Friday, January 25, 2019

Being Just A Number - Counting The Homeless

Back in 2010, I had a police officer tell me that a shopping cart equaled one homeless person and a tent equaled two. Since that day, I have been very suspect of the accuracy of homeless statistics. This week, I participated in the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count because I wanted to understand their particular methodology. We did count tents, but not shopping carts. The tents also seem to remain tents in the final numbers - instead of equating them to a number of people.

The people running the count were very kind, but there was this air of protecting the volunteers from the homeless that was floating about. The training video explicitly stated that the homeless were people too, but went on to tell us to not talk to them "in order to keep their privacy". I kept imagining some guy coming up to me on the street, not saying anything, writing a tally mark down on a clipboard, and just walking away. I would be so sad. People talk to people. People count items. Homeless people are not items. Can you imagine how our national census would go if census takers just counted houses?

We also counted from 8pm to midnight - and in groups. At 11pm, the organizer called me to tell me I could stop if I felt unsafe. If my safety was a concern, why did we count at night? Is it so we don't have to talk to sleeping homeless people? Is it because they're easier to count when they're not moving? Is it because volunteers can't make it out during the day? I had just walked by a sleeping woman and I felt that SHE was unsafe... because she was asleep outside.

It was not explicitly stated, but I felt that for the sake of the volunteers, The Count was also buying into this idea that homeless people are "the other" - that they are not one of US. The ironic thing is that as long as we have this view of separation, homelessness will not get solved.

Some homeless people can be dangerous, but it's not a rule. A more accurate rule might be that homeless people are sad, depressed, and/or lonely. And treating them as a potential danger and a number to count just makes them sadder, lonelier, and more depressed.

Can we start bridging the gap between "us" and "them" by calling the act of counting the homeless a census? I get that the word change is just a token, but maybe some volunteers might feel safer with that word.

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

'Click Bait' Homelessness - The Difficulties in Marketing Poverty

I just watched an interview clip where Conor Skehan (an Irish housing official) talked about the pitfalls of pulling on people's heartstrings. His point was that people are pulled into action when humans say they have no shelter - and this could be used as manipulation. The headline for the article I read about the interview focused on Mr. Skehan calling homelessness 'normal'. Because he called it normal, the publication that wrote about the interview is banking on its readers to think that that is a polarizing thing to say - it's their click bait.

In the eleven years that I have been documenting homelessness in the US, I would agree that homelessness is normal. No person in any city I have visited  has ever said to me, "We don't have any homeless here."

The interviewer asks Conor Skehan if it being normal makes it right. It seems as if the interview's subtext is this:

Skehan:
People need to calm down and not react to people crying 'homeless' because you could be getting scammed.

Interviewer:
We need to hype the heck out of this any way we can to get the public to support getting people off of the streets.

Here is the crux of the dilemma. People are talking about the same thing with different life values attached to it. Homelessness is not like cancer where people have pretty clear views on the subject.

The views on cancer tend to be:

1. Cancer is bad.
2. Getting cancer is bad.
3. A cure for cancer would be good.
4. Other than with lung and skin cancer, cancer just happens. It's not 'your fault'.

Arguments against curing cancer tend to be:
1. We can't cure cancer.
2. We should put money into preventing cancer instead.
3. Curing cancer is too expensive.
4 The money is in treating cancer, not curing it (no one is [publicly] a  proponent of this argument).

If we try to do the same thing with homelessness, it gets ugly pretty quickly.

The views on homelessness tend to be:

1. Homelessness is bad - but some people want to be homeless.
2. Homeless people are - well I won't publicly say that they are bad, and I'm sure some are fine people but drugs and mental illness and scammers and lazy people.
3. A cure for homeless would be good, but I don't see why do I have to put effort into someone else's life. I've got my own problems.
4. I would never be homeless. They did something to get themselves into that situation.
5. Poor bastards. I feel sorry for some of them.

Arguments against solving homelessness tend to be:

1. I will never say we can't solve homelessness because that's bad PR and I am a giving person but I will never back a futile endeavor. Our society fights wars to win and not to perpetually lose battles. Why can't they just solve their own problems?
2. Families need to take care of their own - or people should have enough money to support themselves.
3. I don't want to pay for their mistakes.
4. (Privately) There's no money to be made in solving homelessness. It's a sink-hole.
5. It's not my problem to solve, it's homeless people's or The City's problem.

The above list can grow and grow and people will continually argue about the points and how to approach them. We get caught up in the judgment of being homeless and it clouds any directive we start with. It also makes it hard to 'market'. Talking about homelessness in a directed soundbyte or headline can be difficult because people come to those words and concepts with different attachments.

So what do we do? I focus on getting specific people off of the street and back to being self-sustained. This way, I keep the dialogue contained to that person's situation and needs. Homelessness is not cancer. A homeless person is not a group of mutating cells that can be treated in a single systematic way. People are far more complex than cancer cells and we don't even fully understand cancer cells. How can we expect to understand and support a whole disparate population of people loosely tied together by the fact that they don't have stable roofs over their heads?

Homelessness is normal. But, I don't think we should accept it. We should work to get people stable - because we enjoy living in a stable society. And, we should look past the click bait and into each specific situation.