Works of Lars Eighner at Lars Eighner's Homepage

I am here because I was homeless for three years and because I wrote a book about that. Fortunately, I am a very good writer and the book has received positive critical and commercial acceptance.

Unfortunately, I am only a writer, so I will read many of my remarks. Although I considered myself a writer before I became homeless, and indeed two of my books had then been published, I did not become homeless to have something to write about. I say this because, as I learned from being reviewed by professors of comparative literature, many other writers who have written about being down and out were counterfeit hobos.

Strange, every year lots of young people leave their hometowns and go to Hollywood to pursue a career in acting. Some of them become homeless. And if by chance they do get an acting job after that, no one ever asks them whether they became homeless in order to have something to act about.

I ought to say that before I became homeless I spent five years with an alternative social service agency beginning at the grand salary of $55 per month. Towards the last I made more like $55 per week. We donated our time as an in-kind match for funds from various sources. With that agency I did walk-in and telephone crisis counseling and referral. Later I worked for many years at the state asylum in Austin, Texas, much of that time at the admissions desk where I did a lot of referral work and admitted the patients that were dumped on us by a variety of other agencies and institutions.

In all I spent about twelve years dealing with clients from the street and doing what I could for them and this was before anyone had ever heard of "homelessness" or "the homeless." Then they were called "transients" or "vagrants."

I hope as I progress in my remarks that you will bear in mind that I have experienced both sides of it.

As for the years I spent as a homeless person, I spent all of my time in the Southwest, in Los Angeles and Austin and places in between. So I have no experience in trying to survive on the streets where the weather is frequently life-threatening. My experiences are what academics would call anecdotal.

But I have had the opportunity of reviewing Joel Blau's book The Visible Poor which is a good academic treatment of the subject of homelessness. Of course, the only alternative to an anecdotal treatment of homelessness is a statistical one. And the statistics concerning homelessness are in sorry shape. Scholars have seriously proposed figures in the hundreds of thousands for the total homeless population of the entire country. Such figures are absurd and short of the mark by at least a factor of ten. I have heard gross over-estimates of the proportion of the homeless who are in families—most such figures are wrong by at least a factor of two.

The truth of homelessness, of course, is neither the particulars of my experiences nor the generalities of an academic study.

The tentative title I gave for this talk was Against Paternalism, and I will speak against paternalism. However, as I know that many of you who can hear me are employed in the Poverty Industry, I would like to make my remarks as non-threatening as I can. For this reason I want to discuss things on a hypothetical plane.

Hypothetically I want to propose to you a very revolutionary theory. My theory is that the principal problem of poverty is that poor people lack material resources, or in short, that the poor do not have enough money.

Now, if this proposition seems not very remarkable or revolutionary to you, you probably are not employed in the so-called helping professions, or else you have not been doing your homework. The truth is that our whole system of trying to aid the poor is based on the theory that the poor have some problem other than a lack of money.

When our nation was young, the religious teachings of John Calvin were used to claim that the poor were poor because they were sinful. Although few people still put it in quite these terms, this explanation of poverty is still widely adhered to. And its direct implication is that it was useless to try to help the poor until you saved their souls, for whatever you did, the poor would return to their poverty unless they learned to sin no more.

Of course Calvinists believed the souls that would be saved were predetermined, so it was pointless even to try to save the souls of the poor.

In the Sixties a more modern statement of this philosophy was entered by Daniel Moynihan and others. In modern terms, it is not a matter of sin or blame. But the poor have a culture of poverty, so said the social scientists, and it is useless to try to do them good on the material level until you have replaced that culture of poverty with something else.

The idea that the main problem of the poor is a lack of wealth is a very revolutionary one and many vested interests are against it. If my hypothetical proposition were true, then you actually could do the poor more good by giving them a loaf of bread than by hiring a social worker to hold their hands—and that is unthinkable to a worker in the poverty industry. This is of course why this revolutionary proposition is rejected by the experts on poverty, who happen to be social workers and administrators of social service agencies, and instructors of social workers, and so forth.

Now the corollary to my profoundly disturbing new proposition about the poor in general is this: the principal problem of the homeless is a lack of homes.

This flies in the face of the well entrenched myth that the principal problems of the homeless are drugs including alcohol, mental illness, and a preference for the homeless life. All the experts will assure you that homelessness cannot be solved by finding homes for the homeless. That won't work, you have to do something else.

The experts from the mental health system, having exercised their expertise in the matter of deinstitutionalization will assure you that the homeless are mentally ill and need mental health services. And they know what they are talking about at least in some cases, because they are the people who dumped the mentally ill onto the streets.

The people who run drug treatment programs will assure you that drugs or alcohol are the principal problems of the homeless. They run drug treatment centers, and sure enough, the homeless who apply to them most often seem to have some substance abuse problem. It helps to maintain this view, of course, if recycle your clients, and indeed many of these programs have recidivism rates running into the high 90 per cents and it might be 100 per cent if they did not lose track of some of their clients.

Now a couple of weeks ago, Jim Scheibel of VISTA came to Austin and invited me to sit in as he briefed people from Texas agencies on the President's wonderful new program for the homeless. The wonderful new program, of course, is simply more of the same stuff that hasn't worked before. And you know what the agency people wanted to know, of course. The first question in their minds was How many more positions can I fund. Not a one of them wondered how many people they might get off the street with the new money from Washington.

Now the twist to the President's program is that there will be more local control. Evidently local governments can use the money to fill potholes if they wish—that will improve the streets, the streets are where the homeless live. Sure that's a program for the homeless.

A woman from one of the agencies speculated that she might write a grant to get more daycare with the money. She works with daycare. So in spite of the reality which is that the homeless are overwhelming single men, her idea of a homeless program is more daycare. Another woman, who worked for another agency envisioned a grander infant-feeding program. That was her idea of a program for the homeless, but you can bet she did not think of handing out baby food to people on the street, and the idea of giving parents the money to buy baby food was of course the furthest thing from her mind.

The emphasis is always on programs for families, even though it is admitted that people in families cannot account for more than one-third of the homeless. That is of course always the same. The President's program includes raises in the earned income credit, which of course can only be claimed by those with the exalted status of head-of-household. Two-thirds of the homeless are automatically exclude from this benefit, yet it is a part of the President's homeless package. Since cigarette smoking is now banned in the White House, one can only guess what they are smoking in the Oval Office.

One of the years I was homeless, living out of Dumpsters and sleeping in public parks, I actually owed, and I have paid, more than $250 in federal taxes. If I had produced children I could not support, the government would have owed me money. It is fundamentally dishonest—it is a lie—if you say you plan to help the homeless when your program will exclude single men from any benefit. You don't want to help the homeless, you merely want to help yourself to a nice, cushy grant.

The homeless are primarily single people, mostly men. In a way this good news, because the investment society would have to make to get these people off the streets and on to the tax rolls is small, compared to what would be required if the whole population of homeless were people in families. Yet programs continue to be designed for the most hopeless cases.

I know of one woman who is homeless because she is a schizophrenic who refuses to take her medication. She receives enough SSI to obtain a small efficiency apartment, but when she gets her money, she literally throws it away—I mean she does throw it on the ground and she walks away. Through the years I have watched as hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money have been squandered on her. That same money might have removed scores of other people from the street and situated them productively. But there is a program you see, designed to squander money on schizophrenics who will not comply with their medication. There is no program for a single man who merely has come to a bad situation. There is no program for the unlucky.

Thus, it is safe to say that if the solution to homelessness is finding homes for the poor, it is a solution that does not often occur to anyone who draws a salary from the public treasury on the theory that he or she helps the homeless. Yes, indeed, homelessness is a rich new vein for the Poverty Industry, and it is not in the material interest of people who work in the Poverty Industry to find a solution to homelessness too quickly. Or so one might think, just speaking hypothetically.

My bizarre and hypothetical theory is that the principal problem of the homeless is lack of homes.

Notice I said homes, not shelter or houses. It is no wonder that social scientists have such a skewed vision of the homeless or that their statistics are so obviously out of whack. They look for homeless people to study at the shelters for the homeless. And of course, the shelters are such that any homeless person who is able, will avoid them. Many would rather die than go to the shelters, and indeed some have.

Nothing would improve the state of social services so much as making a requirement of the MSW degree that the candidate spend a night in a shelter, disguised as a homeless person. Oh some of you employed in the poverty industry will suppose it is not as bad as all that. I invite you to try it.

Now of course I would never have proposed my hypothetical theory that the principal problem of the homeless is lack of homes, if I did not have an equally hypothetical solution. It is really a very modest proposal. I propose, hypothetically, that the entire social services system, every program at every level of government be entirely liquidated, and that the same money no more and no less, be used to create a negative income tax, a negative income tax that even single people qualify for. Means testing would be done by the Internal Revenue Service, along the same lines used to enforce positive tax payments.

Let the homeless, and indeed, all of the poor, choose their benefits in the market place. If those of you in the poverty industry really do provide valuable services, then surely clients will be willing to pay for them. Go into private practice, hang out a shingle, see whether the poor will use their money to purchase your services or whether they will use it to pay rent.

Given the resources, would the homeless employ social workers or carpenters? What do you think? I think if this hypothetical and impossible program were ever adopted, those of you in the poverty industry would be well advised to learn to drive a nail. I am sick of hearing of workers in the Poverty Industry who claim they could make much more money in the private sector. I say, prove it.

Yes, yes, I know. This program is a political impossibility, just as the only rational solution to the drug problem is politically impossible.

Frankly, I do not know of anything else that will work. Clearly the President's program will not serve the needs of the homeless, but then maybe it never was meant to serve the needs of the homeless. It certainly will help administrators and bureaucrats and social workers and case managers and maybe that is all it was ever intended to do.

If there is no solution in the public sector, perhaps there could be one in private charities. Few charities today deliver as much as a dime of material assistance to the poor for each dollar donated to them. Private charities employ administrators and bureaucrats and social workers and case managers. But I suppose one day there could be a charity that existed to make direct cash grants to the poor, a charity with virtually no paid staff. I know of one AIDS agency that comes close to this ideal. I don't think that would be illegal or impossible, although I would guess that the entrenched Poverty Industry would try to prevent such a charity from gaining tax-exempt status.

So my solutions are, I guess, on the one hand impossible and on the other highly unlikely. But you will recall I said the theme of my remarks was to be "Against Paternalism."

Against paternalism my point is this. If it were the client's money, would he or she pay you to do what you do? Or would there be some more useful thing to do with the money.

Is what you do really more valuable to the homeless than laying a square of shingles? Do you really think the homeless can't tell the difference between receiving material help and auditioning the same old song and dance.

If, for example, you are writing the rules for an emergency shelter and you decide that people should come in to register during the day to receive a bed for the night, will you realize that you are automatically excluding from your shelter everyone who is actively looking for work or otherwise attempting to improve his or her situation by his or her own efforts. Don't be surprised then if you get only winos, junkies, crazies, and malingerers.

Unfortunately, I fear the ones of you who are able to appreciate my point are the ones who least need to hear it. To the rest of you I say: The principal difference between you and your homeless client is that you have got your hands into the public purse. If you wish to think of yourself as superior to your client, let us see you do more good with the money than your client would.

Thank you.