Book Review: Homelessness and Housing Advocacy

Title: Homelessness and Housing Advocacy

Author: Curtis Smith

Date: 2022

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Length: 184 pages

ISBN: 9781003050872

Quote: "Given what we have learned today, if you experienced homelessness tomorrow, what would you do?"

What you'll learn on the day, or days, you spend reading this book is that, if you experienced homelessness tomorrow, you'd be in a very bad situation. While Curtis Smith teaches sociology and identifies with the social workers he describes in this book, he also shows us some of the ways in which the welfare system makes matters worse for homeless people.

The heroes of this book are the "red-tape warriors" who are determined to get their welfare "cases" off the streets. Instead of sitting at desks and blandly telling homeless people to go and talk to other people sitting at other desks, preferably in different neighborhoods, Smith's best-case social workers go out on the streets. They warn people who've been squatting in abandoned lots to stash their things before the next police "sweep" in which all their possessions are dumped. They call those other offices to request duplicates of documents homeless people have lost. They go out to inspect rooms and apartments people are willing to rent to homeless people with incomes. They are the complete opposite of social workers this web site has so often deplored, who seem to want to keep comfortably housed people depending on food stamps, bogus disability pensions, and if possible subsidized heat, housing, and phone service, forever, in order to justify the social workers' employment.

Yet in their own ways they, too, are making matters worse--because they're working in a big inflexible system that has to try to seem to offer equal treatment to everybody, even though people's needs and assets are anything but equal. The situation is not really funny, but it's an irony overload and a half.

Two mental attitudes are possible for homeless people. One is what used to be called learned helplessness. "I've lost everything, I'll never have another chance at a normal decent life, I'm a useless failure who can only depend on other people while I'm alive, it's positively selfish and mean for me to survive or even want to survive," and if a person who thinks this way is not suicidal, then person must embrace the idea of living as a parasite. 

The other alternative is desperate courage. "I've lost all of my things but I'm still the same person. I'll get through this. I'll find another job, another house, a way to get my children out of foster care, eventually." Homeless people who take this mental attitude are hard to spot. They don't flop down on sidewalks at night in defiant despair; they don't rush down to the welfare office to get food stamps while they sign up for a few years on a "housing" list. They find places to hide at night that are close to work and to low-traffic public restrooms; they look normal, or only a little more tired than normal, on the jobs they usually continue to do--if only cleaning houses or raking leaves. They may actually own houses, and their difficulty may be that those houses are far from the job site where they worked all day; they may have taken jobs with the intention of staying at a campground or in their car for the first few weeks. Their homelessness tends to be temporary. Afterward the only way you ever realize they've been homeless is that they tell you.

When you discover that people are homeless, it usually takes less than five minutes to tell which approach to homelessness they've chosen. The ones who can and will be successful workers and desirable tenants tend to focus on their assets, even if they're pawning and peddling their valuables and sleeping in  their cars today. 

"How is your health? Do you have any disabilities?"

"Fine! All this walking outdoors is good for me. I could do any kind of job."

"What about your mental health? Your mood?"

"Fine, I said." (I once asked this question of a middle-aged widow, unemployed, living in a shelter, whom I'd had the gall to start to pity, and she snapped back, "Blessed!")

"Are you safe, sleeping in your storage bin at night?"

"Only two people have keys and I make sure to leave no traces in the morning, before the other one comes in."

Typically these people are strong and healthy, and the only help they really need is for neighbors to keep rent rates nice and low, so that they can be living in a conventional sort of house within a few weeks after signing a long-term employment contract. Their problems are cash flow problems. If you want to help them, think of a respectful way to get money into their pockets.

But in order to fill in the right boxes on the forms that keep the handouts rolling, the social workers who are most successful in getting their clients sheltered and employed turn out to be the ones who, if homeless people don't want to exaggerate "needs" others really have, will do that for them. The system prioritizes sheltering the most "vulnerable" homeless people first, according to a "vulnerability index" that assigns points in the following categories: veteran, suicidal, severe mental illness, addiction, HIV, other disability or disease, sex workers, families, age, sex offenders, or low income. Obviously, among the homeless population, the individuals most likely to keep jobs or homes will score points in a maximum of four of those categories. The welfare system, however, is designed to reward those who score the maximum number of points, which means all of those categories. A sensible, healthy single woman who thinks federal "housing" is help would actually be ahead to buy a sleazy secondhand outfit and start soliciting for prostitution, preferably near a high school, where she might be able to qualify as a sex worker and sex offender without actually having to take off her hooker heels. For those who've passed that stage in life, or missed it by being male, Smith describes the red-tape warriors helping people claim or cultivate severe mental illnesses the people don't actually have, or want to have. A diagnosis of attention deficiency or depression may be acceptable to the homeless people, may even be accurate, but it's not severe enough to bump a sober hardworking flood survivor very far up the list. None of Smith's heroes actually says "Just stick with the 'depression' for now and see if you can't get up to 'paranoid schizophrenia' after a few weeks on the medication they'll give you," or "He's so despondent, I just know he can get a diagnosis of 'autism' if he tries," but they come close.

Unfortunately from the red-tape warriors' point of view, many homeless people believe they have a future and don't want to be, or become, or seem to be, higher up the "vulnerability index" than they really are. Many don't even want to claim disability pensions when they know other people who are working around disabilities that are much worse. These nonconformists might even say that we need to change the rules in such a way that welfare policy stops rewarding dysfunctional life choices. 

One of my e-friends regularly derides the idea of disability pensions for young veterans who have tinnitus--ringing in the ears. I have tinnitus; many retired musicians and music lovers, as well as veterans, have it. It's certainly an inconvenience to a career in music, but I can understand how, to a homeless veteran whose buddies lost arms or legs, even mentioning tinnitus as a disability feels...profoundly tacky. Sleazy, even. 

We've all heard stories of people who qualified for some benefit by walking into a clinic with filth dripping through their clothes and claiming incontinence, but some people believe that conscience-karma just may bite you for that. Some even hesitate to report the "chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder," a.k.a. cough, they get from sleeping in a moldy warehouse. A cough doesn't seem much of a disability to people who know wheelchair dwellers. Identifying as able-bodied, on the other hand, boosts their mood and their chance of getting a job or a home. More than identifying as disabled boosts their chance of getting "housing"? Maybe, maybe not. The salvageable homeless, themselves, don't seem to mind. The red-tape warriors then have the duty, as they see it, of persuading people that they are disabled.

Smith's red-tape warriors are not stupid, and they don't seem to intend to destroy their clients or their communities. They are frustrated by the system, as are the homeless people. "It wouldn't be social work," Smith quotes one of them saying, "if something didn't go [CENSORED] wrong!" 

Exactly. 

Smith would be regarded as a traitor by his colleagues if he didn't write from a consistent assumption that all federal programs always need more funding but, he admits at the end of the book, they need more flexibility. The "red-tape warriors" who bend the rules are more trusted by homeless people and more successful in getting them...not only off the streets where they are a nuisance, but also enmeshed in the welfare system for life. They should be rewarded, Smith argues, not punished.

The position of this web site is that social work, as a career, is a symptom of a sick society and needs to become obsolete. In healthy societies, it's easy enough for people to help themselves that they need regular subsidized assistance only from specialists--doctors, physical therapists, teachers, perhaps drivers, perhaps child care providers. Many homeless people do need help from specialists, in things like breaking addictions or confining sex offenders. 

Others might be helped if more individuals recognized that throwing money at federal programs is not solving their problems and may be aggravating those problems. What solutions can individuals offer for those homeless people who can benefit from help? What about renting out rooms, attics, and basements at prices minimum-wage workers can comfortably afford, so that healthy, employable homeless people don't need to add "vulnerability" points in order to find homes? What about more exploration of the "rent to own" concept, more recognition that it's a disgrace to ask people to pay for things they never own? 

When individuals help their friends and neighbors, they may or may not find ideal solutions for everybody but they have a chance of doing that. When people depend on "social work" as a specialized job to house the homeless, the result is the kind of stories Smith tells in this book.

Written for use by college freshmen, this book is a valuable eye opener for fiscal conservatives...and fiscal liberals, if anyone still admits to being that any more. Read Smith's explanation of the double meaning of "housing-ready" and understand why federal programs, though perhaps necessary to clean the addicts and sex offenders off the streets, are not likely to help people who really are ready to be the tenants or housemates you need. You still need to help those people. By becoming or remaining a home owner, you can help them. Seeking the Highest Good of all rarely if ever requires real altruism: If we all agreed to help prevent sane, healthy, employed or employable people becoming homeless, not only would federal "housing" programs have less excuse for screaming for more money to create more slums, but those of us who want to grow old in our own homes would be making a profit by keeping these people out of the welfare trap.