How many soldiers recognize their places in accounts of battles
in which they participated? Has there ever been an ethnography so
good that it might be taken as anything but a joke within the
society it described? How remarkable would it be for a person who
has experienced the reality of homelessness to find much of merit
or anything instructive in an academic account of the subject of
homelessness?
Very remarkable indeed, I think.
A homeless life, like all lives, is irreducibly anecdotal. But
anecdotes make poor history and no science. The social sciences are
derived of social facts, and social facts belong to a realm in
which people can have 2.3 children. Social facts are, in a word,
statistical. Not only are the perspectives of the social scientist
and his homeless subject disparate, but also the kinds of
knowledge—and false belief—that they possess are
fundamentally different. A statistic and an anecdote may agree or
disagree, but they can neither confirm nor contradict each
other.
That being said, Joel Blau has produced a map of homelessness
that coincides well with the ground so far as I have walked it.
Although I have written in these pages ("Travels with Lizbeth,"
Winter 1991) that I thought my experience of homelessness was
atypical, I learn from Blau's book that many aspects of my
situation were really rather ordinary.
I became homeless in early 1988. Merriam-Webster's Ninth
New Collegiate Dictionary, first issued in 1983 has an entry
for "homeless," but not for "homelessness," or "Dumpster," and
"homeless" was not yet a collective noun. Surely these will be
among the new entries in the next edition. Estimates of the numbers
of homeless people vary so widely that it is difficult to believe
the authorities Blau cites are dealing with the same
phenomenon—and indeed they are not in many cases, for their
definitions of homelessness are as various as their statistics.
There is agreement, however, that the numbers of homeless increased
sharply in the 1980s; it was not just a matter of a new perception
of an old problem. There really were more people on the streets,
many more.
Nor was the word "homeless" merely a nicer name for people, or
kinds of people, who have always been on the street. Although I
traveled after one prospect or another, almost all of the time I
was actually on the streets was spent in the city where I became
homeless. "Hobo," "tramp," "vagrant," and "transient," are
inappropriate because a large majority of the homeless are not
migrant, but have resided in the city where they are found for a
year or two or more. This is the way of homelessness in the
Eighties. The bindle stiffs belong to the turn of the century, and
the railroad tramps, to The Grapes of Wrath.
Blau's title summarizes his analysis of homelessness in the
1980s. The homeless were, and are, merely the poor become visible
because they have been dispossessed by the economic policies of the
Reagan and Bush administrations.
When I first heard of liberals saying the homeless ought not to
be blamed for homelessness, I assumed this was the same old liberal
line that exculpates a serial killer because something went wrong
in his toilet training. I do not think much liberal thinking got
past this level, for not many people would want to realize how
precarious their own situations are.
Liberals, in the matter of blaming poverty on the poor, have
much themselves to answer for. We have from the War on Poverty of
the Johnson administration such concepts as "the cycle of poverty,"
and "the culture of poverty," and a great deal of writing by Daniel
Moynihan, all of which suggests that poverty is caused by something
other than lack of wealth. Liberals of that period—having
barely regrouped after McCarthyism—could not admit to the
existence of economic classes and could not examine the
distribution of wealth too closely. The psychology of poverty had
to be treated, because no one dared to admit to recognizing the
material basis of poverty.
In particular, I blamed my own homelessness on myself. My income
was much reduced by the time I became homeless, and as anyone in
such in such a situation might, I could see hundreds of things I
might have done differently. Yet I had lived on a small income
before and had not become homeless. What was different in 1988 was
that much of the most affordable housing in my city had been
replaced by condos. And so it was elsewhere, just as more people
held lower paying jobs, the proportion of affordable housing was
decreasing.
The wonder is that anyone wondered who was to blame. Everyone
heard David Stockman's extraordinary admission that the object of
Reaganomics was to concentrate capital in the hands of the
rich—to soak the poor. If few people perceived the subtle
go-slow policy of the National Labor Relations Board in disposing
of complaints, Reagan broke the back of the air traffic controllers
union in a very obvious and public way. If PATCO with its highly
skilled and well educated members was dealt with thus, did anyone
think industrial unions were faring much better? We knew that the
budgets of social welfare systems were being slashed and slashed
again—if ketchup were to be called a vegetable, what did we
think was going on in the rest of the system?
If Reaganomics was not at its heart a flimflam, it was at least
fifty years behind the times. The rationale of trickle-down
economics is not altogether ludicrous in an expanding, industrial
economy. But in a shrinking, increasingly service-based economy,
the money that the rich gain must come of depriving the poor.
Anyone who points this out is accused of raising the spectre of
class warfare, but who after all has fired the first the first
shot?
According to Blau, once the Reagan administration was set on a
course that would ensure that many working people could not afford
housing, social welfare programs had to be reduced according to a
principle called "less eligibility." The principle of less
eligibility is that persons who subsist on social welfare should be
less eligible for social benefits than workers with the least
wages. If any worker cannot afford housing, then the social welfare
system must not provide housing for people who do not work.
Evidently, less eligibility is as old an idea as social welfare
itself, for it has always been assumed that people would prefer to
be idle if they could live as well from welfare as they could from
work.
Blau establishes that less eligibility exists and has a
considerable history, but he is less convincing that the Reagan
administration considered this principle or any principle other
than general meanness in eviscerating the social welfare
programs.
Homelessness is the subject of many myths. Many of the myths
stand in the way of solutions. It is a myth that alcohol is the
root problem of many homeless men. Yet so long as that myth
persists, liberals can keep their purses shut and their consciences
clear. Mental illness, idleness, post-Vietnam stress syndrome: myth
upon myth. In exploding so many myths—with a lucidity not
common in the writings of social scientists—Blau's book is
bound to contribute to a better understanding the problem of
homelessness. That in itself is a step toward a solution.
Blau claims the outlines of a solution must be obvious once it
is understood that homelessness is hardly anything more or less
than poverty in the ultimate. I wonder whether a solution is so
obvious. Blau proposes a negative income tax—or guaranteed
minimum income—with adjustments in earned income credits to
preserve the principle of less eligibility. He is not very
convincing in suggesting how a constituency for this solution might
be composed. But the principal flaw in his plan, it seems to me, is
that Americans simply will not give money to the poor. Vouchers,
yes. Food stamps, yes. Coupons of any description or surplus
commodities, yes. Cash, no.
In theory there should be many advantages to making direct cash
grants to the poor through the Internal Revenue Service. We could
eliminate much of the bureaucracy of means testing and fraud
investigation in the social welfare system, for the IRS has a
fairly effective system for verifying the reports it receives. If
the poor were given cash they might choose their benefits in the
free marketplace—yet, those most likely to object to giving
cash to the poor are the very people who profess to think that
people make rational choices in a free market. At present a
considerable amount of public money for the benefit of the poor is
given by governments to religious institutions: missions, shelters,
and so forth. If that money were granted directly to the poor, then
the poor would not have to choose between conscience and shelter on
a cold night. Very possibly, much of what is now spent on the poor
is spent for things the poor neither want nor need. If the poor had
the cash in their hands would they not buy bread instead of hiring
social workers to hold their hands?
This last, of course, is the flaw in any such plan. Poverty is
an industry. The social workers and administrators who work in that
industry are always the people who are consulted when legislators
want to know what should be done for the poor. How likely are they
to recommend the elimination of their own jobs? Blau suggests that
to establish a minimum base income equal to the poverty line would
cost about twice what is now spent on social programs. It is merely
farfetched that such an amount might be allocated. It is impossible
that the social welfare system will give up paternalism.
