Rachel and Her Children (2 page)

I was invited, in most cases, to address the problems of the public schools. Often, however, education issues became overshadowed by more pressing matters. For
many poorly educated people, literacy problems proved of little urgency when they were threatened with the loss of work and loss of home. In a depressed industrial town in Pennsylvania, Lutheran church leaders spoke of the loss of several hundred jobs as truck and auto manufacture left the area and families saw their savings dwindle and their unemployment benefits and pensions disappear while rents rose, food prices climbed, and federal benefits declined.

“Yes, there are new jobs,” a minister said. “There’s a new McDonald’s and a Burger King. You can take home $450 in a month from jobs like that. That might barely pay the rent. What do you do if somebody gets sick? What do you do for food and clothes? These may be good jobs for a teenager. Can you ask a thirty-year-old man who’s worked for G.M. since he was eighteen to keep his wife and kids alive on jobs like that? There are jobs cleaning rooms in the hotel you’re staying at. Can you expect a single mother with three kids to hold her life together with that kind of work? All you hear about these days are so-called service jobs—it makes me wonder where America is going. If we aren’t producing anything of value, will we keep our nation going on hamburger stands? Who is all this ‘service’ for, if no one’s got a real job making something of real worth?”

In Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas I met heads of families who had been, only a year or two before, owners of farms, employees of petroleum firms, shopkeepers who supplied the farmers and the oil workers. They had lost their farms, their jobs, their stores. Bankers in Oklahoma City spoke about the rising number of foreclosures. “Oil and agriculture—those are everything for people here. Both are dying. Where will these people go after their farms are boarded and their restaurants and barbershops and hardware stores have been shut down?”

The answers were seen in Phoenix and Los Angeles,
where the shelters overflowed and people slept in huge encampments on the edges of the seamy areas of town. In one city homeless families lived in caves. I went out to visit. I had never seen a family living in a cave before.

In Portland, Oregon, the governor told me of some counties in which unemployment caused by the declining lumber industry had climbed above 30 percent. Where did the lumber workers go? I met some of them the same night in a homeless shelter by the Burnside Bridge. A pregnant woman and her husband spoke to me while waiting for the soup line to be formed. “We had good work until last year. Since then we’ve had no home. Our kids were put in foster care.” They had been sleeping on a plywood plank supported by the girders of the bridge. The traffic was two feet above their heads.

“The sound of the trucks puts me to sleep at night,” she said. I learned that even makeshift housing space under the bridge was growing scarce.

In San Antonio I met a father with two boys who had been sleeping for four months next to the highway not far from the Hyatt Regency Hotel. He sold blood plasma twice a week to buy food for his kids. “They draw my blood, put it in a centrifuge, take the white cells, and inject the red cells back into my arm.” If he showed up four weeks straight he got a bonus. In a good month he made $100. “The blood places,” he told me, “poor people call them ‘stab labs.’ They’re all over.” He showed me a card he carried listing stab labs, with phone numbers and addresses, in a dozen cities. He had been an auto worker in Detroit. When he lost his job his wife became depressed and since was hospitalized. He had developed crippling asthma—“from the panic and the tension, I believe.” He had thought mistakenly that San Antonio might offer health and labor and cheap housing that were not available in Michigan.

In Miami I met a woman, thirty-five years old, from Boston. She had attended Girls’ Latin, the same high school that my mother had attended. After graduation she had gone to college and had worked for many years until she was the victim of a throat disease that led to complications that wiped out her savings, forced her to lose her home, ended her marriage, and at last compelled her to give up her kids. She’d moved to Miami hoping it would help her health but couldn’t cope with illness, loss of family, loss of home—and now was sleeping on Miami Beach.

She had a tube in her stomach to bypass her damaged throat. At a shelter run by Catholic brothers she would pulverize the food, mix it with water, and inject the liquid mix into her tube.

In New York I spoke with Robert Hayes, counsel to the National Coalition for the Homeless. Hayes and his co-workers said that three fourths of the newly homeless in America are families with children.

In Washington, D.C., in late September 1986, I spent an afternoon with the director of a shelter, Sandy Brawders, one of those saints and martyrs of whom Robert Hayes has said, only half-jokingly, the homeless movement is primarily composed. (“There are the saints,” he says, “and then there are the martyrs who have to put up with the saints.”) Sandy told me that the homeless population was exploding in the District; the largest growth in numbers was among young children and their parents.

Four months later, the
Washington Post
reported that the number of homeless families in the District had increased 500 percent in just one year and that there were 12,000 people on a waiting list for public housing, with a waiting period of more than seven years.

Home in New England in a small town north of Boston, I shared some of these stories with a woman who works at the counter of a local grocery. “You didn’t have to
go to San Antonio and Florida,” she said. “There’s hundreds of homeless families just a couple miles from here.” When I asked her where, she said: “In Ipswich, Gloucester, Haverhill … There are families who are living in the basement of my church.” After a moment’s pause she told me this: “After my husband lost his job—we had some troubles then, I was divorced … I had to bring my family to the church … Well, we’re still there.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), relying on groups that represent the homeless, suggested a figure of 2 million people in late 1983. Diminished numbers of low-income dwelling units and diminished welfare grants during the four years since may give credence to a current estimate, accepted by the Coalition for the Homeless, of 3 to 4 million people.

There is much debate about the numbers; the debate has a dreamlike quality for me because it parallels exactly the debates about the numbers of illiterate Americans. Government agencies again appear to contradict each other and attempt to peg the numbers low enough to justify inaction—or, in this case, negative action in the form of federal cuts.

Officials in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) puzzled congressional leaders during hearings held in 1984 by proposing a low estimate of 250,000 to 350,000 homeless people nationwide. The study from which HUD’s estimate was drawn had contemplated as many as 586,000 people, but this number was discredited in its report.

A House subcommittee revealed serious flaws in the HUD study. Subsequent investigations indicated HUD had “pressured its consultants to keep the estimates low.”
HUD’s researchers, for example, suggested a “reliable” low estimate of 12,000 homeless persons in New York City on a given night in January 1984. Yet, on the night in question, over 16,000 people had been given shelter in New York; and this, of course, does not include the larger number in the streets who had received no shelter. U.S. Representative Henry Gonzalez termed HUD’s study intentionally deceptive.

Estimates made by shelter operators in twenty-one selected cities in October 1986 total about 230,000 people. This sampling does not include Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, St. Paul, San Diego, or Detroit. With estimates from these and other major cities added, the total would exceed 400,000.

Even this excludes the metropolitan areas around these cities and excludes those middle-sized cities—Lawrence, Lowell, Worcester, Brockton, Attleboro, for example, all in Massachusetts—in which the loss of industrial jobs has marginalized hundreds of thousands of the working poor. Though technically not unemployed, most of these families live in economic situations so precarious that they cannot meet the basic costs of life, particularly rent, which in all these cities has skyrocketed. Nor does this include the rural areas of the Midwest and the Plains states, the oil towns of the Southwest, the southern states from which assembly plants and textile industries have fled, lumber counties such as those in Oregon and their New England counterparts in northern Maine. The homeless in these areas alone, if added to the major-city totals, would bring a cautious national count above 1.5 million.

We would be wise, however, to avoid the numbers game. Any search for the “right number” carries the assumption that we may at last arrive at an acceptable number. There is no acceptable number. Whether the
number is 1 million or 4 million or the administration’s estimate of less than a million, there are too many homeless people in America.
*

Homeless people are, of course, impossible to count because they are so difficult to find. That is intrinsic to their plight. They have no address beyond a shelter bed, room number, tent, or cave. In this book I follow my own sense that the number is between 2 and 3 million. If we include those people housing organizers call the “hidden homeless”—families doubled up illegally with other families, with the consequent danger that both families may be arbitrarily evicted—we are speaking of much larger numbers.

In 1983, 17,000 families were doubled up illegally in public housing in New York City. The number jumped to 35,000 by spring of 1986. Including private as well as public housing, the number had risen above 100,000 by November 1986. If we accept the New York City estimate of three to four family members in each low-income household, the total number of people (as opposed to families) doubled up in public and private housing in New York is now above 300,000.

The line from “doubling up” to homelessness is made explicit in a study by Manhattan’s borough president: At least 50 percent of families entering New York City shelters (1986) were previously doubled up. Nationwide, more than 3 million families now are living doubled up.

It is, however, not only families doubled up or tripled up who are in danger of eviction. Any poor family paying rent or mortgage that exceeds one half of monthly income is in serious danger. Over 6 million American households pay half or more of income for their rent. Of these, 4.7 million pay 60 percent or more. Of mortgaged homeowners, 2 million pay half or more of income for their housing. Combining these households with those who are doubled up, it appears that well above 10 million families may be living near the edge of homelessness in the United States.

Unreflective answers might retreat to explanations with which readers are familiar: “family breakdown,” “drugs,” “culture of poverty,” “teen pregnancies,” “the underclass,” etc. While these are precipitating factors for some people, they are not the cause of homelessness.
The cause of homelessness is lack of housing
.

Half a million units of low-income housing are lost every year to condominium conversion, abandonment, arson, demolition. Between 1978 and 1980, median rents climbed 30 percent for those in the lowest income sector. Half these people paid nearly three quarters of their income for their housing. Forced to choose between housing and food, many of these families soon were driven to the streets. That was only a beginning. After 1980, rents rose at even faster rates. In Boston, between 1982 and 1984, over 80 percent of housing units renting below $300 disappeared, while the number of units renting above $600 more than doubled.

Hard numbers, in this instance, may be of more help than social theory in explaining why so many of our neighbors end up in the streets. By the end of 1983, vacancies averaged 1 to 2 percent in San Francisco, Boston, and New York. Vacancies in
low-income
rental units averaged less than 1 percent in New York City by 1987. In Boston they averaged .5 percent. Landlords saw this seller’s market as
an invitation to raise rents. Evictions grew. In New York City, with a total of nearly 2 million rental units, there were half a million legal actions for eviction during 1983.
*
Half of these actions were against people on welfare, four fifths of whom were paying rents above the maximum allowed by welfare. Rent ceilings established by welfare in New York were frozen for a decade at the levels set in 1975. They were increased by 25 percent in 1984; but rents meanwhile had nearly doubled.

During these years the White House cut virtually all federal funds to build or rehabilitate low-income housing. Federal support for low-income housing dropped from $32 billion to $7 billion between 1980 and 1987. “We’re getting out of the housing business. Period,” said a HUD deputy assistant secretary in 1985.

The consequences now are seen in every city of America.

Housing has some unique characteristics, as urban planning specialist Chester Hartman has observed. One pays for housing well in advance. The entire month’s rent must be paid on the first day of any rental period. One pays for food only a few days before it is consumed, and one always has the option of delaying food expenditures until just prior to eating. Housing is a nondivisible and not easily adjustable expenditure. “One cannot pay less rent for the next few months by not using the living room,” Hartman observes. By contrast, one can rapidly and drastically adjust one’s food consumption: for example, by buying less expensive food, eating less, or skipping meals. “At least in the short run,” Hartman notes, “the consequences of doing so are not severe.” The cost of losing housing and then paying for re-entry to the housing system, on the other hand, is very high, involving utility and rent deposits equal sometimes to twice or three times the cost of one month’s rent. For these reasons, one may make a seemingly “rational” decision to allocate scarce funds to food, clothing, health care, transportation, or the search for jobs—only to discover that one cannot pay the rent. “Some two and a half million people are displaced annually from their homes,” writes Hartman. While some find other homes and others move in with their friends or relatives, the genesis of epidemic and increasing homelessness is there.