“Worst nightmares that we are becoming”: Why America’s treatment of homeless people is a disgrace
Why the killing of a homeless man in LA—and a terrible Instagram post from a Vogue editor—are hardly aberrations
Topics: Eric Tars, Homelessness, Housing, affordable housing, police killing, Don Young, Income inequality, national law center on homelessness and poverty, Vogue, News, Politics News
If the stories that went viral last summer about “anti-homeless” sidewalk spikes did not convince you that Western society has a serious problem when it comes to the dehumanization of homeless people, here’s a little anecdote you should keep in mind.
Earlier this month, after news about (and video of) the Los Angeles Police Department’s killing of Charly “Africa” Leundeu Keunang went viral, Salon reached out to Eric Tars, the senior attorney for the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, hoping to get his take on what the high-profile incident might say about the way homeless people are treated in America today. For various reasons, we had to reschedule and push back our conversation by a few days. But during that relatively brief period of time a Republican congressman recommended solving the “homeless problem” through the tactical deployment of wild carnivores — wolves, to be precise — and an editor for Vogue kicked off a social media freakout by joking about a homeless person she saw reading the magazine during a recent trip to Paris.
As gross as this all is, though, only someone with their head in the sand could reasonably describe it as shocking. Because, as Tars eventually told Salon when we spoke recently over the phone, dehumanizing people without homes — both socially and through government policy — is all too common. And the fact that what ails homeless people in America is much like what ails the middle class on the whole (unaffordable housing, a porous safety net, and a lack of stable, decent-paying jobs, etc.) doesn’t seem to matter. Our conversation, which touches on these themes as well as how and why some local communities are changing their approach, can be found below and has been edited for clarity and length.
Now that we know more about the killing in Los Angeles, are there any broader issues afflicting the homeless — or people without homes, rather — that you saw reflected in that story?
Absolutely. I think the way you just framed that question is very telling: you started off saying “the homeless” and then you switched it to “people without homes” and the broader trend that’s the most troubling here is that we don’t see that reflected in the way communities are treating people. We don’t see them dealing with people without homes — our fellow citizens who don’t have homes — but we see them dealing with “the homeless” as some problem, a nuisance, a pest to be gotten rid of, to be managed or exterminated.
Rep. Don Young of Alaska recently recommended letting loose wolves on the streets of cities to deal with the homeless problem. That’s an extreme example, of course, but it represents the broader dehumanization of homeless people. If we thought of homeless people as people, as our fellow citizens, then we wouldn’t see the kinds of laws criminalizing their behavior that we see. That all lends itself to this environment that makes the kinds of violent interactions we saw in L.A. possible.
Homeless people come into contact with law enforcement more often than others, yes?
Because homeless people are on the streets, in public view all the time, they are more exposed to surveillance by the police, to surveillance by other community members who might call the police. Behavior that’s completely innocent, that you or I take for granted — eating, going to the bathroom, all these things that are perfectly legal when done in a private setting — become criminal acts in public. Every time that kind of act is criminalized, it invites an interaction with the police that wouldn’t otherwise happen.
When you combine that with the numbers of people who are mentally ill on the streets … and there’s new research coming out showing that of the police killings over the past few years, I think 50 percent or more have been with people who have had some sort of mental illness. Because that population is overrepresented amongst the homeless population, you see those interactions with the police that wouldn’t otherwise happen provoking a homeless person with mental illness into acts that police then find threatening, and then it turns into a violent interaction.
We see the overall trend of dehumanization, of criminalization of homeless people as being at the root of the kinds of situations that end up resulting in the death of people like Africa [in Los Angeles].
What are some other attributes about the homeless population that people either might not know or might misunderstand?
There are statistics showing that 40 percent of homeless people work in any given month. For a significant population of homeless people, they are working; it’s not that they can’t or won’t or don’t want to work, but that they are simply working but aren’t able to save up enough to make their first and last month’s rent, security deposit or those sorts of things, especially in cities where the cost of living has gone up,
When you combine that with criminalization practices … we’ve seen a number of situations where people are on the cusp of getting housing and then all of a sudden they’re arrested for no good reason, they spend a night in jail, they aren’t able to go to their job the next day, they lose their job, and then they’re back at square one. Plus, they now have a criminal record, which makes it more difficult for them to get employment and access to housing or other services, so it’s actually putting further barriers between the people who are actively trying to get out of homelessness and their ability to do so.
The idea that homeless people are working and struggling to hold down a steady source of income, that doesn’t really jibe with the stereotypical way we think of the homeless population, does it?
While the most visible homeless people are often these chronically homeless individuals who may have mental disabilities, the largest and most quickly increasing population of homeless people are homeless families with children. Even though the number of people sleeping on the streets is going down, the number of homeless children identified by the Department of Education — which uses a different definition of homelessness that includes families who are doubled up with family or friends or sleeping in low-cost motels but still very unstable — that number has gone up and up and up, almost doubling since 2007 at the beginning of the housing crisis.
There is some good news in terms of communities beginning to address chronic homelessness, but they aren’t dealing with the lack of affordable housing in their communities, and that is what continues to drive the growth of family homelessness across the country.
Over all, how do cities tend to deal with their homeless populations? Is there a most-common approach or does it vary?
We’re certainly sympathetic with many communities that are facing cutbacks in federal, state, county and local resources. All of these things have led to the growth of homelessness over the past few years and the growth of visible homelessness. When there’s homeless people visible on the streets, city councillors and mayors will get calls from their constituents, from businesses, saying, do something about this.
We would argue that the problem isn’t the existence of homeless people, it’s the fact that people have no homes, but they get that pressure, and then rather than doing just the slightest bit of research and learning about the great Housing First program and other housing programs that are succeeding in actually solving the sources of homelessness — often at a lower cost than criminalizing — they don’t do that research. So it appears that the easiest way to “do something” about homelessness is to criminalize it and try to force it out of your city and go somewhere else, wherever that elsewhere might be.



