I was homeless a time several years ago. I never had to sleep on a park bench or find a derelict building, but I did sleep on the floor of a relative’s place for a few weeks, then moved to the floor of a friend’s place. It worked out in the end: I found a room of my own in a share-house with three other men.
Boy On A Bike has had a couple of excellent pieces on homelessness lately. Last week, he dissected a new government report on homelessness and pointed out that the definition of homeless is very broad. It includes people in boarding houses, people living temporarily with friends or family but with no long-term residence of their own; and people who live in cabins and caravan parks. About 8 percent of those designated homeless are “sleeping rough;” that is, sleeping in makeshift shelters, under bridges, and so on. He also pointted out that a student living in a boarding-house style dorm isn’t homeless, but a non-student in similar accommodation is.
And as for the policy of building housing for the homeless it, it will never work, because it is trying to fix symptoms, not the underlying causes.
People are not born homeless, spend their youth homeless, then their teenage years homeless, and continue on into their 20′s and 30′s as homeless. We all start with a roof over our heads to some degree. At some point, something happens to trigger homelessness. A drug habit or drink habit that spirals out of control, a messy divorce, a mental breakdown – perhaps triggered by a bad drug habit. Whatever. Perhaps we should be treating the disease rather than the outcomes.
The whole problem comes about by looking at the homeless issue from a pre-existing worldview. That is, policy makers see homeless people (who may or may not be “homeless” depending on your definition) as the product of a heavily stratified society where resources are scarce, and those without privelege or who are simply unlucky end up without. In short, if someone is homeless, the default assumption is that they are an upstanding citizen (who may have been forced to crime because of their tragic situation), who draw the short straw.
Thinking back, I can’t really identify the cause of my own brief stint of homelessness. I was out of work at the time, and this was certainly a contributing factor. The lease on my apartment came up and my flatmate left, so I decided to give notice and move somewhere else. Drugs and alcohol were not involved. In hindsight, I made some bad financial and other decisions that had the effect of prolonging the time I was without work, and also the time I was without permanent accommodation. I was not part of a social movement, or a hidden class of homeless people. I was just a guy who hit a combination of bad judgement and bad luck. It was a long time ago, and thinking about the comfort of my current home, a distant memory.
Should I have been saved from my own poor decisions? Should the government have bought me a house, rather than sitting back and letting me scramble out of my self-made-hole on my own? Surely not.
If you get a nice house because you dropped out of school and became a meth-head, then becoming a meth-head dropout becomes a rational choice. If you get paid for sleeping on a park bench covered in newspapers, then sleeping on a park bench covered in newspapers is a smart thing to do.
The problem with rewarding mistakes is that they stop being mistakes.