A Gift of Hope: Helping the Homeless (7 page)

The system I saw used most frequently to address the homeless was harassment. When I first began working on the streets, I kept hearing about the dreaded DPW. I had no idea what that was. The KGB maybe, with new initials? What exactly was this agency so feared among the homeless? I was soon to learn that it is the Department of Public Works. The theory is that if people are going to “insist” on living on the streets, then the city will just have to clean them up, tidy them up, and teach them a thing or two. Admittedly, the belongings of homeless people look messy. But how neat can you be when you’re living in a cardboard box, and everything you own is in a shopping cart with three wheels? The DPW solves that problem. They arrive with a giant dump truck, and if the homeless person is momentarily away at a public bathroom, trying to scrounge up something to eat, trying to find work, or maybe just asleep, the DPW truck scoops up all their belongings, and tidies up the mess for them. And suddenly the homeless person has no bedding, no clothes, and so little to their name that you weep to see it. After the DPW truck does
its job, they have absolutely nothing at all except the shirts on their backs, and rubber flip-flops they found in a trashcan somewhere. The DPW goes out there to break up “camps,” scoop up “cribs,” and get rid of all the unsightly “debris” that is all the homeless person has in the world.

One of the theories is that if a homeless person has nothing to survive with, you can force them off the streets. It doesn’t work like that. There is nowhere else for them to go. Some are too physically and mentally sick to do anything other than what they’re doing, and rather than helping, or getting them into a safe place, or nurturing them in some way, the DPW takes away what little they do have and leaves them even more helpless and ill-equipped to survive than before. I’m sorry, but to me that’s harassment. We have to do a whole lot better than just hauling away their belongings in a garbage truck, leaving them crying on the street. I have rarely seen anything more heartless than that single tactic, which leaves people even more deprived and even more destroyed, and teaches them despair as a way of life. Just how cruel does a city have to be?

Several years ago, while they were building the new baseball stadium in San Francisco, there was an area of undeveloped land nearby where homeless people set up a camp. At one time, it must have housed close to two hundred people in tents, cardboard boxes, sleeping bags, and small makeshift constructions. There are advantages to camps like that, in that
they afford some form of protection to more vulnerable members of the group. There is usually safety in numbers, though not always. I watched that camp set up and grow over many months. It was a small city unto itself, and ran in an orderly fashion. And then one day we came along with our vans, and what we saw looked like a hurricane had hit it.

Nothing was left but small bits of debris that had been rolled over and crushed beneath the wheels of giant trucks. DPW trucks had demolished the camp earlier that day, scooping up everyone’s belongings and flattening what was left. By the time we got there, dozens of quietly sobbing people were standing around in shock, with nothing left. It was the kind of scene you see after an earthquake hits a village. There had been no time to salvage what they needed or what was important to them. The camp was flattened, destroyed, disposed of, and everything they owned with it.

How can any city talk about how it is addressing “the homeless problem” while treating human beings in this appalling, dehumanizing way? I can’t begin to tell you how often we stopped our vans and found devastated people, crying that the DPW had just taken everything they owned. My stomach turned over every time I heard it. I’ve looked into their faces and seen their eyes, the tears rolling down their cheeks. If that’s the best we can do to solve the problem, it’s a sorry
statement about us and our cities. And sadly, I see just as many people on the streets as I did fourteen years ago, if not more. In fact, I am certain that there are more homeless people on the streets each year, particularly in these troubled economic times.

San Francisco has for years used an absurdly haphazard system to provide a head count of the homeless. Once a year, a handful of people go out on foot in a prescribed area where the homeless are presumed to live. The census counters walk the streets for that one night a year and count them. As the director of one of the agencies providing free mental health services says, the Audubon Society spends more time, care, and money counting birds than we do counting homeless people.

During that one night of “homeless counting,” they count whoever they see. Anyone in a shelter, in a bathroom, buying coffee at McDonald’s, eating in a free dining room, or lucky enough to be in a hotel room for one night is overlooked, not included in the count. As a result, the officially listed numbers have nothing to do with reality, with the true number of people on the streets. A few years ago, the number of homeless people in San Francisco was listed as just over 7,000. At one time, the official count had dropped to just over 5,000. (Was it a cold night when they counted? Were most people off the
streets, or hiding? Had their disability checks just arrived, so many escaped to hotels for a single night? Or did fewer people do the count?)

The church that provides the most homeless services in the city, and serves over one million free meals a year, believes the more accurate homeless count on San Francisco’s streets at that time was closer to 20,000. The police who worked on the streets in the areas where most homeless people live agreed that there were more than 20,000 people living on the streets. My uneducated rough guess, just based on the population we served (about 3,000 people a year), was also 20,000. That’s a far cry from the official count of 5,000 to 7,000, which misleads citizens into believing that the problem is less severe than it is.

Misrepresenting the count lulls us into a false sense of security that the problem is being solved. The reality is very different. The growing population of homeless in all our cities is a strong indicator that whatever help we’re offering is missing its mark. However good our intentions, however many programs we have in place, the people in most dire need of them are getting lost, not benefiting from the system, and not getting the help they need. And without help they will not be able to get off the streets.

We need more programs, more money, more help, more workers, more people who care about the problem of homelessness,
more citizens who are willing to see it and do whatever they can to help. Until then, ignoring the problem entirely, or harassing the homeless, is not the answer or the solution. The solution is greater awareness, more available funding, and more help.

One of the things that struck me once I began working on the streets was the variety of people I met there. Strangely, each trip was different, in the age and race of people we saw, and I was never quite sure why. Sometimes I saw mostly older (maybe forties and fifties) African American men, up to 75 percent on some nights. Other times we saw mostly Caucasians, the majority in their thirties, who looked functional, freshly on the streets, and as though they could be part of the normal workforce, although something had clearly gone wrong in their lives. Women were always in the minority, and if only recently arrived on the streets they sometimes seemed in better shape than the men. Newly arrived women appeared less unkempt. Sometimes we saw women who’d been there longer and were absolutely ravaged. I had the feeling that women don’t hold up long term. (Our ratio was usually ten men to one woman on any given night, except sometimes in warmer weather when there were a few more women out there. In cold winter weather, the women were more likely to go inside, despite the violence in the shelters, except the most hardcore who were too far gone to even get to shelter, so we
went to them.) A woman I had seen frequently died last year. I assumed she was somewhere in her sixties. I was shocked when I read her obituary to discover that she had once been a model, and was thirty-two or -three when she died.

One of the most moving examples I’ve seen was a young woman who must have been in her twenties. She was wearing a flowered silk dress on a summer night, her hair was combed, and she was wearing a string of fake pearls around her neck. She was one of the few people I continued to see regularly for eleven years. At first, I watched her deteriorate over the months, to a heartbreaking degree. The silk dress and pearls disappeared quickly. And ten years later, probably in her early thirties, she had lost all her teeth, had lost a leg, was in a wheelchair, wound up in jail from time to time, and had a look of devastation about her. Yet when I saw her—and I looked for her often—she was always courteous, kind, and smiling. We always stopped and chatted for a while, and she told me how things were going for her. We gave her our supplies, and she thanked us profusely every time. Clearly, the available systems weren’t working for her. She lived in a tent on a street corner for years. I think drugs were probably involved, and maybe mental illness, or maybe not. All I saw was what happened to her since she’d been on the streets. I asked her no embarrassing questions. Her descent into hell, and how she got there, were none of my business. All I could do was visit
her there every few weeks. I worried when I didn’t see her. And what I worried about most was where would she go from here? Who would help her? How could she break the downward spiral? And why had no one helped her to get off the streets?

I don’t know what gets people to the streets. Some people live so close to the edge that when enough things go wrong, they fall into the abyss of homelessness. Others are there only temporarily and can easily be helped or salvaged. Some have been there for so long that, like someone with a terminal illness, you know they will never be able to return to what they once were. Some struggle on, others have clearly given up. Some you can easily imagine filtering back into the mainstream, given half a chance, but others never fit, never have, and never will.

Far too many (the majority) appear to be suffering from some form of mental illness, and there is nowhere for them to go for assistance. Unable to access help on their own, abandoned by their families, or even with families who would want to help them but are unable to due to our legal system surrounding mental illness, these people get lost along the way. All of them are on the streets, and we are failing each one of them in some way.

Some people say that homelessness is a result of not having enough mental hospitals. But the problem is more complex.
Even if we had enough hospitals, we have no way of getting people into them and convincing them to stay there for treatment. It is an unpopular opinion with most people except the most experienced professionals, but I have long felt that our current system, where mentally ill people must agree to be hospitalized unless they have proven themselves to be a danger to society is a nice theory, but just doesn’t work. Right now, in our current system, the decision to be hospitalized rests in the mentally ill person’s hands. It’s up to them. And realistically, many or even most of them are not in a position to make that decision for themselves. Families with mentally ill relatives can do nothing to get them off the streets, or hospitalize them for treatment. I am deeply grateful that I never got to that place with my son Nick. As many of us do, I have several friends who have adult children (some in their thirties and forties) who have been homeless and lost to them for years. There is absolutely nothing the parents can do about it, and sometimes they wind up in jail rather than hospitals if they step over the line society sets for them, or exhibit behavior that breaks a law.

I believe we need laws that allow us to hospitalize people when necessary, for treatment and safekeeping, even without their consent. Perhaps the people who make the laws, or the citizens who vote for them, have no idea how vulnerable the mentally ill are on the streets, and what very real danger they
are in. The laws we have now are well-intentioned, and do avoid the situations we all read about years ago, when some unsuspecting mentally healthy person could be put away in a mental hospital against their will, often as a result of their family’s greed or self-serving motives. Today’s laws prevent that from happening, but the net is so broad now that we can no longer hospitalize those who need it most. Our hands are tied. So instead of getting treatment, or being helped by those who care about them, mentally ill people are homeless on the streets. The general consensus is that 80 to 90 percent of homeless people are suffering from some form of mental illness, and they’re not getting the help they need.

In San Francisco, a statute of the health code called a 5150 allows you to hospitalize persons exhibiting inappropriate or bizarre behavior for seventy-two hours for evaluation. That gives mental health professionals three days to study their behavior and make a decision as to whether or not they are a danger to themselves or others. If not, it is nearly impossible to extend the three days for a longer period (with the help of a 5250). But sometimes it takes longer than three days to assess a psychiatric problem. And it seems to me that it’s not enough time to determine if they are indeed a danger to themselves or others. And what if others are a danger to them? We can’t hospitalize these people to protect them, no matter how vulnerable their state or confused their mind. As long as they are
not “dangerous,” they are free to go, back to a world where they are preyed upon, in constant danger, and in no condition to cope with the rigors of street life or the constant threats lurking there. Sometimes, no matter how sad, that decision should be taken out of their hands.

Homelessness is not just about not having a job or an apartment. Too often homelessness is due to a disordered mind. It’s more obvious in some cases than others, and some people are less able to comply with society’s rules than others. But in far too many cases, the mentally ill are falling through the cracks and have nowhere to go. You see them pushing their carts as they talk to themselves, sleeping in doorways, living in cardboard boxes, soaking wet and freezing cold. They are no danger to you, perhaps, but they are unable to help themselves. And those of us who so desperately want to take care of them, family or others, have no way to reach out to them, get help, or bring them home. I think it is one of society’s greatest problems today, an urban problem that is out of control, and our existing laws are doing nothing to help us stem the tide.