Works of Lars Eighner at Lars Eighner's Homepage

I am here today because I was homeless for more than three years with my dog Lizbeth. I wrote a book about that experience which has become a critical and commercial success.

I am rather astonished to be here today, not only because the recent change in my circumstances is rather unlikely, but also because I am not sure I know anything about design, aside from the design of shelters using found materials, and because not many of my experiences are especially pertinent to homelessness in a great city like New York and its great climate of which you have lately had plenty.

I will try to keep my remarks brief because I would like tell you, so far as I can, what you most want to know, which I think can best be accomplished by taking as many of your questions as possible.

Lizbeth and I became homeless in the winter of 1988 in Austin, Texas. We traveled to Southern California and returned twice in the next two years, but by the time Austin had its record low temperature of 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter of 1990, we had established ourselves in an abandoned building. The whole time we were homeless, I do not believe we saw a snowflake.

(I should say, because I am always asked, that Lizbeth is in comfort right now with my companion whom she loves dearly, at our home in Austin, Texas, and her ninth birthday will be observed tomorrow.)

We returned to Austin after our excursions to California because I could provide for our survival there from the great, rich garbage of the student residential areas in the vicinity of the University of Texas. This is a survival strategy that is less practical where there is a large number of competitors, yet even in the central areas of large cities shopping-bag and grocery-cart people do find the things that fill their shopping bags and grocery carts.

In short, my experiences with homelessness are what social scientists would call anecdotal.

On the other hand I have lately had the opportunity to review some of the literature of the social scientists, including The Visible Poor by Joel Blau of S.U.N.Y. Stonybrook, which is as good an academic treatment of the subject of homelessness as you may find.

If my view was anecdotal, the social scientists' view is statistical.

Unfortunately, the statistics of homelessness are wholly unreliable. I assume you know that the 1990 census of the homeless was an utter fraud. My anecdotal experience with that census was that although my companion and myself were relatively settled in an abandoned building, we could not get counted even though I went so far as to write the Secretary of Commerce about the matter.

Many studies by social scientists estimate the numbers of homeless to be in the hundreds of thousands for the whole country, and these figures must be wrong by at least a factor of 10. Moreover, the recent trend is to grossly overestimate the numbers of homeless who are in families. It is of course much easier for social scientists to arouse sympathy and to create new programs for the homeless in families, but even in their wildest overestimates social scientists must still admit that the homeless are overwhelmingly single people, mostly men.

Most surveys to determine the numbers of the homeless begin with an axe to grind, but even those which seem to try to be honest adopt methodologies which are certain to undercount the numbers of the homeless and to over represent the homeless who are in families, who are substance dependent, mentally ill, or otherwise less able.

A common method is to count the homeless applying for shelter. Yet in most places, the shelters are so wretched that many of the homeless would rather die than go to the shelter, and some of the homeless have in fact died rather than go the shelters.

I am sure you recall the news stories this winter of the homeless in this city refusing to go to shelter. From this, you may gather some idea of how horrible the shelters are, and you can see that in places where the climate is less severe, virtually no able homeless person ever goes to the shelters. Naturally if you study the population that goes to the shelters, you will find the most dependent and the most vicious elements of the homeless population, for not only the weak go to the shelters, but also those who prey upon the weak.

I will give you just one example of why this is so, from which you can extrapolate some of the variations. Some shelters require that a person come in early in the day to register for a bed for that night.

No one who is activity seeking work or otherwise engaged in a productive, or a potentially productive pursuit can take the time in the middle of the day to travel to shelter to wait on line to register. The people who can register for a bed will be the substance dependent, the wino, the mentally or physically disabled, those encumbered with family, and malingerers and idlers.

And if you ask a shelter worker who the homeless are, he or she will give you an answer based upon his or her experience with the kind of applicant the shelter gets. Moreover, these will be the most hopeless cases. And this is very much the same population you will perceive on the subways and the sidewalks.

I am often asked whether there are among the homeless many people who might write a book such as I have written. And of course the answer is no. There are not many writers in the population as a whole. But there are many able carpenters, machinists, gardeners, and others. Not many of these are among the homeless who will annoy you on the subway, and that is why you do not know they exist, or if you know they do exist, you will not think of them when the subject of homelessness comes up.

It is a myth that most of the homeless are substance dependent, mentally ill, or homeless by preference, but such people are over represented in the parts of the homeless population that are most obvious and most easily found, and for that reason the myth may be perpetuated by some investigators who are well-meaning and honest. Of course the myth is also perpetuated by those who are not so well-meaning or honest. Studies which have attempted to make the comparison have found that in regard to substance abuse and mental illness, the homeless do not differ significantly from the housed population of the same area.

Twenty years ago no one had heard of the homeless or homelessness. Then we had vagrants, transients, tramps, hobos, and bums. We had also hippies and street people who had no particular address but I think we all understood then that knocking around the country for a few years while you are young is not the same thing as really being poor.

I want to suggest to you that homelessness is not merely a new name for an old problem, and that the homeless are not the same people who were once known as tramps and hobos. The reality is that, insofar as the studies can be believed at all, most of the homeless are found in the city in which they become homeless or in a place they have resided for more than a year.

The old words: transient, vagrant, tramp and some of the others, because they imply a migratory life, are inappropriate. My own observations are that those who do travel, do so within a fairly fixed orbit as in the case of Austin's snowbirds who are those who have fled the winter of the Mid-Western cities, but who will return whence they came in the spring or those, as in my own case, who leave their home area from time to time seeking employment, but who return when their prospects are exhausted.

Even the most conservative figures show that sometime in the Eighties the numbers of homeless increased dramatically. Moreover, the new people on the streets were of kinds who had never been homeless before.

It is too facile to blame all of this on the economic policies which dominated the nation for the twelve years that began in 1981. Those policies surely did increase the suffering of the poor and certainly did make things harder for those who became homeless. But I do not believe any policy could have made any significant decrease in the number of persons who became homeless. The American economy is undergoing a basic structural change, and the implications of this change are that there will continue to be large numbers of homeless people for many years to come.

To give a concrete example of what this change means, I wish to call your attention to the squeegee workers. The new mayor of this great city has suggested that squeegee workers find jobs washing dishes in restaurants. Now, let me ask you. Do you think you could find a decent room in New York on a dishwasher's wages?

I'm from out of town, but I could not. And this is the crux of the problem. There are fewer jobs for shoe makers and more jobs for dishwashers. But on a dishwasher's wages, a person cannot afford decent housing. And this sort of shift has occurred up and down on the economic scale, so that those who could once afford better housing, now compete with the poorest of the poor for the shabbiest of affordable housing. Adults compete with teenagers for fastfood jobs and other jobs which never have paid enough for a person to support him- or herself independently. Those who lose out in this great scramble are living on the sidewalks and will continue to do so for many years to come.

And for now, everyone must come down to the sidewalks at one time or another. Perhaps one day we will have a city in which those of elevated economic status never have to touch the ground they will move from high-rise to high-rise on elevated moving sidewalks and sky rails, and they will abandon the sidewalks, the streets, and the subways to the miserable, the hopeless, and the desperate. The ground level of the city will be a desert, a wasteland, and a battlefield. And indeed, we certainly seem to be moving in that direction. You need not look far in this city to find sidewalks hard against sheer cliffs. On top of the cliffs are vast, barren plazas, empty uninviting, forbidding expanses with sickly trees in artificial planters, and where soil has been brought up, the ground cover has been chosen carefully to be as little like grass as possible.

You will be asked, of course, to do more of this. While there will be, from time to time, a few pennies allocated to aid the homeless, there will always be millions available to landscape the poor out of sight, out of the way, and out of existence.

But the homeless are not an alien race. What the homeless need, what the homeless find attractive and comfortable, is no different than what appeals to the housed. Or at least so it seemed once.

I do wonder whether the rich, the housed, the materially advantaged, are not conditioning themselves to an aesthetic of sterility. I find it hard to believe, but it certainly seems that the well-to-do are becoming accustomed to imprisoning themselves in steel and glass, and that they are developing a taste for the architecture of discomfort, and that the picture of luxury today is full of harsh, sharp-edged things. But let's not get too far afield in this flight of fancy.

Let's come back to earth and talk of something mundane. Let's talk about public toilets. In many places in the country there simply are no truly public toilets. I would like to suggest to you that so long as there are homeless, who are living beings, there will be a biological necessity at work. Whether society chooses to meet that necessity with the provision of public toilets or not, the biological necessity will operate.

Municipal governments have long recognized that the provision of public toilets is not so much a matter of catering to comfort of the homeless, as it is a matter of the public health. Yet in the past, governments have foisted the responsibility onto private enterprises. Health codes have required restaurants and other enterprises to provide rest rooms, and having made these requirements, governments have considered the matter dealt with. Governments have contented themselves with providing the occasional little shed in remote areas of parks and rest areas on highways.

In truth, of course, the rest rooms in restaurants and other enterprises are not truly public. The result is easily measured scientifically in any urban area through which a river runs. Simply take a water sample upstream from the city and a sample from downstream and compare the counts of human fecal bacteria in the samples. The difference in the numbers will alarm anyone who is not used to such things. And because these bacteria are species specific, pets cannot account for the difference.

There is not, of course, some great way to design away the problems of homelessness. But here is one thing that can be done. If merchants and businesses want to keep the homeless out, and if they do not want that school of architecture called "the turd in the plaza" to assume a literal significance, the solution is really rather simple: make the rest rooms assessable from the streets.

Where rest rooms are provided, it can add but a little more to the expense to provide a simple cold-water shower, I mean hardly more than a shower head and a drain. True enough, this involves a serious danger of making life more comfortable for the homeless, but one of the reasons public rest rooms get trashed is that people attempt to bathe in the lavatories, and they will do so, so long as there is no alternative, and so long as they maintain any self-respect or any desire to better their situations by attempting to make themselves presentable.

Of course, no one wants to be the first to install such facilities for fear of creating a magnet that will attract the homeless. Almost all of the homeless will want to use public toilets where they are relatively available. And of course the homeless who do want to clean themselves up, do not want to make a mess of the place they use to clean themselves up if they can avoid doing so. They will use better facilities where better facilities are available. And so the fear of attracting the homeless is to some extent justified.

This fear might be somewhat mitigated if municipalities were to provide adequate facilities themselves or were to introduces changes in codes that would require facilities to be constructed to new standards.

Does this seem unrealistic. Yes, I am afraid it does. Yet this is one small point at which the needs of the homeless and the requirements of the public health coincide. If nothing can be done here, then it will surely be impossible to make progress in the problems of the homeless where the public interest in finding a solution is less clear.

I should say that help is not on the way.

A couple of weeks ago, Jim Schiebel 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. 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 day care with the money. She works with day care. So in spite of the reality which is that the homeless are overwhelming single persons, her idea of a homeless program is more day care. 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.

Of course it is easier politically to promote programs for hungry infants or people with small children, than it is to sell programs for the single people who are most of the homeless. And this is shame, for of course single people can be got off the streets and onto the tax rolls with far less money than is required to situate whole families productively. And even if we restrict the discussion to single people, I wonder about the wisdom of developing programs for only 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.

I do not mean that nothing should be done for the mentally ill. I simply suggest that while resources are limited, perhaps it would be a good idea to allocate some of those resources for the aid of those who do not need much aid, for those who are most motivated and able to make productive use of the aid they receive.

Today I am off the streets. My income this year will be such that federal taxes are likely to absorb 51% of it. But I would not be here today if my companion had not been fit to serve as normal subject in a drug study, and if he had not worked as, yes, a dishwasher in the much more affordable housing market of Austin, Texas for several months, and if I had not had the good fortune to find a computer in a Dumpster, and if I had not just happened to have the skills to make the computer functional, and if I had not had the language skills to use the computer to fashion at least a passable manuscript with the computer.

There are many advocates of the hopeless and the helpless among the homeless. I merely want to put in a word here for the potentially productive people on the street, who could return to society many times the investment required to get them off the streets.