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On Increasing Poverty and Homelessness

Cara

The above video really did break my heart. On the one hand, I really do worry that there’s something exploitative about filming and watching this man’s pain. On the other hand, I feel like we need to watch, and turning away is just another way of excusing and reinforcing the system that created this man’s desperate situation, and that of the many men and women like him. Renee has some excellent thoughts on the matter.

And Sharkfu also has some thoughts on those who were living in poverty before this most recent economic crisis.

In related news, I was just reading this article about a plan in New York City to cut access to shelter for homeless men.

That alternative system is composed of eight drop-in centers, which have showers and seats but no beds. From there, homeless men can find one-night beds in churches and synagogues — or, if they can show they’ve been on the street for more than nine months, they can use city-run safe-haven beds. But each night, more than 500 hundred people, on average, end up sleeping in the chairs at the drop-in centers — some by choice and some because there are not enough beds in the faith-based centers.

Saying that it is looking to revamp the system so that homeless men don’t sleep in chairs anymore, the city wants to close the drop in centers at 8 p.m., starting in June 2009. In return, it will add to the number of faith-based and other easy-to-access beds. “What is most important is that at the end of the night, individuals are coming off the street into a bed,” said Heather Janik, the spokeswoman for the Department of Homeless Services.

But advocates for the homeless and some of the men and women who run the faith-based beds argue that the city doesn’t understand its audiences. “The city says it doesn’t like people sleeping on chairs at the drop in centers. We don’t particularly like that, either. But it is a better alternative than sending them back to the street, which is essentially what will happen, of they are told they must go to some kind of city facility,” said Douglas Grace, the director of outreach ministry at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church.

Clearly, this is horrible no matter what way you cut it, and seemingly based far more on aesthetics than on actual desire to help homeless people.  And NYC is apparently being even more thoughtless in preventing 22 churches from housing homeless people, due to enforcement of a silly ordinance.

But as I was reading this article, I just kept noticing the word “men.” Did the writer somehow just forget that women are homeless, too? Or are women actually not allowed in these shelters? Are there other shelters for women that are not being cut? Really, what of homeless women? After all, women do make up a significantly disproportionate number of those living below the poverty line, and homeless women are often rendered invisible in typical depictions of people who are homeless.  I’m very much concerned about the impact that this new plan will have on men, but I’m also concerned about the women who may either be affected as well or didn’t have access to these shelters to begin with, and who seem to be getting erased either way.  Can anyone shed some light?

25 thoughts on On Increasing Poverty and Homelessness

  1. Such a hard situation. I’ll try and look up the numbers I read not too long ago but if I remember correctly, a disproportionate number of women live below the poverty line but a disproportionate number of men are homeless. This of course depends on how you define homelessness, chronic or sporadic, but either way the numbers for homelessness skew heavily towards the males. Not sure what resources are available for women in NYC, interesting how this topic is always very gendered, homeless shelters for men, dv shelters for women, as if there werent a ton of homeless women and abused men.

  2. I’ll try and look up the numbers I read not too long ago but if I remember correctly, a disproportionate number of women live below the poverty line but a disproportionate number of men are homeless.

    It wouldn’t surprise me. And as I said in the post, I certainly am concerned about what is happening to homeless men and men living in poverty . . . it just really concerns me when we know that there are women in poverty and who are homeless, and they’re just no mentioned at all.

  3. Shelters and drop in centers do sometimes wind up leaning in gendered ways, if not by actual policy, by who informally winds up where – one drop in center may wind up with mostly homeless male veterans drawn to a nearby VA hospital, while a family shelter nearby is serving mostly single women with children.

  4. There’s some good information at http://www.endhomelessness.org

    For the latest demographic breakdown, you can check out: http://www.hudhre.info/documents/3rdHomelessAssessmentReport.pdf

    According to the report, almost three times as many individual adult men as individual adult women use emergency shelters and transitional housing programs for homeless people – but that’s just individuals. Over one third of all homeless people are families with children.

  5. I’m sure there are women’s shelters and family shelters in New York, and also sure they’re inadequate, since they are inadequate everywhere.

    Here in the Midwest, there are fewer women’s shelters than men’s, but that’s partly because men are not able to stay in some of the family shelters. In the lines for the overflow shelter here in Minneapolis, a fair number of the guys are always working fathers whose partners & children are in a different shelter, or whose families are staying with friends/family who don’t particularly like them but are willing to open their doors to a mom with little kids.

  6. But as I was reading this article, I just kept noticing the word “men.” Did the writer somehow just forget that women are homeless, too? Or are women actually not allowed in these shelters? Are there other shelters for women that are not being cut? Really, what of homeless women?

    The reason women were not mentioned is because males make up the overwhelming majority of the homeless population:

    Most studies show that single homeless adults are more likely to be male than female. In 2007, a survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that of the population surveyed 35% of the homeless people who are members of households with children are male while 65% of these people are females. However, 67.5% of the single homeless population are males, and it is this single population that makes up 76% of the homeless populations surveyed (U.S. Conference of Mayors, 2007).

    It would make sense then to focus on men since they are the group most likely to be harmed by closing shelters. Based on the available research, homelessness is a men’s issue, so their needs should receive attention first.

  7. I agree TS and again it just feeds into the overall narrative for me. Im not sure how far away from 50/50 you have to get to make it a “mens issue” or a “womens issue” but in this case, homelessnes, the stats TS cites and the way we talk about homelessness results in no mention of women in this article and many like it. Similar to a write-up about a dv shelter, you dont see any mention of men, other than as perpetrators, unless its about boys being denied access for being too old. The problem is perceived a certain way, the stats validate that to a degree and thats how it goes.

    Also I agree with rosa, mens options in a lot of places are more limited, especially if they are a race in a small minority in the area. Use of homeless shelters can be overwhelmingly male, they can be barred from a lot of shelters that women can use. Id like to see how many shelters there are in NYC that bar men over 12 as well as any kind of info on the demand vs availability of beds for women. Hard thing though about the poverty is that many women will stay in horrible situations to avoid being homeless, they increase the poverty stat but not the homeless stat, I wonder if there is any way to account for that.

  8. Echoing what people have said about homelessness being an overwhelmingly male problem in most places, including NYC (and Cambridge–the shelter I volunteer at has 4 beds for women and I think 20 for men, which roughly matches the gender ratio of homeless people in the Cambridge area).

    I would also suspect that a lot of the women who are homeless–not all, but a lot–fall under the “homeless families” category, and I think a lot of shelters are 18+ because allowing people younger than that opens up a host of liability concerns. Also, a lot of shelters that are for women are women-only because of DV and other female-specific concerns, which might have something to do with it as well. That’s just speculation though.

  9. Isabel,
    Good point on the homeless family part. I’ve never run across a shelter that would take women but wouldnt take a woman and her children unless they were resource limited, im sure theyre out there though. It gets sticky for me though when they restrict moms with boys who are too old, generally over 12, and make the boy go somewhere else. I understand the concerns, though I do not think DV is a female-specific concern. Its a tough nut to crack with limited resources and what seems to be almost compering concerns ie homeless boys, men, women, families.

  10. The US Federal definition of homelessness is a person staying on the streets or in a shelter. A chronically homeless person must in addition be single. By Federal definition, families can’t be chronically homeless, though they are.

    Generally homeless women’s services are picked up by family shelters, which serve largely single women with children, and domestic violence shelters. Some large urban shelters for single adults have both men’s and women’s dorms.

    A large reason why, though women constitute the majority of those under the poverty level, they constitute about a 1/3 minority of those who are homeless, is the concept of “worthy poor”.

    A single man with no visible disability (though such issues as depression, addiction, and many chronic diseases certainly classify as invisible) is considered to be “able-bodied” and therefore in some way lacking in that which makes him a ‘legitimate’ member of society (by means of “well, he has a strong back. There has to be something he can do to make a living”).

    As a result, poverty stricken men have far less of a societal safety net than poverty stricken women, for whom the work ethic is often presumed to be secondary to the ethic of raising children and/or building a relationship with a man. A poverty stricken women, so long as she’s not a “fallen woman”, especially if she has children younger than teenaged, generally has vastly more resources available, not only from charitable and governmental sources, but from family and friends, as well. This stems, incidentally, not from an idea that women are “worthy poor”, so much, as that children are. Women simply get the “splash back” effect.

    Keep in mind these issues though: For those who are street and shelter homeless, both male and female, the percent who have been physically assaulted is nearly 100%. For women on the streets, the proportion who have been raped is also near 100%, and for men it’s well over 50%. At least a third of chronically homeless people have a severe and persistent mental illness such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and the addiction rate is closer to 2/3rds.

    We can thank our chronic homeless issue largely on the past twenty (or is it thirty) years of public policy where inexpensive housing, supportive housing, and subsidized housing were low priority, and where existing inexpensive housing was being torn down to make way for McMansions and Civic centers for the credit-rich. There are other major contributors to the problem, but it is largely an issue of supply and demand. We have always had poverty among us, but homelessness has been rare unless affordable housing goes missing.

  11. Hi, I never comment here. But this happens to be my area of expertise. So I thought I’d speak up.

    The reason the article focuses so much on men is that most shelters, etc. are more sympathetic towards women and children and focus on them when providing services. Basically leaving the men to fend for themselves out on the streets.

    At least here in Tampa (Hillsborough County), FL there are far more services and shelters provided for women and children then there are for men. And several homeless service providers have transitioned from serving single men to serving women and children. Of course, there are not enough shelters or options for either group, but honestly women have a much easier time finding help than do men.

    The numbers in Hillsborough county show that women make up almost 1/3 (28%) of the homeless population. More than 1/2 of the shelters and services are aimed at helping or housing women.

    Therefore, the issue in NY probably does affect more homeless men than it does homeless women.

    Something to think about: The number one contributing factor to homelessness across the nation is a lack of affordable housing. Affordable housing is defined as 1/3 of a households monthly income being spent on housing costs (which includes rent/mortgage, insurance, property tax, and utilities). Recently, there was an article published that said 7.5 million mortgage holding Americans are paying 50% or more of their income towards housing costs. This number doesn’t even include renters!

    Check out my blog from Blog Action Day to learn more about affordable housing. There is also a link to the article I was talking about in that entry.

    If you really want to help the homeless support affordable housing when it comes to your neighborhoods 🙂

  13. And indeed, the Housing First model says, ok, first off, give homeless folks (individually) places of their own to live in, and work from there – and it’s supposed be pretty effective, as these things go . . .

  14. I have a slightly related question to this post’s topic. Does anybody have information or ideas about volunteer work in this area? I was looking around yesterday on volunteer match and it seemed that most of the volunteer opportunities involve a time commitment during the weekdays. I work a typical 8-5 job but seeing stuff like this just illustrates to me how urgent it is to do something and I would really like to give time during the weekends if possible. If it makes a difference I live in the Seattle area.

    I kind of think that we will not really know the extent of hardship being exacerbated by the economy until much later but ignorance has no bearing on today’s reality for many. Thanks in advance.

  15. You know, if this had been a woman, with her kids on the street with her when they should be in school (?), and who hadn’t eaten for 24 hours, she would lose her kids. It wouldn’t be making the news as a special interest story; they’d be reporting about how social services deemed her unfit to parent her own children.

  16. Ryan, lots of religious organizations provide services for homeless people (and people who would be homeless if not for services). Where I live Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army are big service providers, as well as the Dorothy Day Center. Your neighborhood may have a drop-in center as well, or do services out of a community center.Veterans for Peace and some of the Vietnam veterans groups run a lot of homeless services, since so many vets end up homeless.

    I’m a big fan of Food Not Bombs, which in most cities has at least one serving a week in the evenings or on weekends. Welfare rights and tenants rights groups, and services for kids who have aged out of the foster care system, can hook you right up, too – your friendly local volunteer clearinghouse or public library can point you in the right direction.

    This is the season when volunteers show up in biggest numbers, so maybe watch your local news sources for who is doing Thanksgiving dinners, and give them a call between now andJanuary when they’re short on hands again.

  17. One group of people being totally erased in this conversation, and in the original post, are trans* and gender variant people. For these people, accessing any type of shelter is out of the question. Trans* people, and particularly trans women of color, have extremely high rates of homelessness. Shelters often deny trans* people entry, or forcibly assign us to shelters matching our so-called “birth sex” (often after intrusively demanding information on hormone usage, surgical status, etc), where trans* people often face sexual and physical assault. So this is one community that is not served by homeless services at all.

  18. Very true Galling. Question though. Say for a shelter run by a town, county or state, when admitting people would they not have to separate by sex? Any by sex I mean a persons legal status. A trans woman of color might be barred from some female only/family homeless shelters depending on her status as the state sees it , is there any way around that? The resources are so limited, many difficult situations.

  19. In an ideal world I would like to see separate locations for:

    – teen boys (why are they mixed in with men? In jails, youth is one of the number one factors leading to being the victim of prison rape.)
    – transpeople of both sexes (i tend to think that one location could probably serve both transwomen and transmen equally well; it is physiologically much more difficult for transmen to commit rape than cismen, and transmen are rarely raised in the kind of privilege that allows them to mentally erase the human rights of women, whereas transwomen, being women, are psychologically unlikely to rape even if they still have the equipment to do it with.)
    – mothers and fathers with children (why do shelters that accept children deny those children their father, assuming the father is not abusive? And why would it be safe for a single homeless man with children to try to take them into a men’s shelter? And why do childfree homeless women have to put up with other people’s kids?) (and for that matter, a location that serves mothers and fathers with children shouldn’t split off the teen boys, either.)

    This isn’t an ideal world and it’s hard to get space for the shelter populations we already need to serve. I understand that ciswomen may feel uncomfortable with transwomen in their shelter, and both transwomen and transmen are very much at risk in men’s shelters, so the ideal solution would be a separate location for transpeople. Perhaps there’s some other population the shelter could serve as well, given that the proportion of transpeople is very low (although, that being said, the proportion of transpeople in the *homeless* population is probably much higher than in the general population.) I wouldn’t want to mix the teen boys and the transpeople; teen boys are still capable of violence and rape. And as much as I might like to mix the transpeople and the families, I think in the real world that would meet totally insane levels of opposition. (“OMG my kids are seeing people who DON’T CONFORM TO GENDER ROLES!!!! I would rather live on the street!”) (Although it really seems like it would work perfectly. Family units that are not to be divided by sex are mixed sex, and transpeople have trouble finding safe space because they are mixed sex, so why shouldn’t a place that lets fathers and teen boys stay with the rest of the family also serve transpeople? But like I said, I think that would meet truly enormous levels of irrational opposition.) I don’t know, maybe the disabled. I mean, not that being trans is a disability — I’m just trying to think of populations which will not be high risk *to* transpeople, will not be at risk (or seen to be at risk, whether rationally or not) *from* transpeople, and may not be adequately served by the current system.

    But like I said in the real world we don’t have enough shelters for everyone in the first place, let alone adding more shelters for special needs. My feeling is, fuck it, require that the women’s shelters accept all transpeople and if the ciswomen freak out, let the transpeople have a separate bedroom and bathroom. Transpeople are *not* a high-violence population, and it should be a fairly simple matter to filter out cismen who have decided to dress as women because it lets them get into the shelter to shoot their ex-wife (I mean, how often does that kind of thing happen anyway? And most of the time, wouldn’t the cisman with a gun just break into the shelter and shoot people who stand in his way anyhow?) And do add shelters specifically for families; families have very different needs than childless women, and the idea of making the dad and the teen boy live somewhere else, particularly since teen boys are at *very* high risk for rape or assault in male-only spaces that include adult men, really seems like a sickening level of sexism. Most men with families who end up homeless are not rapists, not criminals such as thieves and murderers, not abusers; they’re good guys who are having bad luck. Why should they be treated as *so* toxic that they’re not permitted to live with their families?

  20. In an ideal world I would like to see separate locations for . . . transpeople of both sexes

    I think that while a lot of transpeople might feel more comfortable in such a situation, a lot of others would strongly disagree with you there. I disagree with you there.

    Putting aside the resources factor, saying “we need to have shelters for women, shelters for men, and shelters for transpeople” is saying that trans men and women aren’t really men and women. Further, I’m tired of being forced to “respect” bigoted people freaking out when we wouldn’t usually respect that same kind of freaking out from people living at the shelter with regards to another person living there who is gay, black, non-english speaking, etc.

  21. i understand what youre saying cara and i agree with it as a principle but when it comes to state facilities i dont see how they run it any way other than as strict binary. similar to an episode of a law and order svu with a trans woman, at the end of the day it was one or the other. i think one day it might be possible to have what youre saying but until that day i dont know what to do if the 20 other cis women object to the one trans woman or the trans man really wants to stay with all cis men. id like to think the best of my fellow humans but i shudder to think what might happen in those two situations.

  22. dananddanica, I agree with you. My point was that Alara said that separate facilities was ideal, and I strongly disagree with that. It’s worth arguing whether it’s currently most realistic and practical, but ideal? I think not.

  23. Hmm. Well, you know, in the ideal *ideal* world, no one is a bigot, no one commits violence because of their bigotry, and men have stopped raping people. But I suspect that in that world, we won’t need homeless shelters.

    I’d rather see a safe space for transpeople of both transsexes than put any of them in with the male population, because cismen are very dangerous (in fact, I have trouble solving the problem of how to keep cismen from preying on *each other* — by definition a nonviolent cisman can’t be housed in a safe space based on gender, because he belongs to the violent gender even if he is not violent.) And scared people may react with violence as well, so putting them in with ciswomen who may misunderstand and think they are men is setting *someone* up for violence, whether it’s started by the ciswoman who thinks she’s threatened or the transwoman who by that point actually *is* being threatened.

    That being said, probably the best solution would be that the same building house both transpeople and ciswomen, but that the transpeople and ciswomen get their own separate sleeping areas and bathrooms. Putting transmen in with cismen is a terrible, terrible idea… as is putting teen boys in with adult cismen, or putting openly gay men in with straight-acting men… in fact the more I think about it, we need one safe place for everyone that heterosexual cismen are dangerous to, and another place for the (apparently) straight cismen. Transpeople of both sexes resemble ciswomen more closely than cismen in terms of their vulnerability to cismale violence and their lesser likelihood of committing violence.

    Teen boys are another hard issue because teen boys are dangerous to everyone that men are dangerous to, but men are dangerous to them. And, as I said, men themselves are hard to deal with because it certainly doesn’t seem fair to the majority of men, who are non-violent, that they may be put in with dangerous people. But I don’t see how to avoid it.

  24. i dont see how they run it any way other than as strict binary

    If the powers that be focus their concern on the *safety* of shelter residents rather than on arbitrarily deciding the *gender* of shelter residents, then the “strict binary” problem goes away.

    But it seems that the powers that be consider reinforcing a gender-coercive system to be more important than actually giving a shit for shelter resident’s safety and humanity.

    And, dananddanica, please tell me that I’m misconstruing what your saying, cos what I’m hearing is that it is better to let trans and gender-variant (cos I really don’t think that a femme gay man will be safe when surrounded by a bunch of straight men) folk freeze and starve than disrupt the oh-so-important binary.

    Also, I’d like to note that trans women are women and trans men are men; we’re not some kind of third-gender.

  25. I think there should be third gender facilities, but they should be for people who id as a third gender. And for people who aren’t comfortable in gender-appropriate facilities becuz there too trans/homophobic. But where they go should be about trans n gnc ppl’s comfort. not cis and str8 ppl’s.

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