What They Never Tell You About Being Homeless

Author’s note: in the NIDC lexicon, a Journal is a type of informal writing, with few citations, that is typically based on personal experiences. Originally I published this type of article over on our Facebook page, but given the Zuck’s recent hostility to anarchist content, I’ve started simultaneously posting them here on ninaillingworth.com. 

 

Humanity and Homelessness

Hey, I want to ask you something; do you know any homeless people? I’m not asking if you know of a homeless person, I’m asking if any of the folks you know on a personal level are, or have been homeless? To be clear, this isn’t a call out. I’m just saying that it’s pretty easy to type “housing is a human right” from your comfy desk, while treating the homeless like a disease in your everyday life; I know because I watch people around me do it all the time. Have you ever even talked with a homeless person?

I know these are weird questions, but in case you haven’t noticed, America is in the middle of a housing crisis caused by both the pandemic as well as a parasitic investor class, and given that we’re also steaming towards the eviction apocalypse, it’s only going to get worse. Furthermore, because we live in a society dominated by social Darwinist attitudes about folks enduring extreme poverty, it can be pretty hard to put a friendly face on this catastrophe.

Let me make that task easier for you here by admitting that I’ve been homeless. I’m a person, you’re a person, and we recognize each other’s essential humanity and agency up front; so when I then tell you that I’ve been homeless for a couple of brief periods in my life, the problem is no longer faceless or abstract. I’m a real person, with a real face, and I’ve been homeless. Yes, you read that correctly. On two separate occasions, I have briefly been forced to live on the streets.

To be clear, the incidents were separated by a number of years, neither lasted longer than twenty days, and the events actually occurred in two separate cities entirely. I mention this because I don’t want to make more of my experience than it was. I have never experienced long-term, involuntary homelessness; but while I was on the streets, I certainly met people who were living that life through no fault of their own. Furthermore, it wasn’t that hard for me to see how I, or for that matter anyone else, could end up in that same situation as a result of much briefer periods of homelessness.

Today, I’d like to share a little bit of that experience with you, but there’s a twist. Given that most people who have never suffered extreme poverty only understand homelessness through the lens of Hollywood, I’m going to talk about some of the things I know, that they don’t show you on the silver screen. While the movies aren’t bad at covering first order problems like finding food and shelter amid an overcrowded, institutionalized system of largely inadequate support, they’re pretty shitty at exploring the real causes of homelessness and what it’s like to suddenly become a homeless person.

 

Poverty and Homelessness

Putting moralist sensationalism and protestant fundamentalist propaganda aside, in my experience poverty is the most common cause of homelessness; and in my interactions with the homeless, and numerous mainstream media accounts, that pattern has held true. Of course you can then choose to further break down the causes of that poverty, including things like a lack of affordable housing, a lack of adequate medical care, or a lack of employment opportunities that pay a living wage, and so on. At the end of the day however, the essential problem is that you don’t have enough money to maintain stable, long-term housing.

Look, I’m not dicking around with you here. All of this may sound so logical as to be obvious, but trust me, this is a highly-guarded secret in a society that wants you to believe poor people are on the streets because they deserve to be there. There is an entire wing of the propaganda industry devoted to convincing you all homeless people are drug addled criminal types who’ve chosen to be on the street because they reject society; the reality of course is far more complicated and rarely has much to do with personal choices.

In fact, I’d argue that poverty is so central to the experience of homelessness that we really should start there instead.

 

What They Don’t Tell You About Poverty

The thing most people who’ve never been poor don’t understand about poverty, is that it’s really about being trapped in cycle of terrible choices with ever-diminishing returns. Once you’ve been homeless, the likelihood that you will remain homeless shoots up astronomically; regardless of what you personally do to try and escape the poverty trap. This can be a hard thing to understand intellectually from your living room, but that’s because the options for acquiring necessities and improving your life are so much greater for the housed person than for the homeless; even if that person is by no means wealthy.

The very first thing poverty kills isn’t your pride or even your wallet, its opportunities to mitigate the instability in your life caused by poverty. What does that look like in practice for a homeless person?

Well, just think about all the things in your life that both help you manage financial instability, and also require a fixed address. In most parts of the Pig Empire, you need an address to get a loan, obtain a job, or access most government services; such as they are in a neofeudalist society. All of these things represent resources which can help a down on their luck housed person avoid sinking into ever-worsening cycles of destitution and poverty; and none of them exist for the homeless in a capitalist country. Simply having an address is like a passport to a world where homelessness is at least temporarily someone else’s problem; no matter how poor you might be otherwise.

Furthermore, this is a constantly reoccurring obstacle in the life of the homeless that operates on a much deeper level than most housed individuals can understand. Consider for example the job prospects of a worker with access to personal transportation, say, a car, as opposed to someone who doesn’t have that access. The worker with the car not only has access to more potential jobs in a wider area, but they’re also likely to be a more reliable and thus desirable employee because they can be where they’re required to be, on time.

For a labor class person, losing access to reliable transportation is often in and of itself, a precursor to extreme poverty. Given this, the fact that you need a fixed address to get a driver’s license presents a major, but often unnoticed obstacle to avoiding or escaping life on the streets. And of course, this is just one example of the ways in which the homeless are denied the ability to mitigate the scourges of poverty that are readily available to pretty much everyone else in our society; there are many more barriers where that one came from.

Is access to transportation and the job market too esoteric for you? Okay, how about a shower and access to basic laundry facilities? Do you have any idea how hard it is to turn a job interview into gainful employment without access to a shower and clean clothes? During the time I spent on the streets, there were definitely days that I would have traded all the food in the world for a hot shower, clean clothes, and a job interview; that much I can assure you.

I could of course keep going; can you access the internet and send out a resume with a convenience store burner phone? Because in most parts of the Pig Empire you sure as shit aren’t getting a data plan without a bank account or a credit card, and you will struggle to obtain either one of those without a fixed address. The list goes on. At this point however, I hope you’re starting to get a sense of not only the mind-boggling number of barriers the homeless face to escaping poverty, but also just how much the average person really doesn’t know about homelessness.

Let’s move on.

Day Zero: Mind Games

While there have been any number of studies and articles written about both the mathematics, and the material realities of homelessness, I personally haven’t encountered many discussions about what being homeless does to a person on a psychological level. I can say from experience that long before I found myself worrying about my next meal, or where I was going to sleep that night, the mere state of being suddenly homeless induced significant mental trauma. I’m not just talking about the first day here, I’m talking about a period of time encompassing the first sixty minutes of finding yourself without a place to live.

Immediately upon becoming homeless, you become aware of one incontrovertible fact that will assert itself over and over, in a dizzying myriad of circumstances. Specifically, you discover that no matter where you are, or what the situation is, everyone across the entire spectrum of society is pretty sure that you are the problem. Curiously, this rarely appears to have much to do with what you’re doing at that moment, which is typically more or less what everyone else around you is doing.

The problem is quite simply that you exist, and that you’re here, right now, instead of someplace else where you would become someone else’s problem.

 

Keep Moving

Let me try to explain. We live in a capitalist society in which the lives of the labor class have been purposely arranged around work and property ownership. In this society, our response to poverty and homelessness is typically criminalization, justified by a kind of social Darwinism. Although modern leadership rarely admits it, this state of being is not a bug, but a feature of Pig Empire capitalism. The purpose of punishing poverty is to encourage the labor class to accept whatever work the exploiter classes have to offer them at the cheapest possible wage; and in the old days, the capitalist elite had no problem admitting that in the very laws they enacted to enforce this system.

When you fast-forward to the twenty-first century, this system manifests itself in a number of ways that the vast majority of people in our society literally don’t even notice. In a Pig Empire capitalist democracy, everyone always has to have something to do, and someplace to be, at all times. While there are obviously exceptions made for the leisure class elite, a consumer-class worker ant who isn’t on its way to do something, buy something, or go someplace, immediately stands out.

Within ten minute of becoming homeless, you realize to your own shock that you have no place to go, or rather no place to be; and soon afterwards, you realize that the people around you are starting to notice that.

This problem is further magnified by the unspoken truth that literally nobody, from the police, to business owners, and all the way on down to suburbanite housewives, wants to interact with, see, or even think about homeless people. This overt hostility is in turn expressed in all sorts of ways designed to encourage an urban nomadic existence among the homeless; from hostile architecture, to police harassment, and even down to ubiquitous “washrooms are for customers only” signs and table time limits at coffee shops. The overriding message delivered by this often faceless, and quasi-bureaucratic persecution is that it doesn’t matter where you go, but you certainly can’t stay here; wherever here is.

Naturally, the longer you’ve been homeless, the more obvious it becomes to the society around you that you have no place to be, and are thus a problem that has to be shifted somewhere else. Eventually, you will get tired of being pushed along, and you’ll push back or simply refuse to leave. At that point you can expect some type of retaliation; typically, some bougie halfwit will call the police. You can try to hide the fact that you’re no longer considered part of society, but I never had much luck with that tactic myself.

It’s just extremely difficult, if not impossible to obscure the reality that your existence has been severed from the rhythm of capitalist life around you for very long, in my experience.

 

Practical Realities in Action

As a knock on effect of this need to constantly “keep moving” in order to avoid interacting with the carceral system, homeless people become keenly aware of both passing time, and the casual relationships between time and money on the consumer level of society.

For example, let’s say there’s a coffee shop that still has comfortable seating, and isn’t going to chase you back out into the street as long as you keep buying coffee and don’t disturb other customers as they come and go. This establishment presents a golden opportunity to not only escape the constant harassment doled out to the homeless, but a chance to rest weary bones and maybe use a clean bathroom without breaking the law; so you’re not going to want to blow this.

The first thing I did in this situation, was work out how to get the most bang for my extremely limited funds when purchasing a coffee; on a dollars per minute basis. If your cover story is that you’re just a customer sitting down to enjoy the coffee you just bought, you’re going to need to be drinking coffee at a reasonable pace; even the kindest staffer is probably going to notice that you ordered that small coffee three hours ago and its empty by now. Typically I’ve found the best value is a large coffee, which will usually buy you about an hour’s worth of peace unless someone working there has it in for you.

This then allows you to estimate how much it costs for you to briefly be not homeless, and thus not be a problem that has to be moved. At this hypothetical coffee shop, the answer is about two bucks an hour, but this is a calculation you will perform incessantly when you’re homeless. A cigarette buys you fifteen minutes on a park bench, a slice of pizza gets you a half hour at the lunch counter. Have you ever seen a guy on the subway pretending to sleep as you move towards the end of the line? Chances are he’s trying to turn one subway token, into another couple hours of rest as the train goes through another loop.

 

No Commons for the Poor

Now at this point you might be tempted to say “but Nina, what about places where everyone is allowed to be for free, like parks, and public libraries?” Even setting aside the fact that the era of privatization has significantly diminished the number of public spaces available, the problem is you’re forgetting the part about how literally nobody wants to be around, see, or even know about homeless people; including your dear sweet librarian.

Maybe a rich man can sit in the park all day feeding the pigeons, I couldn’t speak to that because I’m not a rich man. But I can assure you from personal experience that luxury is not afforded to the poor. Sooner or later some “tax-paying” wingnut is going to call a cop because “there’s a suspicious person hanging around” whether it’s the park, the library, or wherever.

Remember if you’re not doing something, buying something, or going someplace, you’re going to stand out as a problem in a Pig Empire capitalist society; and most of the things you can do to signal to those around you that you’re not a problem, cost money and last for a finite period of time.

 

A Fun House Existence

Speaking entirely from my own experience, let me try to give you a sense of the Kafkaesque ways all these factors interact together in the life of a homeless person. In my teens, I spent about a week living in a homeless shelter run by a local church organization. The place in particular had the advantage of having two addresses, which allowed you to write an address that didn’t appear to be a homeless shelter on any job application you might fill out; a significant asset if you want to actually get hired. The problem was you had to register with a rotating social worker first, before you could use either of the shelter’s addresses.

The social worker was only in once a week, for four hours, on Fridays. Naturally, my first night at the shelter was a Saturday; which gave me just under a week in which I literally couldn’t even look for work. That worked out fine at first, but at five in the morning on Monday, I learned that the shelter required “guests” to leave the premises from six in the morning, until six at night on every day that wasn’t a Sunday. Ostensibly this was to ensure we were out looking for work, which as I just said was not possible for me at the time.

I made it through Monday alright, but in the early hours of Tuesday morning the seven dollars I’d started with had run out completely and I was in a fine panic. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t have any more money, as that I didn’t have a way to buy the right to “be” anyplace in a capitalist society; and I couldn’t go back to the shelter for just under eight hours. I decided to give panhandling a try, and predictably attracted the attention of a foot patrolman within an hour.

Now, I don’t know if it’s because I was white, or because I hadn’t been homeless long enough to really “look like” a problem yet, but instead of confiscating my loose change and arresting me, the cop called another social worker. When she arrived, she was adamant that I need to get off the streets and into a shelter. I explained that I was already in a shelter but it wouldn’t open till six at night; nevertheless she tried to send me to another shelter across town. When I then told her that all my belongings were in a locker at the first shelter; she just shrugged, warned me the cops would eventually arrest me, and walked away.

After she left, I spent the next couple of hours playing a game of beggar’s “cat and mouse” with the local constabulary, until at some point the first cop turned the corner and saw me again. Realizing that discretion is the better part of valor, I grabbed my change cup and ran like the devil himself was after me. The cop kept up the chase for a couple of blocks, but eventually let me go because, and tell me if this sounds familiar, I was now in someone else’s patrol area, and thus someone else’s problem.

 

Compassion and Will

Please understand that I’m not sharing my story about being homeless here to elicit your sympathy; through some combination of perseverance and sheer dumb luck, I’m pretty confident my days of housing insecurity are behind me.

I can however say from experience that these enforced, and reinforced feelings of desperation, isolation, and dehumanization represent a type of hidden psychological tax on the homeless; as does the constant stress created by food insecurity, the quest to find rudimentary shelter, and completely rational anxieties about your personal safety while living on the street. Combined with the very real financial cost of being poor, it’s not that difficult to understand why it’s so much harder to escape homelessness once you’re already on the streets. It could happen to almost anyone, given the right circumstances.

As America and much of the larger Pig Empire speeds towards the “Hooverville” stage of post-pandemic capitalism, it is important to remember that we could collectively end homelessness right now; thereby sparing millions upon millions of people the very real costs and consequences of street life. We don’t lack the know-how, what is missing here is the compassion and will to do so. If Pig Empire society dismisses its own poor as human failures, it regards the homeless as less than human entirely. That must change immediately, on both an individual and a society-wide level, because it might be your loved ones on the chopping block next.

Buckle up buttercup, because the fight were headed for doesn’t have time for your complicated feelings about the homeless anymore. Homeless people are simply people without homes; and the people united, can never be defeated.

 

• nina illingworth

 

 

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

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