there had been no general population increase in the size of the many vulnerable groups who now made up the homeless, yet more of them were on the streets or in shelters. Clearly, conditions must have changed between the 1970s, when members of these vulnerable groups could maintain themselves in housing, and the ‘80s, when they found it increasingly difficult to do so.”

Mead’s “lazy” hypothesis, in turn, is largely discredited in “The Forgotten Americans,” a September book by two University of Arizona political scientists which marshals a bevy of facts to support its surprising argument that 40% of all year-round, full-time workers in America cannot earn enough to keep a family of four out of poverty (which they define as 155% of the official poverty rate).

Finally, Golden’s argument that the homeless are “just like us” is, however unintentionally, undermined by her own portraits of the women she treated at her shelter. While Golden insists that most of the women are “normal,” many are defeated by experiences the rest of us probably would grin and bear. Mollie, for instance, “bursts into violent floods of tears” when she “thinks about her difficulties,” while Norma would have had “a good chance to acquire some control over her feelings and her life if she had continuous emotional support in a stress-free environment.” Would that we all could reside in such an environment!

How, then, are we to bring people like Mollie and Norma back into the fold?

“Make them work!” suggests Mead, pointing out that his 1986 book, “Beyond Entitlement,” “helped provide a rationale for the last important welfare reform in 1988, which expanded work programs tied to welfare.” That this act--alternately called JOBS and Workfare--was partly sponsored by Bill Clinton testifies to its popularity among America’s “new consensus” politicians.

Joel Blau, however, reminds us that Workfare has had only nominally more success in freeing its participants from state aid than welfare: 61% of Workfare participants left AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) within 15 months, as compared with 55% of those receiving welfare alone. The chief problem with Workfare programs like New York’s Work Experience Program (WEP), Blau argues persuasively, is that they pay too little to foster self-sufficiency, let alone self-respect: “WEP punishes people for their homelessness by paying 62 cents an hour for the kind of menial labor that would hardly--at least at that salary--enhance anyone’s feelings of self-esteem.”

Mollie and Norma might be better served by another, more novel idea set forth in some of these books. Low-income citizens with psychological disabilities essentially have only two stark options today: mental hospitals at the one extreme (although these are increasingly few and far between) and Workfare programs at the other.

The lack of a middle ground is peculiarly American, no doubt stemming from our nation’s staunch individualism, which holds that those people who are not “personally responsible” must be either crazy or criminal. There is near-universal agreement in these books, however, that this ethic is to blame for tragedies like the Los Angeles County Jail. With 15% of its approximately 24,000 inmates diagnosed as schizophrenic or manic-depressive, the jail, as psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey has pointed out, has become “the largest ‘institution’ for the mentally ill in the state.”

In “Beyond Homelessness,” a collection of lively, intelligent and down-to-earth conversations, sociologist Peter Rossi suggests one particularly promising middle ground: Adults unable to live responsibly and independently should be encouraged to stay with their family members through the establishment of “Aid to Families With Dependent Adults.” “If you could help a family keep their dependent adult,” Rossi says, “it would probably cost around $6,000 per year. That is cheap. Taking somebody in for a short-term stay in a mental hospital costs around $2,000 or more each month.”

But the most poignant exposition of what’s lost when the mentally disturbed poor are kept out of sight and mind in the asylums of the 1950s or the jails of the 1990s comes from Stephanie Golden: “Someone who believes she has a mission from God or that she is a reincarnation of Saint Barbara can still make zucchini bread or do laundry or even answer the phone. What is more, as she creates real connections with other people, St. Barbara--or the chemicals or the FBI--recedes into a small corner of her life because the part of her experience that it is connected with is no longer so important. The FBI may never go away, but it does not poison the new friendships. This may not be a cure in the conventional sense, and it certainly does not enable St. Barbara to go out and get a job; but it does permit her to remain inside, as part of a community whose other members are important to her, as she is to them.”

The one point on which all of these headstrong authors do concur is that the single overriding cause of homelessness is lacking a home. But by this they each mean very different things. Some refer to a literal lack of shelter: Blau, for instance, documents the sharp decline since the 1970s in low-income apartments and federally subsidized housing.

Others refer to the community left behind centuries ago when Africans were forcibly taken to America or to the home town abandoned decades ago when low-skilled workers had to leave their family to search for opportunity. What was lost, as southern novelist Harry Crews puts it, was “as vital and necessary as the beating of your own heart: home place . . . that single house where you were born . . . your anchor in the world.”

The most common kind of dislocation felt by the homeless in these books, however, is also the most intractable: a sense of not belonging to a society that gives HUD money intended for low-income housing to wealthy real-estate developers; that has allowed the top 1% of American households to earn as much as the bottom 40%; that, as Jacqueline Jones acrimoniously puts it in “The Dispossessed,” glorifies “consumption conspicuous for its arrogance, and a savage drive for self-aggrandizement that mocks the notion of community.”

And so many of the homeless, feeling unable to change what strike them as givens, take a kind of comfort in their isolation and defeat. As Golden puts it, “The woman on the street has given up; she is all cracks and fissures, and her anger pours out continuously. Having never been able to express it in the appropriate place, she now expresses it everywhere; and what makes such behavior possible is her isolation. The more cut off she is from human contact, the less effect will the release of her feelings have on others. She has made herself safe.”

THE VISIBLE POOR: Homelessness in the United States, By Joel Blau (Oxford: $22.95; 272 pp.)

RUDE AWAKENINGS: What the Homeless Crisis Tells Us, By Richard W. White (Institute for Contemporary Studies: $24.95; 330 pp.)

THE DISPOSSESSED: America’s Underclasses From the Civil War to the Present, By Jacqueline Jones (Basic Books: $25; 375 pp.)

THE NEW POLITICS OF POVERTY: The Nonworking Poor in America, By Lawrence M. Mead (Basic Books: $25; 416 pp.)

THE WOMEN OUTSIDE: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness, By Stephanie Golden (University of California Press: $25; 308 pp.)

THE FORGOTTEN AMERICANS, By John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy (Norton: $19.95; 288 pp.)

BEYOND HOMELESSNESS: Frames of Reference, By Benedict Giamo and Jeffrey Grunberg Photographs by Mel Rosenthal (University of Iowa Press: $25.95; 226 pp.)

OVER THE EDGE: The Growth of Homelessness in the 1980s, By Martha R. Burt (Russell Sage Foundation/Urban Institute Press: $34.95; 267 pp.)