Homeless

Homeless seems to be showing up a lot lately. This week there was a headline about the possibility of YouthCare having to close its Orion Center because of a lost grant. Then another a couple of days later, there was a story that the city was going to take up the slack. Today’s paper had a piece by Danny Westneat about “Real Change” starting operations on the eastside. And then there was Dylan’s release of the first “official” video of “Like a Rolling Stone,” essentially about the experience of being homeless.

I’m not homeless. Never have been. But I have been close at times and probably would have been in today’s economic regime. In my early teens my mother moved three children to different towns in Kentucky, running up debts she could never pay because she got no child support and kept losing her hospital jobs because she stole drugs to self-medicate the pain from an undiagnosed tumor that eventually killed her. That is the absolutely shortest version of that that I can tell. You can fill in between the lines. One could play the float in those days and charging something wasn’t putting it on a card, so she was able by crook to keep us with a roof over our heads.

She wasn’t the right-wing notion of a lazy welfare cheat—we never got public assistance and she basically worked herself to death 13 days out of 14 and on call the 14^th—just a woman in desperate straits who didn’t know where to turn.

The three of us kids were alone in the house we were renting in a new town when she didn’t come home. She had blacked out at her job and been rushed to the nearest big city for surgery. It took three days for someone to wonder about what was happening to us, and we didn’t think to cause trouble by raising an alarm. A minister’s family took me in. Relatives came to get my brother and sister.

The closest I came after that was when I left the apartment where I lived with my father the year I graduated from high school. I’d gotten a menial job running calculations at an insurance company—stuff all done by computers now—and packed a bag and found a room for rent for what amounted to about 1/6^th of my paycheck. The minimum wage at the time was around $1.15 or $1.25. I can’t imagine doing it today when the minimum wage has lagged inflation significantly. That room might be half of my pay now, if I could find one at all.

The roofs in my life progressed from apartments with roommates, then ones with lovers, then ones with a spouse—usually quite small—to a rented house, then our first one with a mortgage after a brief sojourn in a commune. That first house was tiny and very old with minimal amenities that we worked on slowly. It was what we could afford on two state government salaries. One more stop in a rental house during a year as a lecturer at the local U, then we bought something fairly decent; which I gave to her when we split. And I started the progression again. But I was never without shelter. Broke, hungry, not sure where the next meal was coming from, but I always had a roof.

A couple of things from the first paragraph.

“Real Change” is a newspaper. It got started in Seattle in the mid 90s. The idea was that people who were homeless good get copies from the distribution center and sell them on street corners, getting to keep $1.40 of the $2 price: “a hand up, not a handout.” It’s grown quite successfully in these harder economic times and it is estimated to have put $1 million directly into the pockets of the poor. Its expansion to the “eastside,” Bellevue, Seattle’s “tony” burb, is significant because we pretty much think that Bellevue folk think homelessness is a Seattle problem.

YouthCare is a nonprofit organization that has undertaken what I think of as a Herculean task: helping homeless youth, aka “street kids.” They provide drop in facilities, emergency housing, counseling, career help, transitional housing for youth who are about to be able to provide for themselves but need a bit of help, and a host of other care and services for kids on the street. I’ll admit to bias here. I’ve done some work for YouthCare under the aegis of 501Commons, the successor to the Executive Service Corps, and was very impressed at the challenge they have accepted. It made me think about how close I came to needing something like that.

So I’m thankful that despite feeling about one paycheck from disaster at different times in my life, that I have never (yet, knock on wood) been homeless. And it would be so much harder today despite the existence of so-called safety nets and private sources of help.

Imagine for just a moment. You are able to find work for $9.50 an hour, but only part-time, so you end up getting about $220 a week. The old rule of thumb used to be that your housing should cost about ¼ of your budget. Probably pretty tough to find housing for one week’s pay, possible, but not easy: say one room in a place with 3 or 4 others, but more likely you pay more like $350 or $400. You need to use the bus to get around because you aren’t buying a car (think about the cost of insuring it, and fueling it, not to mention parking it) so that’s at least $20-30 a week, let’s say $100 a month.

You need to eat. You can get one meal a day out of your job, but unless you’re on a Top Ramen diet it’s going to cost you at least $5-7 a day and probably more like $10. Let’s make that $250 a month. Alternatively you could stand in lines to make use of food pantries. You probably can get some assistance like food stamps if the yahoos haven’t wiped out the program. We haven’t even talked about keeping your ratty clothes clean or the other routine expenses of daily life, and you are basically one mugging or layoff from the street. And the layoff can happen if the bus breaks down and you are late for your shift.

These are the people living in the hammock of indolence imagined by the ?Christian? right. Always on the edge of crisis, holding things together by dint of will and the blessing of whatever gods there are; and guaranteed to have things fail or break down or disappear, or to be preyed on by someone equally desperate with less of a conscience.

I’m going to be sending something to YouthCare this year, but there are other places—“Wellspring” that very successfully works to keep people from becoming homeless, “Treehouse” that helps foster kids, “Solid Ground” that supports the food distribution network—pick one. Pick one where you are. Give it as nice a gift as you can manage. As Phil Ochs wrote: “There But for Fortune….”