Marybeth Shinn - In the Midst of Plenty

Bunny, a feisty woman who walks with a cane, struggles with mental health issues related to childhood trauma. Anxiety, depression, and some level of cognitive impairment make it difficult for her to express her needs. At 52, and with a grown son and daughter, she has moved many times, been evicted repeatedly, and had several episodes of homelessness. She is estranged from her son, and her mental health challenges would appear to make it difficult for her to live with her daughter or anyone else. Her daughter does show up from time to time with food and cleaning supplies.

Anthea, a 22‐year‐old mother to a 3‐year‐old and a 1‐year‐old, had never been able to afford a place of her own. She moved out of her mother's home into her partner's mother's double‐wide in a small town. The couple intended to buy the trailer, but Anthea's partner became abusive. She left him one Wednesday night and showed up at the door of a shelter with her children. She couldn't get into that shelter, so she and the children prepared to bed down on the street. A passer‐by called the police who showed up and helped them get into a different shelter.

Ricardo, a soft‐spoken man with glasses perched on top of his head, came to a city in the Northeast from Puerto Rico at age 50, hoping to find work and bring his wife and young son to join him. Finding he could not afford the rent in this very expensive city, he stayed in a shelter for homeless people for a year, working a job during most of the time, and then got into a program that provides help with the rent. His wife and son have managed to get to the same city but are living in a different apartment, having figured out assistance in another way.

Michelle first became homeless as a new mother at 22. She was working two jobs and lost one of them. “My daughter was in daycare. I couldn't get affordable daycare for her. It was like I was stuck and I couldn't afford the rent anymore. I had to move out. Came home to stay with family members, mom, whoever I could at the time.” She was evicted from her apartment, the first she'd had in her name. Over the next 8 years, she experienced similar cycles of unstable employment, childcare challenges, births of additional children, and homelessness. Before entering a program that helps homeless people obtain affordable housing, she and her children had spent a year and a half moving between different hotels or shelters when their money ran out. She was paying about $400 a week for hotel stays but could not save enough money for up‐front move‐in costs (first and last months' rent and security deposit) and had an eviction on her record.

Jermaine left home for the last time at age 15. “I remember my dad used to put me out at the age of like 15. I live with myself and been on my own since I was like 13, in a certain sense. I used to run away. Me and my sisters used to jump out of a window and run away. We used to sleep in abandoned cars. I've been a survivor though.” He floated from friend's house to friend's house and between a city in North Carolina and Kansas City, where he had extended family. He became involved with selling drugs at 21 and when he got into trouble in one city, he would move to the other, bouncing back and forth for years and living with family members, friends, on the street, or in his truck. He was staying in his truck at the time a friend of his told him about the rapid re‐housing program he entered. Based on that friend's knowledge of the process, he “sucked up my pride” and entered a shelter for the first time, at age 35 so he could put in his application.

These examples may or may not jibe with common views of who becomes homeless in the United States in the twenty‐first century, but all the stories in this book are about real people (we have changed their names). 1 In addition to showing the variety of pathways into homelessness, they exemplify categories of people that have been developed to help governments and social service systems respond to homelessness: adults homeless on their own, families homeless together with their children, veterans who become homeless after serving their country, young people who fall into homelessness after leaving their parents, and people whose patterns of homelessness are sustained or “chronic.”

Efforts to classify people who become homeless go back half a millennium. In 1528, Martin Luther took a turn. His “Book of Vagabonds and Beggars” cataloged 28 varieties, ranging from “Bregers, or beggars who simply ask an alms for God's or the Holy Virgin's sake” to “Schleppers, or false begging priests” to “Süntregers, or pretended murderers, who say they have taken a man's life in self‐defense, and unless they bring money at the right time they will have their heads cut off” (Ribton‐Turner, 1887).

Early twentieth‐century researchers had the same taxonomic impulse. For example, Solenberger (1911) profiled 1,000 homeless men who sought help from the city of Chicago from 1900 to 1903 in a book with chapters on “homeless old men,” “chronic beggars,” “confirmed wanderers or ‘tramps’,” and “homeless, vagrant and runaway boys.” She also described their disabilities or deficits, with chapters on “the crippled and maimed,” and “the insane, feeble‐minded, and epileptic.”

The twin foci on classification and deficits remain dominant tropes today, although we prefer “challenges” as a less pejorative term than “deficits” for describing mental illness and other issues that some people who experience homelessness struggle with. For both scholars and citizens who try to make sense of the growth of homelessness in our streets, it is perhaps natural to ask what is wrong with the people we encounter there. The rest of this book suggests that if the goal is to understand the causes of homelessness and come up with solutions, there are more important questions to ask.

One reason is that first impressions are often misleading. For example, contrary to both Luther and Solenberger, most people experiencing homelessness today do not panhandle, and many who panhandle are not homeless (Dordick, O'Flaherty, Brounstein, Sinha, & Yoo, 2018; Lee & Farrell, 2003).

Another reason is that people encountered in the middle of a homeless episode are arguably at the worst point in their lives. Many of the people we introduced at the beginning of the chapter had jobs and social connections before (and sometimes during) the time they were homeless. And as some of their stories show—and others would if we followed them long enough—most people emerge from episodes of homelessness and return to housing. People's characteristics change, along with their housing status.

Because most episodes of homelessness are fairly brief, far more people have encountered homelessness during their lives than are homeless on any given night. Indeed, as we will show later in this chapter, one of every 14 adult Americans living in normal housing told an interviewer in 1990 that there was a time in their lives when they had been homeless and slept in a shelter, abandoned building, or public place (Link et al., 1994). That's so many people that you must know at least one of them.

Before we get to the causes of homelessness in Chapter 2, and the solutions in Chapters 3– 6, we need to take the measure of the problem. The remainder of this chapter defines homelessness based on where people sleep and describes groups of people such as families with children, adults, veterans, and how long they remain homeless. We describe characteristics such as age, race, and gender, and show how groups and characteristics have changed over time. We estimate how many people are homeless over a day, a year, or a lifetime, and finally consider the challenges many of them face. Along the way, we explain how we know what we know, and some limitations on our knowledge.