Thesis On Homeless Subjectivity

I met a couple of cool new people today, and got ten new friends on Facebook. This, I suppose, qualifies as a good day. My friend Trevor turned me on to a talk at UW today on "The Invention of Chronic Homelessness," sponsored by Queer World and UW Women's Studies. Wild horses couldn't have kept me away. Dean Spade, who is new to Seattle University and teaches Poverty Law, brought his PhD candidate friend Craig Willse out from CUNY to talk about his dissertation, From Social Problems to Governance Problems: Health and Housing After the Welfare State.

I parked in the UW Bookstore lot and did my usual thing under those circumstances, which is to buy a remainder or two and save six bucks on parking, thereby convincing myself that the books are somehow free. I selected Granta 96 and On Beauty by Zadie Smith for a total of eleven bucks and change. When I went to pay, I discovered my bank card was missing from my visit to the ATM a few minutes before. As I raced out, thumbing through my wallet, all the plastic and cardboard from the pocket spilled out onto the floor. "Fuck!," I said. The woman standing there between the remainder tables was unphased as she helped me scoop the contents of my wallet from the floor. I got out to the ATM and someone else was there.

"You didn't see a card did you," I asked pathetically. "No," she said. "This machine sucks them back in. I've lost a few here. You won't get it from Bank of America either. A different company services these machines. You'll have to get a new one."

"Fuck!," I thought. As I walked back inside to pay for the books with cash, still thumbing through the cards, I spilled them again in the doorway of the bookstore. Fuck! Back at the cash register, I told the sympathetic bookstore clerk I'd lost the card.

"Well, that happens," she said.

"Yeah," I replied, "but this is the second time I've walked away from my card in an ATM this week.

"Oh dear," she murmured.

"Exactly," I said. As I put the change and receipt into my wallet, the gravitationally challenged contents of my billfold spilled once again across her counter, which set me off on a short hysterical laughing jag that I imagine she found unnerving. I had become the unwilling protagonist in a slapstick comedy about myself.

Happily, I was able to hold it together during Willse's presentation in the packed Women's Studies Conference Room. Here's how he describes his dissertation on his website:

Scholars have demonstrated that under neoliberalism, economic logics drive social welfare policy. They have also shown how national and subnational governments increasingly outsource welfare state functions to private nonprofit organizations. My research suggests that in this context, social problems are transformed into what I term “governance problems.” In other words, the focus of policy and administration increasingly centers on managing social programs, rather than addressing social problems. Thus, in housing and shelter provision, current federal initiatives concentrate on (1) developing quantitative measures for assessing service provision outcomes and (2) establishing “performance-based contracting” protocols for allocating federal, state, and private funds to non-profit organizations. In this move to organizational management, the individual subject (or client) of welfare services is not erased, but increasingly is understood and addressed through statistical population models of risk, recidivism, and cost. I hope my research will offer substantive knowledge about this important area of social welfare policy and administration as well as contribute to theorizing how governance works in “post-welfare state” neoliberalism.

Much of what he said, once you got past the Foucouldian framework and all the grad-student speak that flew about the room, wasn't new to me. Academic lit on homelessness, he said, is a tug of war between the qualitatively oriented ethnographers and the quantitative data-heads over in public health, and these perspectives are both at odds with and informative of eachother. Both have focused on the problem of fucked up people at the expense of examining the fucked up system that produces said people, and this is a problem for those of us interested in system change. Sociology, he said, has turned increasingly from the work of identifying social problems toward being of service in managing them.

True enough. I guess it's important to have realistic expectations.

It was interesting to hear him date the dawn of federal intervention in homelessness to the passage of Mckinney-Vento in 1987, and to describe this in terms of assertion of federal authority by means of funding. Willse has written an interesting paper I haven't read yet on HMIS data collection called The Biopolitical Life of Homeless Populations. Data collection systems like Seattle's Safe Harbors, he said, are not about the control of homeless people, as advocates once feared. Homeless people as individuals are way beneath their radar. These data collection systems are about the control of the non-profit agencies that serve these people. Technology, he said, has become a "method of governance." This is about "population management in the neoliberal state." This was something that hadn't fully dawned on me, and made the whole unseemly trek more than worthwhile.

Perhaps it was the brevity of the presentation or the emphasis on the academic framework, or maybe it's just that this is a thesis in progress and Willse's ideas are still less than clear, but the promise of a critique on the invention of chronic homelessness was left largely unfulfilled. He described the evolution from the notion of "housing readiness" through "continuum of care" to Housing First, but none of this was news to anyone who's been in this work for more than ten minutes.

He also spoke of the increasing trend toward cost-benefit arguments for resource allocation, and the contradiction of government focusing on those who, in a more foucauldian universe, we'd properly expect to be left out to die. It's complicated, said Willse: "economic investment and social abandonment run parallel."

Indeed. Here's the thing. There's a whole lot more abandonment than investment going on out there. It's the investment — and the heartwarming success stories of lives and dollars saved — that make the abandonment so much more palatable to the misguided middle-class conscience. We all want so badly to believe.

Here's the other thing. People are left out to die. Now that we've decided that housing with services is the answer to homelesness, no matter how theoretical and underfunded that housing may, in reality, be, we've drawn the line against new emergency shelter and even become a little trigger happy in reducing what we have, regardless of actual demand.

Cities clear homeless campsites and hold up their ten year plans as an excuse. You can't have your tent tonight, we say, because noone should have to live like that, but sometime in the next ten years, we're going to get you the housing with services you really need, because we know what you need better than you do.

So what happens when there isn't enough housing, and when cities across America consider trashing people's survival gear and issuing citations for camping some form of enlightened public policy? People are abandoned, and sometimes they die. They're surplus, they're a problem, and government defines them as trash and treats them like shit. They just want to look good in the process.

When I spoke to Spade and Willse afterwards, I said I was happy that this work was being done. "The radical academic literature on homelessness is very thin," I observed. "Paltry," Willse agreed. Spade had been to the Critical Resistance conference in Oakland last weekend and seen our own Danina Garcia present on a WRAP panel about the convergence of homelessness and civil rights issues of criminalization and incarceration. This was one of the conferences more popular sessions. I'm sure we'll all be talking more. We radicals need to stick together, because soon the fuckers will be coming after us.

Out For The Count

In case you missed it, the New York Times covered the homeless definitions issue that is at the heart of the national legislative debate right now. The article is odd. Somehow, the reporter managed to write 1,100 words on the subject and still miss the point.

This year's renewal of $1.7 billion in federal legislation to fund homeless programs has centered on the issue of whether those who are considered homeless under the Department of Education definition and thus able to attend public school — those doubled up or living vulnerably in poverty motels — should also be eligible for homeless assistance from HUD.

One position is that homeless is homeless, and the nation needs to step up and deal with reality. The other, which is supported by President Bush and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, argues that in a time of limited resources, we need to focus on those who are most desperate.

Several advocacy groups, including the National Coalition for the Homeless, argue that the HUD definition should more closely mirror the Education Department’s. ... These advocates note that many families live in communities where shelters are full or nonexistent. In other places, some say, shelters sometimes bar large families, families with two parents or those with boys older than 10.

“I think we have to take care of our most vulnerable,” Ms. Biggert said. “Shouldn’t children as well as the others be a priority?”

Barbara Duffield, policy director at the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, echoed those concerns. “This is really about our nation acknowledging the extent of the housing crisis and the devastation it wreaks on children, youth and family,” she said. “The housing crisis is bigger than the emergency system put in place to address it 20 years ago.”

Opponents of a broad expansion of the definition counter that demand for shelter beds already exceeds supply. About 700,000 people live in shelters or on the streets on any given day, housing officials say. But federal dollars finance only 170,000 beds.

Some advocates also fear that communities would shift resources from single, mentally ill or addicted people to doubled-up families who were newly classified as homeless. Such families are typically easier to serve and politically more appealing.

“Nobody thinks that these families are having an easy time of it,” said Steve Berg, vice president for programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “But when push comes to shove, when you’ve got people in apartments and people in shelters and on the streets, the people in the latter group need the help more.” ...

Whatever the number, “we need to deal with the most desperate the best that we can and keep working” toward greater expansion, said Representative Maxine Waters, the California Democrat who heads the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity. “We don’t want to create competition and have people at each other’s throats for limited space.”

OK. So let's review. Less than 25% of current shelter receives any federal support. This shelter, numbered at 700,000 or so beds, does not include those who lack housing but are not literally on the street or in a homeless shelter already. Counting these, worry some, would stretch already scarce federal support even more thinly, leading to some sort of ugly Darwinian competition for shelter beds that don't exist. Regardless of which version of the expanded definition gets passed, no new resources will be made available.

When it comes to poor people, the feds are officially out of money. Large badly-run financial institutions, on the other hand, are always a good public investment

Which means this debate, for now, isn't about whether the numbers of homeless people who get help gets expanded. It's more about how accurately we account for the various ways in which poor people are being fucked.

Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, homeless advocates routinely took great pains to point out that families with children make up the great majority of those who are homeless. Those who look homeless — the mentally ill, drunk, and addicted — were the red headed step children of homeless advocacy. These two categories — sympathetic families with kids and somewhat frightening single men — divided neatly across the lines of deserving and undeserving poor. Homeless families got shelter and transitional housing, and single homeless men with problems got hot soup, a mat on the floor if they were lucky, and a bus ticket out of town.

Then came the glitzification (I just made that word up) of our downtown areas and the national preoccupation with ending chronic (read visible) homelessness. Suddenly, homelessness became all about the most dysfunctional: the drunk, the addicted, the mentally ill. These problematic but relative few have become the focus of our concern, and the cure usually resembles small servings of carrot paired with liberal helpings of stick.

"Homeless advocacy" became the new found passion of hundreds of instant experts. Quasi-governmental public/private planning bodies erupted across the country to manage the growing contradiction of growing affluence and poverty in a changing urban landscape. Ending chronic homelessness through ten year plans became the driving paradigm as desperate localities uncritically followed the money that trickled down from the feds. The definition of "chronically homeless" itself began to narrow. The numbers went down. Success was declared.

To now broaden the definition would be to undermine the illusion that means so much to so many. This we cannot do.

The federally imposed Ten Year Plan To End Homelessness template has reduced our scope of concern to the homeless that are bad for business. As for the others, if we don't see them, they don't exist. We can pretend, along with the NAEH's Steve Berg, that raising kids in an exhorbitantly priced, crack-infested transient hotel is the same thing as having "an apartment."

What I'm saying here is this: One can't understand why the federal definition of homelessness should be expanded without first understanding how and why it has been narrowed. The HUD press releases focus on reductions in chronic homelessness. When family homelessness increases, the media is seldom alerted.

Poverty in America isn't news anymore. Not unless it pisses on your sidewalk.

Stigmatizing the Homeless

Just today, I was thinking about all the shit I say to reporters that almost never makes it into print. Here's one time that I can't complain. Robert Dobbs at Tacoma's Weekly Volcano reports on that city's failure to make progress on Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness goals (chronic homelessness up 27% since 2007) and the aggressive crackdown on visible poverty that has overtaken efforts to help.

Refreshingly, Tacoma calls their sweeps policy the Encampment Elimination Program. At least this smelly city to the south doesn't leave you guessing as to what they're about. For the first time in the history of print media, my core concern with the chronic homeless focus actually made it into someone's story. You'll never see this in the Seattle Times.

“The thing that I keep struggling to get my head around is how distant appearances and reality are when it comes to city policy around homelessness,” says Harris. “Everyone has embraced the rhetoric around ending homelessness, but I see very little of it in terms of what is coming to prevail. What this really comes down to is reducing visible homelessness. ” ...

“I don’t think people understand what the 10-year plan is all about,” he says. “Why would the (federal) administration that seems to be (the) most hostile to poor people in 70 years take on this task of solving homelessness? The answer is that it’s not really about solving the issue. Truth is, the chronic homeless make up a very small percentage of the overall population. This is really about visible homelessness. You have this federally backed strategy that is essentially a template for a very sophisticated propaganda model. It’s a way of reframing homelessness to focus on the most visible and dysfunctional and most easy to blame.”

That is one of the most damaging aspects of the 10-year plan, says Harris — it makes the homeless easy to dismiss. Once you stigmatize a population, “it’s pretty easy to do whatever you want to them.”

After decades of advocates stressing that homelessness has many faces and most people don't fit the stereotype, federal funding priorities and local development-driven imperatives to hide poverty have combined to make homelessness all about the drunks, addicts, and crazy people. And the major media is always willing to toe the city line: We're sick of their unsightly misery, and we don't have to tolerate it. They're service-resistant vectors of criminal activity. So screw them, in a compassionate Seattle sort of way.

Speaking of screwing homeless people, the Downtown Seattle Association's long-held dream of shutting down Seattle's public toilets may now come to pass. This has been on their agenda for at least two years, but Tom Rassmussen, citing the lack of evidence that this is really a problem, gave them no traction with City Council. Well, things change. The Department of Public Utilities has generated the report they need to make it into a problem, and they've got Sally Clark on board and a new, more compliant, council. The panhandling legislation can't be far away. See Sharon Chan's Seattle Times story, which also gets my problem with this right.

Tim Harris, executive director for homeless-activist newspaper Real Change, wants the city not only to keep the automated toilets, but also to add portable toilets. Removing toilets would force people to relieve themselves in streets and alleys, Harris said.

"If you don't provide alternatives and viable alternatives, then it's not fair to blame people for activities that they have little choice but to engage in," he said.

Apparently, the plan is to somehow get local businesses and government buildings to staff and more prominently feature the availability of their toilets. Yep. That's the plan. And it will cost just as much as keeping the ones we have.

I actually went into this whole conspiratorial rant about how they'll take the toilets away, and then when the whole downtown smells like a Belltown alley on a hot summer day and there's shit on every doorstep, we'll hear all about the filthy, disgusting, homeless people who are too lazy to even find their way to the bathroom.

But for some reason she didn't use that.

I had high hopes for the Seattle Metropolitan story on the Seattle sweeps that came out in their new April issue, but it turned out to be a rather bland overview and to offer little new.

McInturff said she was "moved" by the three hours of entirely one-sided testimony at January's public hearing. They may tweak the 48-hour notification, and rethink the $25 limitation on goods they're willing to store. Wow. Look at those big-ass crocodile tears running all down her face. They apparently chose not to hear the "throw this heinous piece of crap out, start over, and listen to us this time" theme.

Seattle Metro, having the luxury of magazine-style journalism, should have been the ones to do something in-depth. But instead they accepted the city's frame and pretty much went brain-dead from there, as is standard media practice. I'd link, but they kept it off their website.

Finally, my friend Silja Talvi got a great piece into the April In These Times that covers the Seattle sweeps issue as a stark example of national trends and linking it to the development boom. She calls it a homeless eradication program. Nice phrase. I'd like to see it stick. They didn't have the story online when I checked, but maybe they will sometime.

From the Horses Mouth

This week I came across Chronic Homelessness: Emergence of a Public Policy, a 2003 article that long-time homeless researcher Martha Burt wrote for the Fordham Urban Law Journal on recent homeless policy shifts toward focusing on chronic homelessness. Burt, along with Dennis Culhane, is one of the main researchers whose work helped bring Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness into vogue.

Fan of 10YPs that I am, I expected to find something to disagree with. Oddly, I didn't. I was amazed to discover that, in her dispassionate academic way, Burt sees the problems as well as the possibilities. It seems that where we've gone wrong is to adopt a sort of Ten Year Plan boosterism that pretends we can have the good parts while ignoring the troubling barriers that get in the way, as if these issues will somehow resolve themselves.

This has the effect of reducing the whole thing to a bit of a resources shell game that boosts the budgets of some human service providers at the expense of others while focusing on the visible homelessness that urban downtown interests find most troubling. It's a convergence of interests, but it's not "ending homelessness."

Let's start with the good parts. Burt says the research is clear: those who have been homeless long term opt for housing with supportive services when it is available, and, for the most part, they stay in that housing. It's expensive, but no more expensive than the cost of not doing so. Even better, the estimated total number of these people who need to be housed — roughly 150,000 to 250,000 people in a given year — is within the means of a concerted, long-term effort to achieve.

It's interesting that her research shows a more or less break even cost-benefit relationship, as opposed the the savings factors of two or three that we hear from Mangano and company. This strikes me as a more honest assessment.

While this is good news, it's qualified good news. Even as she expresses enthusiasm for the Ten Year Planning strategies then unfolding through the USICH and NAEH, she also cites numerous problems.

The first is that while its no more expensive and more humane to provide housing with services than to leave people on the streets and in shelters, these costs are born by different bureaucratic entities, and a savings realized by one does little to offset an expense borne by the other.

This brings us to the political will issue, and the difficulty of sustaining said will over time.

Finally, even the narrow approach of solving chronic homelessness will take more resources than seems to be politically possible at the moment. The rest of the homeless — families, working poor, etc — are unaffected and may even receive less attention than before as a result of the policy shift.

These problems alone are enough to give any prudent person pause. But the biggest issue is that the structural realities of rising housing costs, low wages, growing inequality, and diminished government support for programs that assist the poor essentially undermine the foundation upon which progress through the means of Housing First would be realized. Burt concludes:

First, housing has to become more affordable. The simplest way to do this is to subsidize housing; research indicates that the public policy that would do the most to reduce the risk of homelessness is subsidizing housing. This involves no need to build more units, no struggles over project siting or zoning or not in my backyard behavior. All it takes is providing those people with the most disparate housing costs in relation to their income the financial resources to remain in place. In addition, new housing needs to be created that is affordable by people earning relatively little despite working regularly — renewed incentives for producing affordable rental housing would greatly help the current situation of inadequate housing supply.

It is also essential that people who are poor today, and their children, have the educational and training opportunities to assure that they are not poor tomorrow. That is, we have to increase the ability of the poorest people in this country to afford housing without requiring subsidies in the future. The problem is, these steps are not in political favor at this time, being seen as the old anti-poverty agenda. Instead, present federal budget proposals actually offer significant cuts in public and subsidized housing — actions that in the long run will work against the federal commitment to end chronic homelessness. Ultimately, the solution to chronic homelessness will rest on the solution to homelessness in general; the latter begets the former. Only a few communities so far have committed themselves to this larger goal.

Seattle is one of those communities, but rather than embracing the challenges of what it truly means to end homelessness, we have over time moved toward a more limited focus on street homelessness. This is inevitable, in that ending homelessness would take political courage and imaginative organizing across class and issue constituencies. We need a broad-based organizing effort that can change the definition of the possible. What we have instead is a lowest common denominator effort that is directed from the top. That's just not going to do it.

Counting the Homeless with Philip Mangano

NPR's Scott Simon did a softball interview with Bush administration homelessness czar Philip Mangano last Saturday on Weekend Edition, and Phil offered a genially upbeat litany of distortions and half truths as he assured us that the "business focused, results oriented" Ten Year Plan strategies are succeeding in ending homelessness. It was disappointing to hear Simon, who is certainly capable of doing a tough interview, defer to Mangano as if he were the reincarnation of Mother Theresa.

Simon sets the stage for Mangano's rap by parroting the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness line that ten percent of the homeless draw fifty percent of the emergency shelter resources, and that the magic bullet to ending homelessness lies in relentlessly focusing our attention on the toughest cases.

The rebuttal to this gets pretty deep into the weeds, which is part of why Mangano's oversimplification works so well. The short version is that the studies upon which this is based exclude several key groups, like families with children. The Ten Tear Plan model also assumes a static reality, which is just weird. For a good overview and critique, see NPACH's Q&A on chronic homelessness.

What I find so maddening about Mangano is how successful he's been in sidelining any discussion of structural poverty in relation to the problem of homelessness. By focusing national attention on the most dysfunctional and stereotypically "homeless" ten percent of the two million or more who are without housing, he has managed to deflect attention from the many ways in which federal policy creates poverty while effectively placing ninety-five percent of the responsibility for a solution on the localities.

He uses the terms chronic homeless, street homeless, and homeless interchangeably, so when he talks about these huge "reductions" that are taking place, any normal person would assume he's talking about homelessness in general. Thus, the illusion is established that major progress has been made when the reality is far less encouraging.

In Portland, for example, Mangano says homelessness has decreased by 70%. Without going into the complexities of the count, let's just say that this is an extremely contested number. The City of Portland claims a 39% decrease. Portland's Street Roots says they're not convinced.

The 2006 Conference of Mayors report says that requests for family shelter in that city actually rose. Outside the city, these rosy reports of ending homelessness turn positively grim. Some advocates claim that rural homelessness in Oregon is up by as much as 300%.

San Fransisco, another of Mangano's successes with a 38% decrease, reports a rise in family requests for shelter as well. Overall, says the Conference of Mayors, homelessness is up by six percent, nearly a third of family requests for shelter go unmet, and the average length of an episode of homelessness is now at eight months, the longest on record.

A recent internal fight within the our own Committee to End Homelessness in King County might shed some light. While some parties within CEHKC, based on the last two years' counts, wanted to report similar declines in homelessness, others argued that changes in the timing and methodology of the annual one night count rendered comparisons less than entirely meaningful. This point of view eventually prevailed.

Something that goes unsaid in all this counting and recounting is that most cities are employing liberal use of the stick right along side the Housing First carrot. Portland, LA, San Fransisco, and a host of other cities have become decidedly less hospitable, and this decreases the numbers as well. LA, for example, sends their police out every two weeks to roust sleeping homeless people under the guise of getting an accurate count. The numbers in LA's skid row have declined sharply.

Over the last three years in San Fransisco, says the Mayor's press release, "1,864 homeless persons left San Francisco to be reunited with friends or family members in other parts of the country through the City's Homeward Bound Program." This is otherwise known as the one-way bus ticket out of town. Long-time San Fransisco advocate Paul Boden reports that his city now counts these as housing placements.

So as Mangano goes around crowing his mission accomplished message, I'm thinking I've heard it before, and it wasn't true then either.

I'm just thankful that he didn't go into his "I'm from Massachusetts and an abolitionist, and Republicans ended slavery and they'll end homelessness too" rap. That just might have sent me right over the edge.