Homeless Street People​—Their Cruel Plight an Unsolved Problem

FOR a brief moment the bustling streets are deserted. The stores and shops have closed. The last bus filled with the city’s nine-to-five office workers has left. The commuter trains filled with business executives are speeding toward suburbia. Store lights have been dimmed and street lights have come on. The evening’s wind picks up as the temperature plunges on another winter night. Heated apartments are a welcome haven for the city dwellers, while blazing logs in the fireplace spell “home, sweet home” for the suburban commuters. The hot dinners and soft beds that follow are taken for granted.

How different the story on the city’s empty streets! Shadowy human figures begin to appear on hundreds of them. Walking slowly on numb feet, hunched forms bracing against the cold wind, they take their place in store entrances, under bridges, over hot-air grates, and on the sidewalks. In cardboard boxes, scavenged from garbage bins, they bed down for the night. Whatever their age, their background, their physical and mental condition, they have one common denominator that inseparably links them all​—they are homeless. These are the urban nomads, the street people, the bag ladies, the winos. They are the blight of almost every major city in the world. They have become a major urban crisis, a problem without a solution.

In the more affluent cities these unfortunates are as close as many people have come to witnessing poverty. If they have not seen it for themselves, they have heard about it. What youngster working in fast-food restaurants could keep silent after seeing bag ladies filling their plastic bags with stale buns and rancid meat from garbage bins outside their kitchen doors? Or what about the pizza maker who often fills telephone orders for pizzas with things on them no one would want, such as pineapple, and then, when the unclaimed pizzas are thrown out, watches the hungry who phoned in the orders scavenge them from the garbage? Or what waiter in fine urban restaurants could not tell of the desperate hands groping through the establishment’s garbage bins for discarded food?

“Ah, the balance of nature,” wrote George F. Will in Newsweek magazine, “expense accounts encourage diners to order to excess; vanity​—fear of fat—​causes them to leave much uneaten; desperation brings other diners to the remains.”

The plight of the homeless in urban areas becomes the focus of increasing attention when weather forecasts predict freezing and subfreezing temperatures for the nights. The established shelters are far too few. The majority of the homeless are forced to face the elements with inadequate clothing on their backs. “If I could furnish shelter for everyone seeking it on a cold night,” said one welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, “I could sleep a lot better that night.” And so they die​—in distressing numbers. The chairman of New York’s Board of Health said that an average of one homeless person a day is now found dead in the streets of that city.

Many of the homeless refuse to take shelter within the municipally provided dormitorylike quarters and flophouses. They fear for their lives at most and being stripped of their earthly possessions at least. “Let me tell you something, man,” said one who spent a few hours in one such shelter. “You never know what the guy next to you is going to pull. You’re much better off in the streets, man.” One Community Service researcher who volunteered to spend a night in a flophouse said: “Conditions are absolutely scurrilous, they’re dangerous as can be. A natural predatory relationship exists between the younger and the older men, and in the brief period of time I was there I all but witnessed any number of robberies.” Violence runs rampant, with knifings, beatings, and muggings out in the open.

Hence, many of the homeless would rather take their chances facing the elements, where they can at least run when threatened. But all too often it is a matter of the survival of the fittest on the streets. Some have been raped many times by winos and drug addicts. Especially are the women victimized by their own kind. The older and weaker women fall prey to younger and stronger ones​—taking what clothes that appeal to them off their backs. “Down here if you can’t hold on to what you’ve got, then you don’t deserve to have it. That’s the rule,” one said.

No one knows for sure how many homeless there are in the world, for census takers cannot find them. In the United States some experts have placed the number as high as two to three million. Whatever it is, it is growing.

Some cities have seen their homeless population increase by 100 percent in the past year. Published reports estimated the number of homeless in the city of New York to be 40,000 in 1984, and the ranks are swelling daily. Newsstand magazines in 1982 placed the number of homeless in Washington, D.C., at 10,000, whereas in 1984 estimates of 20,000 were given. Chicago’s 25,000 homeless are a big increase over last year. England has its homeless problem. So does Sweden. So do most of the major cities of Europe. In poverty-stricken countries, homelessness is an accepted way of life.

The causes of homelessness vary​—loss of a job, breakup of a marriage, an encounter with alcoholism or drug addiction, followed by an eviction from house or apartment, and family and friends refusing to take in the now down-and-out.

Many of the street people lived in flophouse-type buildings, known as single-room occupancies. But with the urban renewal programs undertaken in many cities, these buildings were the first to be destroyed or remodeled and converted into condominiums. Many of their occupants were forced out onto the streets. From 1970 to 1980 a million such rooms were destroyed or converted in the United States alone. For some cities it meant a more than 50-percent loss of single-room occupancies. For New York it was an 87-percent loss.

Consider, now, the street people’s double jeopardy situation: Because they live without addresses, the homeless are unable to receive food stamps and welfare in most states. “Some of these people might qualify, but first they need a fixed address, and they don’t have one,” said a Chicago volunteer worker. Moreover, many are mentally incapable of coping with the red tape of the bureaucracy to seek welfare or governmental subsistence.

There is a sad note that fills all the published data that describes these urban nomads​—it is no longer true that the homeless are primarily age 60 and above. There is a fast-growing population of young, chronically mentally ill persons. They have never been admitted to institutions but have joined the ranks of the homeless. Both boys and girls sell themselves as prostitutes to get the price of a meal, teenage girls sleeping with hotel managers just to have a room for the night. Not all of these, however, are mentally ill. They are the children that nobody wants​—not even their parents. Often they are the abused children. Many know the meaning of the word “incest” all too well. Can you imagine that in New York City alone, half of the estimated 40,000 homeless are under the age 21​—20,000 of them! And these are the ones that the older homeless fear the most, the ones who beat and rob them of their meager goods.

In city after city, where there is a homeless problem, the young ones are there and their numbers are increasing yearly. Are yours there? Would you go looking for them if you did not know where they were, where they were sleeping during the cold nights while you were warm, what they were eating while you had plenty? Or would your child be like the homeless man who said: “I been missing twenty years, and no one come looking for me.”

The solution to the homeless problem is not forthcoming by human administrations. Everything has been tried, everything has failed. The only solution lies in that long-prayed-for government in Jesus’ model prayer, part of which petitions, “Let your kingdom come.” That promised Kingdom will erase poverty, hunger, mental and physical sickness, and death from off the earth forever. Homelessness will be a thing of the past, for in this Kingdom, with Jesus as the administrative head, every person will have his own home, will be able to sit under his own vine and fig tree, and nothing will make him afraid.​—Matthew 6:10; Isaiah 65:21, 22; Micah 4:4.

[Blurb on page 13]

‘Affluent diners order to excess; desperation brings other diners to the remains’

[Box on page 15]

Release From Institutions​—A Major Cause of Homelessness

In 1752, at the urging of Benjamin Franklin, the nation’s first hospital to help care for the homeless insane was opened. The following two centuries saw mental institutions opening in every state in the nation. Then in the mid-1940’s the plight of the mentally ill came to the fore. The appalling conditions of overcrowded state mental institutions was publicized.

In 1954 the drug chlorpromazine, developed in France, was allowed to enter the United States for the treatment of the psychotic, calming them and suppressing their delusions and hallucinations. Four years later the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health was established. Through this commission a nationwide system for treating the mentally ill was called for. The proposal had far-reaching goals in mind, namely, to treat the institutionalized within their communities. In other words, those who could be treated and controlled by the new drug and who would not be a danger to others should be released from their places of confinement.

In 1971, in the state of Alabama, a class action suit was instituted on behalf of patients involuntarily confined for mental-treatment purposes. The court ruled that for a patient to be institutionalized the institution must meet certain rigid requirements. The court also ruled that “no later than 15 days after a patient is committed to the hospital, the superintendent of the hospital or his appointed, professionally qualified agent shall examine the committed patient and shall determine whether the patient continues to require hospitalization. . . . If the patient no longer requires hospitalization in accordance with the standards for commitment, or if a treatment plan has not been implemented, he must be released immediately unless he agrees to continue with treatment on a voluntary basis.”

With this legal decision, mental hospitals began releasing inmates in unprecedented numbers. By 1982 mental institutions dwindled in inmate population from 558,922 to 125,200.

Good intentions, however, backfired. The proposed community treatment centers failed to show up. The outpatients ultimately became wards of the city. “Many former patients, because of their condition, did not know how to get to community centers,” said one Washington mental-health administrator. “So after they were released from hospitals, that’s the last anyone saw of them until they showed up in doorways.” “Approximately one-third to one-half of the homeless,” writes Psychology Today of February 1984, “are believed to be mentally ill and on the streets primarily because of a process known as deinstitutionalization.”

In some large cities the percentage rate is higher, up to 60 percent. For example, in an interview with 450 homeless seeking refuge in three New York shelters, it was revealed “that 54 percent of the patients had been in a state hospital and 75 percent had a history of psychiatric hospitalization. A very high percentage (53 percent) of patients were diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia . . . Many of these patients had been discharged into the community to fend for themselves without adequate community services or support systems to assist them in making the adaptation from institutional to community living.”​—Hospital & Community Psychiatry, September 1983.

That journal reported a similar study conducted in London with 123 homeless men. The data compiled showed that 15 percent were diagnosed as schizophrenic, 8 percent suffered from affective disorders, and 29 percent had a history of psychiatric hospitalization.

[Picture on page 14]

‘I’ve been missing for 20 years, and no one has come looking for me’