When We Walk By

(2/5)
——

When I was in high school, we lived in a little * apartment in rural Illinois. It was across the street, a short walk from the factory where my mom (and several relatives) worked. We were on the South side of the tracks - a small open field separated us from them. Trains no longer run through this track and haven't for years, as far as I know. I used to walk over to the high school, only about a mile away, but rarely with sidewalks available.

My mom was a single parent after the separation. I remember her working various jobs—mostly waitressing and factory work, often two at a time. I remember walking home from school one day and seeing a pink paper on our front door. I don't know the specifics of that one, but I've seen enough in the years since to know it was a 5-day notice or some equivalent. This would have been 2010 or so. It might seem hard to believe that someone working two (sometimes three jobs, one under the table because of what this book calls the “cliff effect”) couldn't afford the rent on an apartment. Yet, I'm here to tell you that was reality for my family then.

That's as close as I ever got to homelessness. What intervened in my life then wasn't an assistance program—it was one of my high school teachers who found out about this and paid three months of our rent anonymously. I thought about this a lot years later when I ran a rent assistance program, where people would sit across from a desk and tell me their story, and I would have to be the one to decide if we could pay 3 to 6 months of their rent, and sometimes advocate their case to my manager. That memory isn't what drew me to work with people experiencing homelessness and the policies that impact them, but it was on my mind a lot as I read Adler & Burnes's book.

I've been working in roles serving people experiencing homelessness since 2016, more or less, now working in a policy job rather than direct service. For this reason, I kept having to calibrate what I was looking for from this book. I didn't go in expecting something like “Homelessness is a Housing Problem” or “Poverty, by America” — I went in expecting a work exploring the deep moral injury(1) that occurs when we—the richest nation in the history of the world—walk by our fellows in calloused squalor, begging for subsistence. How do we function, the feelings of uncomfortability, the confusion, the knowledge that this should not be possible, with the evidence of it before our eyes and our frequent decision to do nothing but stare steely-eyed ahead?

That is not precisely what this book is. Adler and Burnes spend time discussing relational poverty—a kind of poverty in social networks and social capital—and how this weaves around the experience of being homeless and the systems that fail and struggle to serve those experiencing homelessness. Essentially, it is a primer on contemporary homelessness and graspable interventions to which the individual can contribute.

This works well as a relatively shallow introduction. It gives the lay of the land and enough information for informed conversations with their peers. That's a tremendous value.

It has a few problems. Some of these have to do with writing mechanics, and I'll save those (maybe snobbish) thoughts for last.

While reading the introduction, I started to feel a little uncomfortable. Without getting technical, I got the willies. Andrew Yang adorns the book's cover with a blurb at the top. Yang's political candidacies have been a little odd, but his thoughts on UBI are at least (as far as I know) coherent. Yet, I tend to be suspicious of venture capitalists, especially when the very rich come into communities trying to serve the very poor. I dismissed this, and then, in the introduction, we began to hear a lot about Adler's work with Miracle Messages, and I got those willies again. Adler's intro seemed to suggest some kind of white savior complex to me, or maybe a variation of, “We're venture capitalists/start-up bros, and we're here to help.” This did not ultimately seem to be accurate as I continued to read, but it made me defensive going in.

A contributor to this may be the concept of Miracle Messages, which seems to take more or less untrained volunteers and pair them with people experiencing homelessness in a buddy system for phone check-ins. I wonder about the support given to the volunteers, how these relationships form and sustain, and if they're healthy. Perhaps that is cynicism—volunteers encroaching on social work territory, and my reaction is some ingrained thing. It's a gut reaction, that's all. Perhaps it's a manifestation of my allergy to all things vaguely religious and the name “miracle.” Loneliness is an epidemic, and Adler and Burnes's case for relational poverty is sound. I think the idea of a buddy phone program is interesting. Sometimes, it felt like a commercial for the program. Maybe that's not a bad thing?

Similarly, in the last chapter, a few paragraphs detail what readers can do to invest themselves in ending homelessness. The authors dedicate a whole page to listing start-up/non-profit-ish social entrepreneurship things, some of which crowdfund money for people experiencing homelessness. I find this dystopian. This shouldn't be necessary; this should be a tax-funded initiative, and we shouldn't have to rely on crowdfunding to satisfy the basic needs of the people in this country. Well, shoulda, woulda, coulda. Various levels of government presently fail to widely program basic income, direct cash assistance, affordable medical care, affordable tuition, affordable housing, etc. So, in the meantime, I guess social entrepreneurship is where it's at.

There is a recurring theme in the book on paternalism (a whole chapter and more). Yet, the book does not well address the realities of paternalism (progressive or punitive), with concepts like involuntary psychiatric holds. The book explores (BRIEFLY) the idea of forced hospitalization and does not dwell on how to square this with its previous writing on paternalism. The ethics of involuntary hospitalization of people experiencing homelessness is topical and rich for exploration. Yet, the book gives it only one paragraph (not even in the original chapter on paternalism or mental health). This is about as far as the book goes: “Furthermore, since involuntary treatment can easily be misused, it is critical that health care professionals determine that the individual is in desperate need of hospitalization before they are committed” (p. 197). I was disappointed that the book did not think more about this difficulty.

The authors routinely put “the homeless” in quotations and frequently discuss that they feel this moniker will be as gross (in time) as people referring to LGBTQ+ people as “the homosexuals.” They make this point at least three times in the book, but only the last time did I understand what they were saying. In the first instance, “the homeless” is quickly grouped with “people experiencing homelessness” and “the unhoused” in the argument, and I thought to understand that they didn't like ANY grouping term (as they specifically note that people experiencing homelessness are frequently termed in homogenous ways). The book's final pages clarify that they are espousing support for Person-First Language (which is good!). The authors could have communicated their point more clearly. It is worth recognizing that when we talk about homogenous references vs. specific references to groups of people within a larger group, there is power in that larger grouping category. Adler and Burnes frequently bring up the LGBTQ+ community as a reference point for language (i.e., “the homosexuals” and the concept of being closeted). I hope people do not read this and seek to stop using terms like “people experiencing homelessness” in favor of something more discrete like “a person who couch surfs” or “someone who sleeps in their car.” This distinction makes these groups appear smaller and easier to hide. Being able to have an umbrella term like “the gay community” (and eventually, “the LGBTQ+ community”) helped take us from Stonewall to Obergefell in less than 50 years. We can understand, identify, and respect more specific groupings while holding onto the power that comes from big numbers.

Finally, I had some concerns about the writing. The authors have striven for so much organization that they have overorganized, and as a result, the book is repetitive. Some of the same stories and anecdotes appear several times, and this is not necessary in a book that's fewer than 250 pages. Each chapter ends with a “Key Takeaways” section, which repeats some elements of the previous 5 or 10 pages of the chapter. Then, the penultimate chapter (“Fixing Broken Systems”) goes chapter-by-chapter with suggestions, restating the same statistics or stories. These notes, which were so powerful in their first use, are drained with every subsequent recurrence because they feel like disorganization rather than being the beat of a theme. In a second edition, I would suggest doing away with Chapter 12 and integrating solution sections in each topic chapter, allowing more efficient use of the reader's time and the book's page count.

Mechanically, the writing is passable but not great. Sometimes, this is just me being fussy about a terrible abundance of adverbs (the most criminal of these is on page 145: “One of the most ubiquitous developments” — ubiquitous means everywhere or totally! Skim away all of this unneeded text. Let's get on with it!). But sometimes, the phrasing is so poor as to appear careless and misleading to the reader. The most notable is on page 96: “And many local public housing authorities make it illegal to rent to someone with a felony conviction...” The problem is that a layperson may read this and somehow think that PHA's get to tell renters who they can and can't rent to — they can't. PHAs cannot determine what is and isn't illegal; they can only set policy within the guidelines set by Congress and, to a lesser extent, HUD. To say that PHAs can “make it illegal” is misleading. PHAs can and do set rules about approving people with felony convictions for vouchers- a bad practice that should be explained clearly in this text so that people can understand who sets that policy and to whom they should advocate in their community.

——

Overall, I would recommend this book to the layperson for a good primer on homelessness broadly and the ways many different systems intersect to make it difficult to escape it. The book could benefit by offering more information to the reader, such as who sets policies where and how to engage in advocacy around them. I am concerned that many of this book's solutions revolve around social entrepreneurs benefiting from unpaid volunteer work and, to a much lesser extent, local non-profits where direct service could help, but not at all around direct advocacy to local, State, and Federal policymakers.

(1) “Moral injury is the damage done to one's conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one's own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.” https://moralinjuryproject.syr.edu/about-moral-injury/

(Edit July 2024: while talking with my mom recently, I found out that we weren't in a section 8 apartment — we were in something that was low income, but they wouldn't accept section 8. Those visits I remember to the housing authority were applying, but either not getting or getting but not finding somewhere to take it, apparently. I corrected the above paragraph.)