I’m going to stop talking about homelessness

In January, it will be three years that I’ve been serving breakfast downtown and I’ve made lots of friends. Friends who don’t have the same lifestyle that I do.  Friends who don’t have the same background that I do.  Friends whose experience of life is unfathomably different from mine.  And friends whom I love and who love me back.

I was at a meeting with a facilitator for the Center for Creative Leadership last December. The topic was poverty and what we can do about it.  After listening for a while, she spoke up, “I’ve been going to meetings about poverty for more than 20 years.  You know what has changed?  Nothing.  It’s gotten worse.  And we just keep talking about it.”

I’m invited to all kinds of meetings about homelessness, to hear others speak and to speak myself. I’ve spoken from churches to college campuses to country clubs.  Most folks, including folks from organizations providing homeless services, talk about statistics, the number of homeless people in the City, what government programs are most effective, on and on.  Until recently, when I’ve been the speaker, I’ve talked about folks I know and love, personal stories of friendship with folks living outside, and how we live as a community.  My hope has been to raise awareness, to help the larger community understand that people enduring homelessness are not somehow “the other,” that they’re not different from them.  That each person is a human being, someone’s dad, someone’s sister, my friend.  Folks always want to help.   I’ve told them lots of ways to do that, from serving food to providing underwear.  I’ve told them to hold accountable the folks who are supposed to be helping and to make monetary contributions to homeless services nonprofits.  And all that is absolutely necessary.

But now…. I grew up farming and I know a thing or two about growing food. Let’s say we have a large swath of the country where we’re having crop failure.  Okay, stay with me here!  We’re not getting any tomatoes, squash are rotting on the vines, the cucumbers are shriveling up and dying.  So we, the farmers, get together over and over and talk about it.  We talk about how many of the crops are failing, the number of pounds we’re not getting, how long before the vines die.  When the plants are half-dead, we bring them into the lab, and try to “fix” them.  And the cost?  Astronomical to the lab, but not nearly the cost that it is to each individual human “plant”.

You see, what has come clearly into focus is that it doesn’t help to talk about folks dealing with homelessness as if they are a homogenous group of people. We have to talk about the specific causes and what we can do about them, and take action.  Otherwise, folks will just continue to end up in the lab, aka, the shelters and housing programs and the revolving door of the very costly prison system.

So what do we do? What are the specific causes of homelessness that we need to address?  I’m sure I’ll learn more, but right now, I would say there are three main ones: mental illness, mass incarceration of African American males, and wages that are so low folks can’t pay their bills.  Many of these causes exist side-by-side with substance abuse, and often it’s a combination.

The first one…. A couple of weeks ago, Shirley, our Monday “coffee lady” (she makes 100 cups every week) got out of her car at 7:15 a.m. As we were setting up for breakfast, I looked her way and she had tears in her eyes.  So I ran over to her, “What’s wrong?”  And she said very quietly and with big eyes, “They’re all mentally ill, Amy.  They’re all mentally ill.”  And she kept crying.  I said, “I know’” and just hugged her.

That Friday, I drove my friend Jeb, who lived outside for eight years, to the eye doctor. If anybody knows folks downtown, it’s Jeb.  He’s from down East, and he loves barbecue.  So after his appointment, we go over to Stamey’s and while we’re munching away, I said, “Jeb, I have a question for you.  Of all the folks downtown, how many of them do you think are mentally ill?”  Jeb was steady studying his sandwich, but he peered up at me over his glasses, and said, “You want the truth?” “Of course I do,” I said.  Jeb said, “Pretty much all of ‘em.”

In last Sunday’s News and Record, there was an article by Allen Johnson that mentions a picture of a man defecating into a cup in an alcove of a shop downtown at 6:34 in the morning. I was disgusted by the icy coldness of the whole article, and that’s another blog post, but can you imagine how the man felt when someone snapped his picture right then?  This is a human being, not a dog.  There are no public bathrooms downtown.  The ones at Center City Park are not even open until 7 a.m.  What should he have done?  Gone right out on the street, instead of in the alcove?  How about without the cup and directly on the sidewalk?  What if, that particular day, that man’s chemistry is so off he doesn’t even know his name?

The second one, mass incarceration, results in mental illness.  Folks come out of prison and it’s as if they’ve been in a war zone.  84% of the IRC’s clients are black males of working age.  WHAT?  We hear that, and we all nod our heads.  Some folks can’t stay in a shelter after prison, even if they wanted to.  They have PTSD and they’d rather freeze than be in close quarters.  They simply cannot do it.  Folks, we have to change “the new Jim Crow era.”  The human cost and the fiscal cost are staggering.

Lastly, according to HUD, a person in Greensboro working a minimum wage job would have to work 70 hours a week to maintain an apartment. 70 hours.  And folks have kids.  It’s complicated, and it has to do with equal opportunity for education, inadequate transportation systems, and lots of other factors.

And we have to ask ourselves, is it okay with us to see our kinsmen, our own countrymen who share our soil, sleeping in the streets by the thousands? Here, in the United States of America, we have become complacent, content with providing only Band-Aids that help people survive.  Is it okay with us that we have mentally ill people who sometimes don’t even know where they are, walking the streets at night?  Is it enough for us to just write a check to organizations that “take care” of “these people” and give them stuff they need, so then we feel better?  Is that okay with us?

I just loaded the car with toilet paper, bottled water, feminine hygiene products, and condoms to give away at breakfast tomorrow, along with the fried chicken I’ll pick up at 9 p.m. Yes, we have to continue to help folks survive until we get these systems changed.  But we also have to face the fact that that is not enough.  We have to move this buggy forward.

So I’ll stop talking about homelessness, the result of several systems. Instead I’ll focus on real problems, deep issues that we can change.  I’m figuring out how to effect long-term change myself.  Will you join me?