Poverty and Homelessness in the United States
A while ago I was writing a little column about homeless women in the United States on a web site you may have seen before it disappeared into the blackhole of little dot com failures along with tons of writing people had submitted to it.
Sadly, around the same time I found out that assuming there is no such thing as a virus that can really wipe out your entire harddrive (virus software or not) is not just a myth.
So - poof - there went the articles I wrote. Except one, which is not the best but gives some information about homelessness and women in the United States and how prevalent it is.
I started this column, actually, not long after I had been homeless myself. Literally it had just been a couple months since I had gotten a place to live (which according to some legal definitions, because I was staying in someone else's house and not paying rent, is not a real place to live and you are still technically homeless).
I realize very well that in comparison to most of the world, being homeless in the U.S. is like a cold versus AIDS and I do not ever want to understimate the pathetic level of poverty women outside the country I was born into often find themselves in (which is often the fault of my (which, sadly, has a lot to do with the government of my country and some lovely organizations like the IMF and the World Bank).
However, I do not think that most Americans actually have a clue at all as to how many women really are homeless, and that, in fact, most homeless people are not men you will see on street corners. One day I will try to rewrite the stories from memory that got zapped off my computer and off of themestream.com about some of those women who I knew. Until then, I will add what I still have here.
You can read one story I wrote, which survived only because it was published on another web site (and I forgot this fact for over a year myself). It is about a woman who I called Rebecca. I still think of her sometimes. More often I think of her daughter, who was four years old when I knew them. You can read it here now.
I think of a lot of women I met at that shelter. With a scanner and some significant work I could someday add to this site the story of that too (although I am not healthy enough to do such a thing any time soon). It is about a shelter that was run by criminals who had a contract with the county government. In general, these are the shelters with the worst conditions, I later found out. When you're living in one, you find out quite quickly, from observation.
I helped a lawyer from an amazing little pro-bono law firm called the Homeless Person's Representation Project organize secret meetings of a few women at that shelter (we would have been kicked out had they found out we did this, and in fact, they tried pretty hard to get rid of me). Inside that shelter I became more of an activist than I have probably ever been at any time in my entire life before or since. In the end, that company lost its contract to run the shelter. And somewhere in the Baltimore Sun you can read about that.
During this time I learned quite a few things about how dehumanizing it is to simply not have a roof over your head that you can depend on. A simple thing really. Not a simple problem to solve.
I met women who became homeless because of being battered by their husbands, many mothers who were homeless with their children and no sign of any fathers, women with disabling chronic illnesses (kind of like me), an elderly, mentally ill woman who was left sitting all day in her own urine (she was my roommate). Her name was Marie. I had a car then (a major luxury when you are homeless and not something I have anymore, but I was quite grateful for it at the time). She and I drove sometimes, just drove - away. That was the only time she got out of the shelter. If I was a little less jaded by life thinking about her would make me cry now. I only hope she is in some better place.
So it is for those women, the women at Hannah Moore before it was no more, for who I am making this section of this web site. Everything on it is dedicated to them. And to all women, everywhere who do not have the money to feed themselves or their children, to house themselves, for whatever reason, and have to rely on abusive men or abusive parents or grandparents or an abusive staff at a crummy shelter or a cardboard box or a backseat of a car or someone's garage or a park bench or some dirt on the ground - to have a place to sleep. And for every woman who ever sells her body out of desperation, for money.
If that is not a feminist issue, then I don't know what is.
So this is the section on economic rights.
Below is an a short article written in 2000, with some facts about homeless women:
The fastest growing group of homeless people in the United States is comprised of single women with two or three children, according to The National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Several studies have shown that 50% of homeless women become homeless due to domestic violence. The National Coalition for the Homeless has a fact sheet online about this issue. http://nch.ari.net/domestic.html
As of 1996, according to the United States Census Bureau, women made $.74 for every $1.00 a man earned. http://www.census.gov/
So, onto the question. Do you know what a homeless person in America looks like? Do you picture a man begging for money on a city street corner?
If so, I would like to tell you about some homeless people I have known. Understanding who homeless people actually are is a necessary beginning to any discussion on how to end homelessness in our society.
First, they are not mostly men. And they are not all adults. Some are children; some are infants. Some are born while their mothers are living in shelters or on the streets. I met three women in a shelter with newborn babies; two of them were pregnant when I met them, and had to return to the very unsanitary shelter directly after giving birth.
They are not mostly panhandlers or "street people" either. Many homeless people live in some form of shelter or another most of the time and are not standing on your street corner begging for money, or sleeping in a cardboard box in an alley like some stereotypical bag lady on a made-for-TV movie.
"A most important fact about these dramatically visible homeless persons on the street is that, their visibility notwithstanding, they are at best a small minority, tragic caricatures of homelessness rather than representatives of it. For every one of them there are 10 or maybe 20 less visibly homeless persons on the street or in emergency shelters", Elliot Liebow wrote in Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women.
I will tell you about some real homeless women I have known with this column. Their individual stories give a much more accurate view of homelessness than most Americans have.
First, I will tell you about myself. I am female. I have never begged for money or food, or stood on a street corner holding a sign. I do not want anyone's nickels and dimes; they would not cover rent of any kind even if I was physically able to stand outside collecting them.
I am not lazy. I would love to be able to work a regular job again. I cannot do that, because I am disabled, like a great number of homeless and poor people in this country. I am not stupid, nor am I ignorant. I would love to be in college again right now, especially at Smith College, where I was supposed to be for the past year. I had a large grant that I really wanted to use and complete my education. I am not there, nor am I a student at any college right now, because of my chronic illnesses and the financial problems they have caused. I cannot express how much that fact depresses me.
I am not an alcoholic (though alcoholism runs in my family), a drug addict, or a schizophrenic. Actually, I do not drink or do drugs at all. I do not want a drink or a fix, even when I am horribly depressed.
I do not have any children, so you cannot call me a "welfare mother", even if you are ignorant enough to use that term to describe poor women with children. I have never been pregnant.
I worked, most of the time, since I was seventeen-years-old, except and until I was too sick to do so. I do not want pity. I do not expect or desire charity. I do not want to be a burden to society or on any individuals.
What I want is a place to live. That is what I believe most homeless people want. That is what every homeless person I have ever spoken to wanted.
I do not want to annoy you by sleeping on a bench at a park or a shopping center near your where you live. I do not want to be an eyesore on the sidewalk or at a library in the neighborhood you live in. I recall the way people reacted to homeless men who used to seek shelter during the day at a library where I worked in Florida. They were looked at with more disgust than the rats nearby. Like those men, I do spend quite a bit of time in libraries. But, unlike them, I have been able to keep myself clean, have not been homeless for years, and have not had to sleep outside. I go to libraries because they are a place to go, but also because I love books.
I have looked at books on homelessness in libraries and bookstores. Most of them were not worth looking at. I like sociology, and was about to switch my college major to it, however, I am disgusted by books that describe homelessness as something occurring in a foreign land, removed from anyone who might actually read those academic attempts to define what exactly a homeless person is, as if she were an alien. I read those books, and I am one of the people those books omit in their descriptions of the conditions that currently define my life.
I do not like being some scholar's omission. Guess what? I could be that scholar myself. So could many other people trapped in poverty and homelessness. "Something there is that does not love a wall," Robert Frost wrote, once, describing fences between neighbors. Something there is that does not love blindness too. America needs to open its eyes and see who homeless people actually are, and note that they are Americans too.
I have some ideas, as do many other people, on what could end homelessness in America. They will be in another article. What I want you to know, in order to give you an accurate view of my situation, is that I wrote most of this and that article in a McDonald's while I was living in my car, after getting very little sleep (I have Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome and Fibromyalgia, which involve a severe sleep disorder). While writing this I had very severe pain in my muscles. I was eating with money someone who I did not want to ask for money had given me.
All the shelters in the city I lived near (Baltimore) had been full every single time I had called, and every time my caseworker at a (rare) non-profit agency for disabled people had called, for about four months. According to Baltimore County's Department of Social Services, I was not allowed to go to another shelter in the county (of which there are barely any in the first place), since I had already been in one this year for 70 days, and, according to their interpretation of a Maryland law, no one can be in a homeless shelter twice in a six-month period.
I am fortunate, unlike most homeless people, that I have a car and have never had to sleep on the streets. It is for those people who are living on the streets, and people who are homeless for years, and homeless people who cannot look after themselves due to severe mental illnesses which they are not getting treated for, that I write this column. You will probably never hear their voices, or read their words, but, I would like all Americans to wake up and remember that part of our Constitution that says all of us are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There is no clause that says those entitlements apply only to people who can afford them.
I wish that I had enough faith in humanity to think the discrimination against homeless and poor people would end in my lifetime (I am 25 years old). I wish I could believe there would be a day, in my lifetime, when the U.S. government decided to put more money into low-income housing, schools in impoverished neighborhoods, job training, and financial assistance to poor people than it puts into its unnecessarily huge military budget, or NASA's satellites that lose millions of dollars when they malfunction, or political campaigns. There are so many things we could do with a few million dollars for poor people, much less a few billion. But, I do not have that faith. I do not hear anyone uttering, "Send me your tired, your poor", in this country. What I hear is, "Send them away", even when they are women with children or disabled women.
For news on legislation and policy related to homelessness, you can visit the National Coalition for the Homeless's site and follow their links to contact your Representatives and Senators in Congress:
If you wish to volunteer, make a contribution, or educate yourself about homelessness, they can direct you to ways to do that too:
