The Homeless—What Are the Causes?
IT WAS a cold winter night. Louise and her family were rudely awakened by several piercing screams. A fire had broken out in a neighbor’s apartment. The fierce winter gusts whipped up the flames and propelled them through the six-story building. In the panic and confusion of trying to get out of their fifth-floor apartment, Louise’s mother fell to her death from the fire escape. Moments later, the flames gutted the building, and all the homes were destroyed.
The loss of her mother and her home overnight was a shattering blow to Louise. Fortunately, she had relatives and friends who took her in until she could work things out. This is what sociologists call a community support network, which for generations has served as a safety net in times of emergency.
Then why does every big city have its street people and its shelters for the homeless? Why all the squatters, slums, and shantytowns? And, indeed, why the bad housing situation and homeless problem?
When the Safety Net Breaks
Under normal circumstances, the network of relatives and friends works well enough to provide the help needed during any personal crisis. However, the network is fragile. What if the need is so great or so costly that it is beyond what the network can provide? Or what if some large-scale social upheaval should disrupt the network itself? When the safety net breaks, people fall into dire straits.
This is what is happening in many developing countries. In India, for example, the annual monsoon rains have proved inadequate in the past several years. By the summer of 1987, one out of every three Indians lacked enough water to drink. Shortage of water also meant that crops did not grow, and cattle could not survive. With no crops, field laborers had no work and no means to feed their families. The only choice for them was to leave the villages and go into the cities where some work might still be found.
The effect of this migration proves to be a real burden to the cities, which are already plagued with rapid population growth. Without money or work, these incoming migrants cannot afford even a small room in a slum colony. And since they have transplanted themselves into a totally new environment, few of them have anyone to turn to. So they must join countless other pavement dwellers, and the housing crisis intensifies.
Other developing nations are faced with similar problems. “In 1950, there was only one city in Africa of over one million people: Cairo,” says the book Africa in Crisis. “In 1980, there were 19 cities of over a million. By the year 2000, there are expected to be more than 60 such cities.” The rural population flocks into the cities in hopes of finding a better livelihood. But what has resulted is slums and degradation, often worse than what they left behind.
Rising Cost and Dwindling Supply
In the more affluent or developed nations, the causes of homelessness may be quite different. Advocates of the homeless usually point to economics as the prime factor. In Canada, for example, “while rising construction costs over the past two decades have pushed up the price of new houses,” reports the Canadian newsmagazine Maclean’s, “the arrival of two-income families on the housing market in recent years has driven prices even higher—by as much as 50 per cent last year alone in some urban neighborhoods.”
Contributing to the rising cost of housing in many cities is the process called gentrification. Increasingly, older, low-cost housing in the inner city is being renovated or converted into high-cost units with all the modern amenities that cater to the newly rich or the young professionals who prefer city living to life in suburbia. This not only drives up the cost but also greatly reduces the supply of affordable housing for low- or even middle-income families.
In the city of New York, for example, a recent study found that a family would have to earn $58,000 a year to afford a new average-priced one-bedroom apartment. A national survey shows that Manhattan also tops the nation’s cities in rent. A 1,400-square-foot [130 sq m], two-bedroom apartment in a good area rents, on the average, for $2,555 a month, and a family would have to earn about $73,000 a year to afford it, assuming they are willing to spend over 40 percent of their income on housing alone.
Housing costs in other cities may be lower, but so is the average wage of workers. With housing eating away such a large chunk of a family’s income, any unfavorable financial turn could easily result in disaster. That was the case with John, who a few years ago moved his family of five from Chicago, Illinois, to Houston, Texas, in search of work. For a while he supported his family by the commissions he earned as a recreational-vehicle salesman. Then, because of the depressed economy, he made no sales for two months. Unable to pay the $595-a-month rent for his apartment, he and his family were evicted. With no one to turn to, they went to a shelter for homeless families. Although assured of a roof over his head, John wondered how he would ever get back on his feet again, since few employers will hire someone without an address.
While most people in large cities may not be homeless, what they live in leaves much to be desired. A survey reveals that even in a city as modern as New York, 10 percent of the housing stock are the so-called “old-law tenements,” houses considered unfit even at the turn of the century because of inadequate air, light, and sanitary provisions. Another 30 percent are “new-law tenements,” somewhat improved, but outmoded even by 1929 standards. Each year, as many as 30,000 people are forced out of their homes when their decaying buildings are finally condemned or abandoned.
A Psychiatric Factor
To complicate matters, many experts believe that economics may be only one side of the homeless problem. They contend that a high percentage of the homeless become so because they are mentally ill and can no longer care for themselves.
Since the mid-1960’s many state mental institutions, in an effort to reduce costs, have adopted what is called the community mental health approach. Mental patients are treated with certain new psychoactive drugs and then released. The theory was that with the more serious symptoms under control by the drugs, the patients would be rehabilitated by living in the community and being supported by it. As a result, in Canada, for example, the total capacity of mental institutions has dropped from 47,600 beds in 1960 to under 10,000 now, and the current population in mental hospitals in the United States is less than one quarter of the 1955 peak of 559,000.
“But the release of mental patients has been to a large degree undermined by the failure of the provinces to provide adequate community services, or living arrangements, for former psychiatric patients,” reports Maclean’s. Many of them are forced to live in run-down hostels and rooming houses. Others, unable to take control of their lives, end up in shelters or on the street. Welfare officials in many Canadian cities estimate that about a third of the homeless suffer some form of psychiatric disorder. A study conducted by Ellen Bassuk of Harvard Medical School found “a 90 percent incidence of diagnosable mental illness” among the residents of a typical shelter for the homeless in Boston.
The situation with homeless families placed in welfare hotels and the like is not much better. Though not many of them had suffered from mental illness, the overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, plus the boredom and hopelessness, often lead to family violence and emotional disturbance, especially for the children.
Tragedy in Search of a Solution
Although the experts cannot agree on whether homelessness is due to economic depression, the high cost of housing, psychiatric problems, or something else, several aspects of the problem remain alarming. First of all, there is no denying that the housing problem is intensifying worldwide. Second, more and more, not just single people but families, are becoming homeless. And finally, the homeless population is of a younger age. These tragic facts cry out for solutions. What is being done to solve the problem? How effective is it? And will there ever be sufficient housing for all?
[Picture on page 9]
Makeshift shelter in the shadow of luxury housing
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Mark Edwards/UNCHS