Tag: Homelessness

In-Group Cohesion & Out-Group Hostility

In-Group Cohesion & Out-Group Hostility

Posted on by jabittan
Everyone knows that a common enemy can bring together two groups that are not natural allies. World War II, when the United States and Soviets coordinated in against the Nazis is probably the best and most famous example. Humans are wired for in-group cohesion and out-group nastiness, and the common dislike of an external enemy and US/Soviet example shows how powerful these in-group and out-group responses can be. The phenomenon plays out in massive geopolitical theaters, but also in our every day lives. We quickly identify our in-groups and real or perceived threats by out-groups can drive us into closer bonds and even extend our in-groups.
Elliot Liebow shows how this happened among homeless women in his book Tell Them Who I Am. He writes, “real and perceived abuse by the non-homeless world strongly reinforced group cohesion. Much of the talk in shelters centered on fighting off the negative stereotypes of homeless women and the mindless insensitivity of the citizens at large.” The homeless women Liebow met and studied did not always get along. They didn’t always trust each other, didn’t hold the same beliefs, and came from different backgrounds and ways of life. But their shared homelessness often drew them together despite these differences, because a powerful out-group threatened them.
Liebow wrote about the stares, jeers, and insensitive comments that homeless women had to deal with on a daily basis. The women he met were constantly scared and made to feel weak and insignificant. On the streets the women were alone and hopeless, but when they came together in shelters, they found a community brought about by out-group antagonism reinforcing in-group solidarity that was hard to build among a transient population. The experience and group dynamics of homeless individuals reflects a very interesting and often troublesome reality of human nature. We evolved from small tribal groups, and the instinctual in-group versus out-group analysis that we do whenever we are in social settings is still with us, despite often causing more trouble than we want. Whether we are homeless, part of a metal band, or have a PhD, we cannot escape our in-group and out-group biases. These biases can determine the way we act toward others, and can bring us closer together when threatened. People with homes expressed this out-group nastiness toward the homeless which pushed the homeless together against a common out-group enemy. Their union and community was tenuous and wasn’t natural for many of the women, but the negativity they all experienced created a shared in-group sense for the homeless women and allowed them to bond and share niceties toward each other.
The Chicken and Egg Problem of Mental Health Issues and Homelessness

The Chicken and Egg Problem of Mental Health Issues and Homelessness

Posted on by jabittan
I recently wrote about the challenges of mental health and homelessness, and how sometimes homelessness itself causes mental health disorders in individuals. In general, we assume that people become homeless because they have mental health disorders, not that homelessness causes people to have mental health disorders. Elliot Liebow looks at the issue with a much more careful eye in his book Tell Them Who I Am. Liebow writes,
“Mental health problems and homelessness stood in a chicken-and-egg relationship to one another. Homelessness was seen as a cause of mental health problems just as often as mental health problems were seen as a cause of homelessness. Indeed, it was not uncommon for the women to use their homelessness to explain their sometimes ungenerous behavior.”
Being homeless is stressful. Homeless individuals cannot maintain many basic possessions. They face uncertainty with meals, where they will sleep, how they will go to the bathroom, and whether they will be in danger from weather, animals, or other people. They don’t have a lot of people, besides other homeless individuals, to speak to and get support from. Liebow writes about the ways this stress can boil over for the homeless, and how sometimes the women he profiled for his book would lash out or act irrationally and blame it on the stress of homelessness. With no safe places, shelters that impose rules and ask prying questions, and with little to keep one’s mind engaged and hopeful for a better future, it is not hard to imagine how the stress of homelessness could become overwhelming and spark mental health problems.
At the end of the day, however, this chicken-and-egg relationship should be encouraging. Not all the people who end up homeless have mental health problems – at least not when they initially experience homelessness. This means that early interventions and support can help keep people from developing worse mental health problems that prevent them from rejoining society. It also means that providing stable housing and shelter can help reduce some of the mental health problems that the homeless face, easing their potential reintegration into society. We can also look at the relationship between mental health and homelessness to see that providing more mental healthcare to people currently working and maintaining jobs may support them and keep them from becoming homeless. Preventative mental health care can prevent stress and anxiety worsening to drive someone into homeless where their mental health could further deteriorate. The key idea is that we shouldn’t dismiss the homeless as helpless crazy people. We should see investments in mental healthcare at all levels of society as a beneficial preventative measure to reduce and address homelessness.
Paternalism, Deservingness, and Dependency

Paternalism, Deservingness, and Dependency

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Tell Them Who I Am Elliot Liebow writes about homeless women and how society tries, but ultimately fails to truly help the women survive and rejoin society. Our system for helping those in need, especially the homeless, is inefficient, ineffective, overly invasive, and ultimately fails to provide what people actually need. We have a system that provides limited government support that is hard to access and hard to understand. We provide what we think homeless people and people in need want, or what we want to provide them, not what they necessarily need.
Liewbow has an explanation for why we have a system that operates so poorly, “That we tolerate these system malfunctions can be understood in part as the end point of two streams of public thinking about the poor. One is that many poor people are not deserving of public support; the other is fear of giving them too much support and encouraging dependency.”
One of the things I have noticed in my own efforts to help support those in need is that what I think I should give people is not always what they actually need and want. Rather than giving panhandlers money, I prefer to give them some type of in-kind donation, often some type of non-perishable food item. I used to buy nutritious and calorically dense granola bars, but what I learned is that people who are asking for money often don’t have teeth or don’t have good oral hygiene and cannot actually eat a granola bar. Nor can they eat apples, healthy sandwiches, and other food items that I would prefer to give them rather than cash that I fear they may spend on alcohol. I’ve settled by providing Nutrigrain bars and similar soft yet somewhat nutritious food items that I can keep in the car.
My story shows how there is an element of paternalism in the way that we approach the homeless. We assume we know what is best for them and provide what we think they need, we don’t always take into consideration what they can actually use, carry with them, and what they would prefer. For me, this has been a learning process to be more useful with my support, even if I am still not giving them money which would be most useful. However, for many people, homeless people are not seen as deserving of any aid, and consequently those who help them become overly paternalistic. Any aid is provided on the conditions of the donor, with little consideration for the needs of the poor and homeless. If someone won’t take that aid then it further demonstrates that they just are not worthy. I think my experience of trying to give the homeless apples and granola bars demonstrates that this paternalistic approach and calling people unworthy demonstrates the shortcomings of such a view and approach.
The second aspect of Liebow’s quote is that we don’t want homeless to become dependent, so we chose to give them the minimal support necessary to survive. The theory suggests that we shouldn’t allow them to be too comfortable, or they won’t try to fix their own lives. We don’t want to offer them too much support, or they may just come to expect aid and assistance rather than accepting that they must work and be productive. Somehow we think that desperation, starvation, and the pain and shame of homelessness is the right way to get people to work and be productive. We would rather see people wasting away on the streets than living in acceptable conditions and receiving food, money, and shelter provided by the  government. Dependency runs against the American ethos that so many of us adopt, and we are unwilling to help those need beyond the bare minimum that we can do to keep them from dying in the streets.
Fear of the Homeless

Fear of the Homeless

Posted on by jabittan
This last week my wife and I volunteered in a kitchen to help serve meals to homeless men and women in our community. With the rise of the Delta Variant, the kitchen we volunteered at was not serving meals inside, but instead outside in the parking lot. This was the first time that we had served outside rather than inside, and the group leader chatted with us about the new format and some things to be aware of with the different serving location. It was the first Friday of the month, and as a result he warned us that some of the homeless individuals and people who came by for dinner were more likely to be using drugs or abusing alcohol for the evening since assistance checks would have just gone out. He warned us that when the kitchen switched to serving outside, they lost some control over the individuals and their things, and that a fight had broken out a few nights earlier. He wasn’t trying to scare us, just to warn us about the realities of volunteering outside rather than inside the kitchen.
I will admit, listening about the recent fight and likely active drug use of the people we were volunteering to help was frightening. I am not immune to a fear of the homeless, even though I still want to find ways to help them. Elliot Liebow would not have been surprised by my reaction. In his 1993 book Tell Them Who I Am he wrote, “everyone fears the homeless, including the homeless themselves.”
Fear is a big reason we don’t do more to help  the homeless. We are afraid of unpredictable people who are (or may be) using drugs and alcohol. We are afraid of people who may have mental illnesses and could act irrationally at any moment. We are afraid of people who are messy, who smell foul, and who could carry some type of disease or pest. Fear is a driving emotion related to the homeless and drives many of our behaviors. Liebow’s quote shows how common this fear is by noting that even the homeless fear each other.  With this fear comes a lack of trust and a lack of willingness to be around homeless. Without learning about the homeless, without having a chance to meet and interact with people who are homeless and needy, we fail to truly appreciate who they are, the challenges they face, and to develop any empathy toward them. Fear prevents them from reintegrating into society, and prevents us from understanding how we can best help those in need. It keeps them from connecting with each other and joining together to advocate for their needs or even help each other out. Fear locks the homeless out.
Homelessness, Temporary Assistance, and Social Costs

Homelessness, Temporary Support, and Social Costs

Posted on by jabittan
Support in the United States is typically only given to those who are viewed as deserving. People who lose their homes in unpredictable natural disasters, people who are targeted by criminals, and those who simply had bad luck but were otherwise hardworking are worthy of help and assistance. Those who seem to just be lazy, who made poor decisions, were gullible, or who used drugs are not seen as worthy of our time or charitable efforts. The consequences of this plays out in homeless shelters and on the streets of our country every day. Without society feeling a need to help people who are viewed as deviant and unworthy, the role of supporting these individuals falls to the altruists, some church groups, and the families still willing to provide second chances. Often, any aid provided by these groups is conditional and temporary.
“Just as some women are homeless because their families can no longer support them, other women have little or no family support because they are homeless,” writes Elliot Liebow in Tell Them Who I Am. People lose social and familial support and can end up homeless. However, homelessness itself is often a reason for why support is taken away from people. Whether we are trying to support people because they are family, because we feel altruistic, or for other reasons, at a certain point any aid or assistance that we provide begins to feel useless. At a certain point, we cut people off and demand that they help themselves before we help them any further. Homelessness begets homelessness in this scenario as aid and assistance is taken away from those who need it most.
It is fine to believe that homelessness is a cost to the individual who becomes homeless, that it is a consequence of their bad behaviors and poor decisions, and to imagine that we are not responsible for the homeless individual. It is fine to decide that we won’t help them if they won’t help themselves. It is fine to decide not to help people who use drugs, drink to excess, and refuse to take the necessary steps to work and live as a productive member of society. But in doing so, we should be aware that these individuals did not become derelict in a vacuum. They were part of a society that failed at some point to direct them in a more productive way, to help them feel connected, to help them find meaning in their lives. We should also note that refusing to help individuals still pushes a lot of costs back onto ourselves and our societies.
At a gut-level, I don’t like the idea of simply providing housing, cleaning and sanitary services, counselors, and whatever else is needed to homeless individuals and potential drug users without  requiring them to get their lives back on track. I don’t like thinking that developing a system that provided a comfortable life without any effort for everyone might encourage more people to drop out of society and become useless druggies wasting their time away on the social supports and services of others. But I also don’t like that we treat the homeless like a plague, that we simply wish they would vanish, that we force them into dangerous situations on the streets where they could freeze overnight, die from heat exhaustion during the summer, and could be victims of crimes simply because they were defenseless and existed. I also don’t like that we will spend millions on emergency room healthcare costs, on police and jail costs, and have blighted sections of our cities because we won’t help the homeless by paying the up front costs to provide people housing and jobs. When I consider all the alternatives, giving the homeless a place to live, a care taker to watch over them, and helping provide basic sanitary services for them seems better than allowing the homeless to rot in the streets. I can’t imagine how anyone could ever come back from the streets, but perhaps more people could come back from a life where they are provided safe and sanitary spaces, even if we don’t think they deserve the effort it would take to provide such a life. I think we should at least try to treat them with dignity and give them a place where they can find dignity within themselves if they ever want to turn things around. Either way, we all live on this planet together, and we all create society together, so we cannot escape the costs of the homeless or wish the homeless away.
Understanding Why Some Homeless May Not Want To Work

Understanding Why Some Homeless May Not Want To Work

Posted on by jabittan
“On one hand,” writes Elliot Liebow in Tell Them Who I Am, “the women desperately want and need the money, the independence, and the self-respect that most of us have come to expect from a job. On the other hand, to get a job and keep it, the women must run an obstacle course at the end of which is a low-pay, low-status job that offers little more than they have without it.” In his book Liebow explains that most of the homeless women he spoke with in his book wanted to work, or at least they saw the benefits that work would provide and wanted those things. However, few of the women he met were actually working.
Women didn’t work because it was difficult to actually obtain a job and difficult to keep a job once they had one. They were not respected during the job search process, and the jobs they landed often put them in places where customers could be rude to them, where the threat of losing the job could induce additional stress and anxiety, and where the work required such great travel and time costs that the cost benefit analysis barely made working worth the effort. For the women at the lowest socioeconomic level, jobs were seen as necessary but insufficient to improve their position in the world, and as a result some simply dropped out and decided it was not worth trying.
A point from Liebow’s quote that I think is worth exploring in more detail is how low-wage jobs available to homeless women are low-status jobs, and how such jobs don’t help integrate individuals into society. No one wants to feel like an outcast, and if we feel that what we do doesn’t matter and isn’t respected, then it is hard for us to get up, put ourselves together, and put in the effort of getting to work and sticking it out through the whole day. In our society we are all constantly looking to improve our status one way or another, and one way to increase our own status is to diminish the status of others, creating a bigger gulf between us and them, even if our status doesn’t actually raise. Relative to those who lose status, we look better. I think this is part of the problem with the low status jobs that homeless people may be able to find. Those who are barely above the homeless are incentivized to keep the lowest-status jobs as low status as possible, to keep themselves marginally better in the status race than the working homeless.
Our country celebrates work, but only certain kinds of work. For the lowest status work, we sometimes accept disrespect and inconsiderate behavior. We certainly don’t do much to praise those who do the lowest status work. Lunch counter servers, lawn service personnel, and janitorial staff are crucial to the smooth functioning and high standards of our society, but people who do these jobs are not well respected. It is little wonder that many people who find themselves choosing between homelessness where they don’t have to be around disrespectful people while they complete menial tasks, chose unemployment over work. Dead end jobs with no prospect for life improvement are not inviting, yet they are often the only option for those who want to work. The increase in status over being unworking and homeless is marginal, and if we don’t make an effort to increase the status of those low-wage workers, we won’t be able to convince them that putting in the effort and actually working is in their best interest.
Transportation & Jobs

Transportation & Jobs

Posted on by jabittan
As I reread the quote for today’s post and the supporting paragraph for additional context, my first thought was simply to write about the importance of transportation to jobs and how overlooked transportation can be for those who have well functioning cars and the resources to maintain and repair cars. For many of us who live in suburbs, our Nation’s public transportation infrastructure is largely invisible and unknown. I was going to write about the ways in which our ignorance of public transportation has failed people in need and people at the lower socioeconomic levels, ultimately crushing the idea that people are poor and homeless simply because they are dumb and lazy. I was going to argue that we should be more considerate and push back against the American individualism we prize so highly if we are successful.
 
 
But instead, I’ll reference that idea in my opening paragraph and focus on the complexity of the world around us and use this post to explain why so many people prefer not to think about homelessness and poverty. The challenges are too complex for anyone to fully grasp, and the solutions are not always obvious.
 
 
In his 1993 book Tell Them Who I Am Elliot Liebow writes, “It is also likely that the limits of public transportation directed women toward lower-status, lower-paying jobs, since these tend to be the jobs best served by public transportation. Those sleek, stand-alone buildings around the Washington Beltway, for example were far less accessible by public transportation than were lower-paying jobs in fast food and retail establishments stretched out along main arteries in the downtown areas.”
 
 
Liebow explains that homeless women are often able to be presentable and work decent clerical jobs in offices that could help them find their footing and begin to build the stability needed to find a place to live. However, getting to these kinds of jobs is often difficult. Bus lanes don’t always get out to the office parks where such jobs exist, and I know from my own experience in cycling around Reno, NV that sometimes bike lanes don’t go to the office parks or industrial centers where stable low-wage jobs exist. Instead, getting to a fast food restaurant, where hours may be unpredictable and pay may be even lower, is often easier for those experiencing homelessness. If you live in a shelter and have to be inside the shelter by a certain time each evening, lower pay and lower security jobs may end up being your only option.
 
 
We want the homeless to find jobs, but we also want to live in suburbs and have our offices relatively close to our homes, especially if there is no real reason for our offices to be located in a downtown center. We want to have ample parking at the office and wide avenues for us to drive down to reach our destination quickly. Unfortunately, this means that we don’t want the things that make it easy for homeless individuals to reach the same places where we work (this may even be by design though few would want to admit it). Addressing the challenges of homelessness may mean making changes to the systems that housed and working people count on to make their lives marginally easier – a tough sell.
 
 
To truly tackle the issue of homelessness we need to think about the kinds of jobs available to people, but job availability is often driven by huge and complex market forces. As individuals we are all trying to scrap for our own jobs and job security, and we don’t want to give up either to help another person – especially if we see that other person as less deserving than ourselves. Where our jobs are located is sometimes driven by where the employees live, sometimes driven by local taxes, and sometimes driven by other factors (like good internet and a well connected airport). People need to have jobs to escape homelessness, but jobs are unpredictable and respond to more forces than even a strong government agency could control.
 
 
I think people who really want to help end up crushed by the complexity of homelessness. This jobs example is only one aspect of the complexity of homelessness that may leave those who want to help feeling like there is nothing they can do. We want people to work, but finding and maintaining a job, especially a solid job that allows for personal growth is not easy, especially for those who have not been working. With so much complexity it is not surprising that many people simply avoid thinking about the issue, or adopt oversimplified views of homelessness, its causes, and its solutions. The reality, however, for those who wish to make a difference in the world of homelessness, means that multiple complex factors all need to be considered and navigated in order to get more people into stable housing. Multiple factors have to be addressed in tandem before we can really address the housing and homelessness crises that our nation faces.

Keeping a Job

Keeping a Job

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Tell Them Who I Am Elliot Liebow writes about homeless women who make an effort to work and earn paychecks. Detailing the experience of a woman named Gwen, he writes,
“Keeping a job could be as difficult as finding one. Keeping a job might mean having to suppress an awareness of one’s real-life situation. Gwen struggled against that awareness. Once, when she had to go to her salesclerk job the next day, she was trying very hard not to be discouraged and not to worry about the fact that The Refuge [the homeless shelter where she was living] would close the next week. You’ve got to have a clear head on a job, she said if your mind is on your troubles, you can’t do your job. Customers want you to pay attention to them, and that’s what your boss wants you to do, too.”
When we think about homeless men and women our first thought is often that these people need to get a job and begin earning money so that they can afford a place to rent and get off the street. When we logically express what each person needs to do we recognize that there is a chain of events taking place. First is securing a job, second is keeping that job long enough to earn a paycheck, and third is being able to afford a place to live to escape homelessness. Somehow, when we casually make this suggestion, we fail to recognize the time that may be involved in each of these steps. We fail to realize that this simple, orderly process that we expect everyone to follow likely requires working a job while not having a place to live.
Liebow’s quote shows how absurd this idea can be. Homeless individuals can hardly be expected to first obtain a job when they live in a shelter and don’t have a stable living situation. Employers will not want to hire someone without reliable transportation to work, who might be coming to work hungry, and who is likely going to be distracted on the job and face numerous troubles outside of work that make it hard for them to perform well. If they do extend a job offer to someone who is homeless, then that individual is likely to have difficult times ahead of them as they try to get their life on track, and that means they may not have the mental toughness and on the job focus to grit through rude customers and challenging work tasks.
This reality is another argument in support of housing first programs. People need to have someplace secure, where they know they can go at the end of the day, in order to put their best selves forward in work. It is truly an argument for expanded social safety net programs in general. Those who contribute to such programs often complain about the costs they bear and the lack of benefits they receive (since they are not the homeless and needy ones) but fail to see how much they could benefit if more people were more productive on the job and were ultimately more productive in society. People are expected to work in the United States, but often they are under-supported and challenged outside of work to an extent that makes both finding and keeping a job nearly impossible. More support upfront may seem wasteful and may seem undeserved, but it may be better for the system in the long run.
Values, Contradictions, and Paradoxes Surrounding Jobs

Values, Contradictions, & Paradoxes Surrounding Jobs

Posted on by jabittan
In his book about homeless women, Tell Them Who I Am, Elliot Liebow writes, “values and behavior around jobs and work are awash in ambivalence, contradiction, and paradox.” Liebow goes on to explain the complex relationships of homeless women and work. Many women, he writes, do work or do want to work. Some women hold more than one job, some only work intermittently, and some work random gigs for people they know. Some homeless women do avoid work, while others are afraid to try looking for work because they don’t have a fixed address or phone number to use when applying. Overall, there is a huge variation for homeless women when it comes to their experience with jobs and paid work.
The variation of work and jobs among homeless women shows us that working and homelessness is more challenging than the simple idea of homeless people needing to get a job to get off the streets. Some of the ambivalent or paradoxical ideas around work relate to the idea that one can be working, or want to be working, and still find themselves homeless. It is not hard to imagine why some people give up trying to work when they see others work hard but remain stuck on the streets or still others search for jobs and face constant let down with not being hired due to their appearance, their lack of recent work history, or because of their homelessness itself. It is also not hard to imagine that some women would like to work, possibly just to avoid boredom, but are afraid to try because they don’t want to be outcasts on the job or be looked down-upon by co-workers or customers for living in a shelter or in a car.
Ultimately, I don’t think the relationship that most homeless women have to work is all that different than the relationships most housed people have with work. We all strive toward retirement. We work hard, so that one day we won’t have to work any more. But when we meet someone new, pretty much the first thing we ask is what they do for work. And if they were a wealthy person who never had to work, we look down on them, even if we wish we were in their shoes and didn’t have to go to work every day. We too are living paradoxes when it comes to work and jobs. Some of us work simply to avoid the boredom, to escape our family lives, or to avoid disappointing other people. Some of us love our jobs and would do them even if we didn’t get paid. And some of us are frustrated by those old boomers who just won’t retire to let us take over the top spots that we have been striving so hard to reach – not because we necessarily need more money, but because we want the prestige and title to impress others.
In reading about homelessness, and in my personal interactions with homeless individuals, I am always surprised (which itself I find surprising) when I hear homeless people talking about work. I never expect us to share something in common around work, but the conversations I have heard fit with any conversation complaining about the tedious and unpleasant parts of a job. I’ve heard first-hand the ambivalent and often paradoxical thoughts toward work that Liebow wrote about. The easy way to think about homelessness and work is to assume the homeless don’t want to work. But the reality is much more complicated than the simple assumption. The reality is that all of us have more complicated views and feelings about work than we want to admit, and that include the homeless.
Mental Health and Homelessness

Mental Health & Homelessness

Posted on by jabittan
People are afraid of the homeless in part because they fear that homeless individuals suffer from mental health disorders. This means they cannot be trusted, their behaviors cannot be predicted, and they could lash out irrationally at people passing by. This perception of mental health disorders is fueled by real observations, such as depressed homeless individuals, homeless people talking to themselves, or homeless people acting and behaving in strange ways. It is also used as an excuse to explain why people are homeless, how useless it is to try to help them, and why we don’t really need to help them (because they have mental problems and we can’t help them even if we wanted).
However, Elliot Liebow’s book Tell Them Who I Am suggests that this perception is at least partially wrong. According to Liebow, some of the homeless women he met did have real mental health issues and concerns, but those concerns and problems did not necessarily cause their homelessness. For many of the women he met, the causal arrow flowed in the opposite direction. He writes, “some women explained that their mental health problems were caused (not merely aggravated) by homelessness and shelter living, and there was nothing to do about them so long as one remained homeless. For these women, the remedy lay in housing rather than treatment.”
Homelessness and the loss of autonomy that comes from living within shelters was the cause of mental health issues for many women. The stress of homelessness, the unpredictability of shelter living, and insufficient nutrition created mental health crises for some of the women. Social isolation and the feeling of failure and worthlessness further contributed to mental health problems. Mental health problems didn’t always drive women into homelessness and poverty, but often homelessness and poverty did drive women into mental health problems.
One solution would be to try to treat the homeless with medications or therapy to solve their mental health challenges and open a pathway to a job and stable housing. Liebow suggests that this would not work for many of the homeless. Their mental health challenges in part stem from being homeless (something Matthew Desmond wrote about in Evicted) and what they need more than treatment is a stable place to live. A stable place to live can open a pathway to improved mental health, reintegration with society, and ultimately a job and all the things we want for homeless men and women. For mental health concerns, Liebow argues, housing must come first, not as a reward for getting things back on track.