As more and more studies reveal that homelessness is a result of material factors unrelated to cultural issues like family values, it’s become increasingly evident that the majority of homeless people are victims of forces beyond their control. If this is truly the case, state and local management policies for homelessness need to be reevaluated.
Few of us would support punishing victims of a natural disaster. Imagine prohibiting survivors of an earthquake or forest fire from resting and recovering wherever they can. In fact, natural disasters almost always bring out best in us as citizens unite to provide support and comfort for the victims.
Unfortunately, homeless people too seldom receive such support and comfort, mostly because from the very beginning they’ve been demonized as addicts, bums, and habitual criminals. In fact, recent studies have shown that causal factors in homelessness include housing shortages, rising rents, evictions, stagnant wages, job losses, increasingly expensive health care, insufficient disability incomes, previous incarceration, trauma, mental illness and spousal abuse.
While it’s true that drug use among homeless people is rampant, it’s important to understand that fact within the context of drug use nationwide. The opioid epidemic taught us that overprescribing and misleading advertising by companies like Purdue Pharma were major causal factors in addiction. Billions of dollars in fines resulted from extensive investigations into the practices that led to the nationwide tragedy that destroyed the lives of millions of people, most of them housed.
If addiction were purely a matter of personal choice choice, pharmaceutical companies would not have been held accountable for their role in the opioid crisis. Nonetheless, homeless people are routinely blamed for “choosing” to use drugs while housed drug users are rightfully seen as sick, often due to circumstances beyond their control.
Some will say it’s not government’s role to provide support for people in distress, but at least since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, government has provided assistance for multitudes of citizens in distress, including farmers, flooding and fire victims, the auto industry and more. In any case, without government support, the negative effects of homelessness must be borne by local businesses, renters, homeowners and public institutions of all kinds. Clearly, government involvement in managing homelessness has become increasingly necessary as homeless numbers continue to burgeon.
To date, billions of dollars have been spent throughout the state trying to make homelessness go away by forced removal of homeless camps and orders to move on. Despite the expense, homeless numbers have risen and the punitive effects on homeless people denied even a place to lay down and rest have been devastating.
First impressions are hard to dislodge. Because homeless people were routinely demonized and depersonalized at the beginning of the homeless crisis, they too often remain objects of disgust and disdain. Given more and more research that shows homelessness is due to material factors like housing shortages, stagnant incomes and broken systems of care, we need to adjust our comprehension of the problem so it better matches facts.
We also need to decide whether we want to be a society that punishes victims of a humanitarian crisis. Thus far, that’s what we’ve been doing when we deny the poor, the disabled, the sick and traumatized members of our community a safe place to lay their heads. As long as we continue such practices, we have no right to call ourselves a civilized community. Punishing homeless people for homelessness is inhumane.
Unfortunately for the homeless population, the stigmatization mentioned in this article is the sum total of every negative encounter of homeless persons with those who are housed. Add in the dehumanization efforts by unethical politicians and we have a hostile and volatile mood in the general public that hinders common sense solutions.
Rather than overcoming the problem thru direct action, local governments try to alleviate homelessness by throwing money in any direction that does not require public input. Heavy handed policing, building housing via government funding, and using public lands for temporary housing are methods employed to avoid public input. Most importantly, keeping homeless segregated away from the housed keeps problems hidden and does not require solutions that work.
These techniques have been employed for so long that the numbers of unhoused are no longer manageable. The solutions that have been avoided for so long need to be deployed, but government has lost the credibility to employ them. In fact, the situation may have overwhelmed local governments to the point beyond the ability of leadership to fix. Meanwhile, the general public grows ever more frustrated and angry, causing one to wonder what will happen next.
Let me suggest a different scenario. The long history of territory being the key to survival (security) translates into modern times locations of where we live down to the units we live in. Thus we are challenging a person’s fundamental security which manifests as NIMBYism (lets all stick together to protect the fortress of Woodland as a current example). Add to this the fact that homes have become investments and the resistance will be that much greater.
Can the rule of law deal with this fundamental human need to be secure and protect investments?
I just picked one comment to comment. We are regulated by regulations and supposedly by a conscience, moral or otherwise. Even the 14th amendment article deals with all people but doesn’t point or segregate them all. Just peopl all equal. Everybody.. But the local rules state or otherwise have no exceptions except what the law specifically says. No extras allowed. Homelessness is not supposed to be a norm, but is and growing. Just like rising rents and prices. We are ruled more by money and fear, insurance co.s, and liabilities. An exception rule has to be made to cover what wasn’t known, ignored, exceptions to deal with these things literally. An Exception rule/law. Sound crazy? Look at the Homeless and see one of the exceptions being passed along with little or no fixing. Despite many, churches, groups and just plain individuals trying their best the problem isn’t even close to being fixed.
Nobody’s normal, yet for centuries society has cast a moral judgement on anyone with a variance in neurodiversity. It is yet another dastardly cultural response that casts dark shadows on some people and not others. Court ordered forcing of pills will not do nearly as well as a nutrient dense diet. If anything meds are slow, sometimes quick, killers. Many instabilities are linked to the bodies starvation without proper food. Real food is what I would choose to target remedial assistance toward any person with any type of illness, diagnosed yet or not. It is a good hunch we all suffer.
Homeless people are utterly devoid of wholesome meals. Many may have never had a decent meal in their lives. The meals given out free at shelters amount to over cooked mush. The junk given out at food banks and bought at convenience stores, even major grocery stores, is unfit for human consumption: processed, refined, adulterated garbage, laden with sugar, MSG, and chemical flavors called ‘natural’ but anything but, craved and eaten, because it tintillates taste buds.
While I lived in Upstate New York working for a county community action program, in their homeless assistance program, I had the benefit of knowing a woman who initiated a pilot program. She fed delinquent teenagers only an organic, well balanced diet and she watched as their neuroplastic emotions stabilized, their school grades improved, and their lives turned around. She made a believer out of me, that what we eat can and will deteriorate our health or enhance it emotionally, mentally, and physically. Very little is genetic, though imbalances can run in families.
Their is a saying, ‘the hand that rocks the cradle’. If the person doing the purchasing of food always serves certain meals, they may be devoid of certain nutrients. This alone may cause a member or members of the same family or group eating those same unbalanced meals: to have a proclivity toward certain ailments. Thus those proclivities can run in the family, yet not be genetic. Not enough of specific vitamins and minerals can tip the scale. Our being creatures of comfort (foods) does not help one bit. Manufacturers of food products are more than glad to supply our demands if it helps their bottom lines. If it will sell, supply it.
An author, who’s last name is MacDonald, wrote a book named ‘What Your Food Ate.’ It happens to be the best book of it’s kind I ever read, and I have read many excellent books on what constitutes food worthy of eating and the best method of growing. Due to our soil being depleted and manufacturers processing the heck out of the nutrients that may have been left in plants, it is nearly impossible to locate what our bodies need from any regular grocery store. It is clearly more miss than hit. We seldom, if at all, stop to question what we put in our mouths.
I share all this to demonstrate what homeless people are up against as they try to fill their hungary stomaches. As time flees, so does any semblance of health drain away. Their minds become more and more ravaged, as their bodies literally cannot keep up, while in starvation mode. Bodies need the broad spectrum of vitamins and minerals, including trace minerals. Growing plants in dirt, that has ceased to be soil teeming with microbes, macronutrients and micronutrients, and a lot more, is a fools errand. Yet we pay groceries, and all down the chain, our hard earned money, thinking they are keeping us alive. There is a goal called quality of life we all should be demanding for ourselves, our families, and the homeless.