Originally appeared in Peacework (Delaware Pacem in Terris), 01-02/1987
And homeless near a thousand homes I stood and near a thousand tables pined and wanted food. – Wordsworth
The fact that there are people without the resources to provide themselves with so basic a need as shelter is not an act of God. Neither is it a natural phenomenon, resulting from the working of some iron law. The homeless are not aberrations from human society but rather symptoms of political-economic failure. They are no more deserving of their hurts than they are to blame for them.
The scarcity of resources which governs homelessness is of human creation. Fourteen one-hundredths of one percent (.14%) of Americans own one-quarter of the land, and one-half of one percent (.5%) own one-quarter of the wealth. Only nuclear holocaust or another massive calamity would render any of these owners homeless. As long as there is a social fabric, their place in it is secure. They possess, but they do not just possess things. Even the homeless have such possessions as can be put in a cardboard box or garbage bag. What the rich possess is power over things and over their fellow human beings.
There is a man who owns a steel mill in our community and a basketball team in another. He is reported to be “worth $240 million.” 220 workers have just lost jobs at his mill, because the section of the mill in which they worked was not profitable and his managers have closed it. The mill itself is for sale and the 760 jobs remaining will only be saved by a buyer who, according to these managers, will have the resources to dedicate to capital improvements needed at the mill. This man who is selling his steel mill intends to keep the basketball team.
Resources have been misallocated. Working people become unemployed. Nothing they possess -cars, homes, and bank accounts- can prevent their layoff. Those who decide such things as the fate of workers exercise possession of an entirely different magnitude.
Such people as become jobless, such people as the working poor, such people as become homeless, do not possess the power to command. No matter how many things they possess, their lot will always be uncertain in a society that is ruled by a few.
The city concentrates people and resources, wealth and poverty, homes and the homeless. Among the forces which have shaped the city is the destruction of the rural community. The technological revolution in agriculture compelled large segments of the newly unemployed rural labor force to migrate to the cities during the 1950s. The dispossession of farmers and the concentration of land ownership -resulting from farm foreclosures, rural bank failures, and the disappearance of small rural towns- is resulting in the forced migration of the 1980s. The large banks and corporations which are becoming the absentee owners of rural America have their headquarters in the cities to which many of the dislocated of the farmland are destined.
But new arrivals to the city, whether they come from the farmlands or from other metropolitan areas, find that the situation of their counterparts in this new urban area is nothing to envy. Small businesses fail here, also. Plants lay off workers here, too. Plants close. Unemployment, lack of affordable housing, and the effect of federal cut-backs on income maintenance, health, and transportation programs, as well as on employment and housing intiatives make survival stark, bitter, as much threat as promise.
The homeless are a currently more celebrated part of the army of poor being held in reserve until such time as the labor market has need of them, until the housing market has space for them. Working people, children of working people, grandchildren of working people, they suffer the status of superfluous, marginal entities. Some of them are not used to such treatment. Others have never expected anything better.
Whether homeless in the heart of their own city or new to town, whether from a steel town of Western Pennsylvania or an erstwhile mining town of West Virginia, whether newly released from a “treatment center” or a “correctional facility,” whether a college graduate or a grade-school drop-out, whether a fire victim or an evicted tenant, whether able and willing to work or completely discouraged from the hope of earning a living, the homeless have learned the most profound and painful social lesson: the humiliation which comes of living a life which is socially expendable.
No one would choose to be this vulnerable. No amount of slothfulness would cause one to opt for a life of such utter precariousness. No amount of deceitfulness could make a life of such uncertainty worthwhile. To be exposed to the elements; to be the potential prey of any stranger on the street; to live at the sufferance of police, social worker, shelter staff; to have depleted the fund of good will of one’s family and friends; to struggle without support and in full knowledge that personal resources have been exhausted and public services completely used up; to be down and to feel on your way out; this is homelessness.
The poor never expect much, for they come from that class of society which builds the world but only inhabits it at someone else’s pleasure. The degradation of being homeless, of having no viable options left, of being dependent upon that most dreaded thing, organized social benevolence, is deepened by the contempt which most poor people receive in good measure with every doling out of “aid.” Blamed by others for their deepening plight, they readily blame themselves. Some have been blamed so early in life and so consistently by the adults around them that their present condition seems like little more than a confirmation of their deepest and oldest fear: “I am no good.”
The blame is a lie. It always was. They cannot be blamed for not keeping the homes they could never afford in the first place. They cannot be blamed for not getting the jobs which were already filled or for which they were unqualified. The grown woman cannot be blamed for claiming very little of the world when the little girl was always told to accept less than she really deserved.
Behind the blaming of the homeless for their situation lie two things: first, a misunderstanding of the intense and desperate struggle which they wage every day; second, a fear of such abject pauperization and a desire to stem it by making it cost its victims even more dearly.
A recent Washington Post article referred to the majority of shelters as the “moral equivalent of kennels.” And even the best of shelters charge high personal costs for admission. The majority operate from a philosphy in keeping with the spirit of the workhouse, as described in the English Poor Laws:
“In to such a house none will enter voluntarily; work, confinement; and discipline will deter the indolent and vicious; and nothing but extreme necessity will induce any to accept the comfort which must be obtained by the surrender of their free agency, and the sacrifice of their accustomed habits and gratifications.” 1“Regulating the Poor,” by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, in Problems of Political Economy: An Urban Perspective, David Gordon, ed., (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1977), p. 337.♡
No one would choose to be homeless if a proper alternative were offered. No one would choose to live with the shame of being homeless if provided a place of respect and hospitality.
We must hope that by some grace we will be forgiven for the charity we ordinarily mete out to the poor. The hand which proffers charity alone also pushes the human being away, unless the gesture is made in full realization of the injustice which has caused the need. The word of kindness also creates a distance between speaker and hearer, unless spoken in full admission that such kindness is a right and not a gift.
The homeless are profoundly and thoroughly our kindred. They are no different in all that is most essential from you or me. Like us they have always done their best to overcome and to triumph. They love and aspire and persevere, just as we do. They are ready in an instant to forget the shame of their circumstances and to take pride in having survived them. What they deserve is far better than we usually allow ourselves to imagine or than they normally imagine themselves.
In a new and better world, in a society renewed at its roots, in the beloved community, our charity and their justice will coincide. Until we reach that place, we must struggle to fashion our charity so as to make of it the thinnest, entering edge of the wedge of justice, the wedge which we drive home in solidarity with, not in separation from, those we have allowed to remain dispossessed.
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Footnotes
- 1“Regulating the Poor,” by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, in Problems of Political Economy: An Urban Perspective, David Gordon, ed., (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1977), p. 337.♡