Many years ago, in the late 1990’s, I worked with the homeless in a mid-sized Rust Belt city. I loved the job, but it frustrated me in many ways. The facility that I worked in was run as a Christian shelter with a long term program to help men stay off the streets, and off the drugs and alcohol that put most of them there. My particular job was to interview and evaluate men for the long term drug and alcohol treatment program. Once I selected them, I began to delve into their stories, why they were homeless, and what they thought they needed to get their life stabilized.
The program was heavy on “Let Go and Let God.” The curriculum was the Bible and daily life skills classes that I taught. The bottom line was, “pray about it and see what God has in store for you.” I had worked in mental health facilities before, and knew deep down that this wasn’t going to be enough. I would make medical appointments to make sure all the men were physically healthy and to get any problems treated. Same for dental. After that, we made sure to clear up any legal issues they had with the court system. Once clear, they could focus on getting clean and sober.
Some years after leaving that job, I moved to Florida to escape the cold and dark winters. I lived in Orlando, and would sometimes go downtown to walk around the beautiful Lake Eola. One day, I noticed a homeless man walking in the street, ignoring traffic and the sidewalk beside him. He stopped suddenly, and turned to cross the street. In what seemed to be slow motion, I watched him walk right into the path of a van, and sure enough, it knocked him down. I ran over to see if he was alright, and he was already trying to stand up. When I told him to be still to make sure he didn’t have any broken bones, he laughed and said the van had barely tapped him. He stood with those of us who stopped for a few minutes, and then walked into the crowded sidewalk and disappeared.
About a year later, I stopped in at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop on Orange Ave. to grab a snack and a drink. As I stood in line, I noticed that the same man was sitting in a chair watching TV and eating a bagel. With my donut in hand, I went and grabbed a seat not far from him. I was just wondering if he would even remember the event when I saw him look right at me. He smiled and said, “I remember you!” He didn’t hesitate to come sit beside me.
After remembering the last time we met, he said he had seen me a number of times at the lake since then. I asked if he lived nearby, and he said sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t. “Long story,” he said. And then he launched into it.
When he finished, I told him my history at the shelter up north. He told me he had actually been there before. He said many homeless people traveled to that shelter in the summer because it was new, clean, and had good food. “We work day labor jobs for a week or so, and we save up enough money to get some food and a bus ticket to Florida in the winter.” So I asked him if the streets were his choice, and he said yes.
He said that the “vast majority of homeless people are voluntary.” They are people who choose to live without responsibility….no job, no bills, no relationships that could hurt them. There is always food at shelters, and a safe place to sleep if you need it. Otherwise, they chose to gather together and sleep under bridges, in alley, in business doorways. But it was there choice.
He estimated that around 75% of those he had been around were mentally ill. Some were veterans with PTSD, some were abused severely at some point in their lives. He called some of them “bi-polar,” and others “schizo.” But he made the point that some were just like him, wanting to be left alone to live as they wish. I asked him about the older one’s who you would see shuffling from trash can to trash can in the middle of the day. “Their choice,” he said. “And they’ll kill you if you try to take them off the street.”
He finished his donut and said he had to catch a bus to the part of downtown where he was staying. I shook his hand, and never saw him again. But I’ve thought about that conversation many times since.
The problem of homelessness is constantly obvious in Florida. You see them every day. Panhandlers at just about every freeway exit, every downtown has dozens of men and women pulling small suitcases on wheels, or with their whole life slung over their shoulder in a trash bag. I see them in a different light now. The problem will never completely go away. There are too many of them who choose the lifestyle.
But for those who are afraid, confused, hopeless, or mentally ill, there is much we can do. In the 1990’s, I watched several states, including my own, begin to close state-run mental health hospitals. They said it was inhumane to house people with moderate to severe mental illness in large facilities. The experts all said that they needed to be treated in the community, in group homes and residential apartments run by private organizations or local governments. And as they closed the hospitals, they promised that the money saved would follow the residents back to their communities.
That would have been great, except the money never made it to the community. And that meant that large numbers of mentally ill people were left with no home, and no serious treatment. It’s exactly why we have the problems we have with homelessness today.
There is really only one way to tackle this problem. Those who choose homelessness want to be left alone. So leave them alone. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be directed into alcohol and drug treatment. They are a hazard to the public because they beg for money to feed their addiction, not their bellies. There is plenty of food for them, and they know how to find it. If they want to be left alone, they need to get to a point where they can leave the rest of us alone too. It’s a two way street.
For those who need intensive mental health treatment, we need to reopen those shuttered clinics and hospitals. Both private and public funding needs to go toward secure housing in treatment facilities. For those who are unable to care for themselves, we should re-institute laws giving law enforcement the ability to legally admit them to a locked or secure facility for treatment. So many of the people we see homeless now are schizophrenic, and should be off the streets because it’s inhumane to let them wande around all night, And it’s dangerous.
It will take time, and it will take money to make this work. It will take churches and it will take a caring community. But the status quo is not acceptable. It’s an issue I have decided to take on with local and state government in the coming days. This is America, where hearts are big, and hands are open. I hope others will take up this cause in their cities and towns.
BareNakedPolitics 