Reading and Thinking about the History of PNW Homelessness
As I continue to observe and interact with the homeless of Oregon, and write the New American Diaspora newsletter, I also read news reports, studies and books about the homeless crisis. I want to keep learning. I want to keep challenging myself.
I recently read Skid Road: One the Frontier of Health Homelessness in an American City by Josephine Ensign, a professor of nursing at University of Washington, formerly homeless herself, and long-time worker on the front lines of Seattle's homeless crisis. It was published in 2021 by John Hopkins.
This is a brilliant, brilliant book focusing on Seattle's unique history with homelessness and one that energized my thinking on how Portland and the rest of Oregon is addressing this seemingly intractable issue. I urge everyone interested in the subject to read this book. It should be required reading for those connected professionally to what the author calls the Homeless Industrial Complex, one that pays her extremely well.
What did I glean from this book?
Seattle has a bewildering number of agencies addressing the crisis and developed an astonishing number of initiatives, policies and programs over the past century. Nothing has really worked. I repeat, nothing has worked on a large scale level. But Seattle keeps trying because it must and because the numbers are growing with no end in sight. WW II isn't coming to reorder the American economy and eliminate the Hoovervilles.
Some of the strategies used 200 years ago to combat vagrancy, homelessness, pauperism, are still be used, such as giving indigent mentally ill people passage to another locality. England did it with the colonies. Nevada did it with California. The Oregon Coast did it with Portland and Eugene.
Official and unofficial tiny homes have been around for well over a century. They used to be called shacks. Seattle once had a community down by Lake Union called Shacktown. It was razed to make way for progress.
Ensign makes the point that the modern homeless crisis is particularly a West Coast issue. Seattle, Portland, Eugene, San Francisco, Los Angeles, all have some of the highest real and per capita numbers in the country. Why? What is it about the region that makes this so? Is it governing? Is it the dream of going West? The climate? Is it the benevolent nature of people in this region who want to help? I mean, if you are homeless, you aren't going to Omaha, Mobile or Minneapolis. Ensign also reports that most of the people who are homeless in a certain area are from that area. Every homeless person I've met and interacted with is from Oregon.
People lived on abandoned boats in and around Seattle, just like they do now in the Portland area.
Charity is a loaded word. Charity for all is revolutionary, although Lincoln called for it in his Second Inaugural Address.
A striking quote from the book: “Social workers are a recent development in the machine age. They are the ambulance corps of the capitalist system and as such they have one objective in all that they they do.” According to Ensign's interpretation of this statement, that one objective is: Make people work. Get them functioning for capitalism. Nels Anderson wrote the line in 1931 before the New Deal and a rudimentary safety net had been established.
The official and unofficial names of the homeless have changed over the decades: bindle stiff, hobos, tramps, paupers, vagrants, bums, winos, transients, homeless, unhoused etc. The author never addresses this but it is an interesting point to consider. Does a new naming provide new initiative? Or do we just waste time debating semantics, as what so often happens with the Left?
Homelessness was once exclusively single men, but in the 80s families, women and runaway teenagers began showing up on streets all around America.
Forced labor was once a policy to combat homelessness. Vagrants were even auctioned off to private Seattle companies to work on projects.
Without faith-based organizations on the front line, the problem would be exponentially worse.
There have always been discussions of the deserving poor and undeserving poor.
The banality of the bureaucratic language used by the Homeless Industrial Complex employees drains all the energy out of initiative. You read it in their editorials all the time. It's like they have a computer programs that generates nostrums and buzzwords.
Everything that's been tried will be tried again but will be redressed with fancy new names and a stamp of innovation.
There is one solution. Get them housed. That's it. Everything then flows from that.
There is no flash and flair with Ensign's prose and that is welcome. This is clinical history and it moves fast. She inserts herself every now and then into the narrative toward the end of the book, but it is unobtrusive and interesting. She even makes the candid admission she helped develop a new program to serve street youth and it never got off the ground after two years of planning and spending.
I hope my writing in the New American Diaspora partially models Ensign's style, but sometimes I fear it does not. I sometimes have to caution myself to lower my profile when writing on this issue.
Some more thoughts inspired by reading Skid Road:
American capitalism produces an acceptable or unacceptable (depends on who you talk to) number of victims and puts them on display in form of the homeless population as a warning or encouragement.
Do we look to the causes of homelessness or do we concentrate on policy and program solutions? Can you do both at the same time?
Is the poor farm going to make a comeback? What about an updating of the 1862 Homestead Act? (More on that in a later newsletter.)
Ensign's advice is to develop empathy and search for the stories of the homelessness beyond the numbers and beyond the Homeless Industrial Complex's agenda and limited thinking.
Is that what I am doing?
We're in an emergency right? Shouldn't we act like it? Seattle and Portland declared a state of emergency on the homeless issue in 2015. What will empathy get us in a state of emergency? Many progressive people I know have exhausted their empathy for the homeless. If that number grows, we might really well be in trouble. Interestingly enough, there are many Americans and their politicians who believe exhibiting a lack of empathy is exactly what the problem needs, you know the old bootstrap saw.
What are the stories out there that need telling? Where are they hiding? Who is not telling them? Is there a way to approach them systemically, which I am certainly not doing. It's totally random. Maybe that's a fresh approach.
I must move into the stories. Listen. Observe. Meander into new situations. Document more. And work with all deliberate speed. Remember when that phrase was used to address a massive American social and political problem?