THE LIFE OF THE HOMELESS

...The deinstitutionalized homeless are only the most conspicuous and most compelling group of outcasts...

...In July 1981, a Phoenix ordinance made it a misdemeanor to lie down or sleep on public property, and that November a new zoning ordinance excluded soup kitchens and missions from the renewed downtown area...

...Luther sought, he adds, to sweep away two classes of "locusts": the papacy and its members, and "the beggars and vagabonds who imitated the Mendicant Friars in wandering up and down the country, with lying tales of distress, either of mind or body...

...The Roman playwright Plautus, for example, gives these words to one of his characters: "He deserves ill of a beggar who gives him to eat or to drink, For he both loses that which he gives and prolongs for the other a life of misery...

...Unfortunately, the extensive literature on social stratification tells us little about the political and social functions of outcast groups...

...Since the Reformation and the rise of capitalism, there has been the strong conservative tendency to label outcast groups as unworthy, undeserving, antisocial, indigent out of inertia rather than because of public apathy or private exploitation...

...Politically active or not, this outcast class is almost always a political symbol...

...But these entitlements are slipping away fast and leaving no charitable tradition of moral rights and obligations in their place...

...Based on the wholly unsupported view that big is beautiful, or cost-effective (or better for managers), even the best public officials are likely to favor huge public institutions (schools, asylums, medical complexes, shelters) over more intimate and self-managing ones...

...initiation of a pilot public-works program of jobs and stipends for willing shelter residents...

...An ordinance of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the seventh century, as reported by C. J. Ribton-Turner in A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy, published in 1887 (London: Chapman & Hall, p. 9), reads: Whosoever doth not receive a sojourner into his house, as his Lord ordaineth and promiseth of the Kingdom of Heaven therefore . . . and hath not washed the feet of the poor, nor done alms, so long let him do penance on bread and water, if he amend not...

...Luther writes that such a work "should become known everywhere, in order that men can see and understand how mightily the devil rules in this world...

...Conservatism, of course, predates industrialism...

...In the Marxist view, this class has little political significance because it lacks true revolutionary potential...

...In New York City, the most effective advocacy has been carried out in the courts, and by * Oddly enough, during the great depression of the 1930s, the mentally ill apparently played a very different role...

...A case in point is a student who told me of a young man who lives in front of one of the city's super-luxury hotels by day and in steam tunnels near the hotel by night...

...Mendicity, he says, became a distinct institution, divided into various branches and provided with a language of its own...

...The successes of the Coalition for the Homeless, at least in New York City, have been notable...

...Appalling as their condition is, it may serve some social purpose...

...In New York City and elsewhere, a new group has appeared to join the poor and outcast, relieving to some degree the stigmatizing pressures on older outcast groups...

...It's not the usual test...

...THE MEDIEVAL SYSTEM of hands-on charity was an imperfect model...

...These laws over time virtually forced the able-bodied poor into workhouse confinement, while providing some meager public assistance to the disabled...

...In fact, the outcast class has always had political meaning, usually of a passive sort, in that it may move other groups to political acts (often of a punitive sort...

...In May the editor of the Arizona Republic hailed such actions: "We didn't tolerate prostitutes—why tolerate bums...

...This group invites political interest because its symbolic associations have been unexpectedly positive for several reasons, among them: (1) the special characteristics of the group and its growing numbers and visibility in front of opulent highrisers and on the steps of elegant Manhattan brownstones and everywhere else in the city...

...Vincent de Paul Society, which, the Coalition reports, "has decided to fight...

...q The photograph on page 80, appearing here with permission, is part of the book Shopping Bag Ladies, by Ann Marie Rousseau, copyright 1981 by Ann Marie Rousseau, and published by the Pilgrim Press, New York...

...The program should include: the identification of thousands of emergency beds to be used on an as-needed basis for the winter...

...at last three hundred...

...Thus the private citizen was let off the hook while the welfare system was institutionalized, bureaucratized, and, in the worst of times, corrupted by those who dispensed welfare in an exceedingly uncharitable way...

...The public response is far more charitable than its response to the old outcast groups, perhaps because its composition is quite different...

...In the Manifesto it is a "lumpenproletariat," a dangerous class: [This] passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution: its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue...

...This book was published seven years after Luther's formal excommunication from the Catholic Church and four years after his violent denunciation of the Peasant Wars and his break with Erasmus and the Humanists...

...What we observe about one group of outcasts, the homeless in New York City, finds its reflections on a historical screen of alternating concern and contempt for the poor...

...The deinstitutionalized are far more visible than most of the poor and, more important, they are obviously "deserving" poor...

...reimbursement of nonprofit groups and the substantial assistance of religious groups that set up shelters...

...The importance of the city's relative receptivity, plus the religious connection, can be seen in a Coalition news report on an "extermination program" underway in Phoenix, Arizona...

...It includes some older inhabitants of the central city and skid row: males without families, jobs, homes, often disabled by alcoholism or other infirmities...

...City shelters and soup kitchens have been opened, the conversion of single-room occupancy hotels to more profitable purposes and the consequent eviction of their residents has been impeded, and new money for the homeless and for small residences has been obtained...

...My student spent many hours of many days trying to befriend this desperately troubled man and in the end broke through his silence, and told him of other food and shelter options available to him...

...the third presents a "vocabulary of their language or gibberish, commonly called . . . Beggar Lingo...

...no collection plates are being passed, and there is no demand for impersonal credit-card giving...

...We already know a great deal about who the homeless are and what they need, but we know much less about how to win the votes and resources needed to deal with their problems...

...Estimates derived chiefly from the Department of Health of the State of New York indicate that more than 36,000 people in New York City are homeless...

...More recently, he has filed suits against the city on behalf of homeless women, and against the state for its failure to provide suitable voluntary hospital care for those suffering from chronic mental illness...

...Other religious groups, such as the Moravian Church (which predated the Lutheran Church), have also been active...

...Private tax-paying citizens, on the other hand, may be persuaded to prefer, for their communities, the more modestly proportioned establishments, all else but size being equal...

...Departing from the Church she used to feed the poor: first three, then nine, then twenty-four...

...employment of shelter clients on the staff of all new shelters...

...Plautus revisited...

...Rather than sweeping out the "locusts" of beggars, the effect of this "pitiless" upheaval has been to multiply the number of disassociated outcasts and to diminish the compassionate regard in which they once were held...

...The first resemble the "hobos" of the 1930s in that they are mainly able-bodied young males who have been displaced by hard times from their jobs, families, shelters...

...The Coalition claims that smaller residences, run by nonprofit groups, can do a better job for less money than big public institutions...

...And the major religious groups of the city—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews— collectively decided to work on behalf of the homeless...

...The duty of hospitality to needy strangers was taught by the early Church...

...Alas, Plautus lived out his later life in poverty...

...The second group, which is of special concern here, is almost unique in our times, made up as it is of people who were, in other days, locked up in mental hospitals but now are "deinstitutionalized" or denied voluntary admission to these hospitals...

...but it also urges New York City to adopt a large, planned crash program to meet urgent need...

...The Coalition may indeed be the only potentially largescale movement concerned with the poor to survive the current war against poverty programs...

...the second gives some "notabilia" about these livelihoods...

...The book's message is essentially that most beggars are frauds and that charity should be given only to those who are known by the givers as honest beggars, even when others appear needy and possess official licenses to beg...

...While growing numbers of these homeless are apparently young jobless males who are relatively sound of mind and body, there is evidence that one-third or more of the city's homeless (estimates range up to two-thirds) suffer from some disabling psychological disorder, including chronic alcoholism...

...In the 13th century, the wife of the King of Scotland was distinguished for almsgiving: 79 During her whole life, wherever she might be, she had twenty-four persons whom she supplied with meat and clothing...

...To keep that system open, honest, vigorous —and charitable—there may be no substitute for the application of hands-on charity, to all varieties of outcast and impoverished people, by as many citizens as can be reached...

...The term "homeless" does not attach blame or a degraded "lower" status to people...

...It has resolved personal worth into exchange value...

...She learned that he had been in mental institutions but much preferred his present quarters to hospitalization...

...Accordingly, those who traded on rising welfare costs and street crime delivered this message at the polls: the poor are not only undeserving and expensive to support, they are made even more miserable and antisocial by public assistance...

...The test is onetoone, hands-on giving, and it involves more than money or mere symbolic currency...

...Obviously, the hands-on charity of passersby is no substitute for proper housing and public welfare...

...The English translator of Liber Vagatorum attributes the increase of vagabonds during the 16th century to the begging system of the Catholic friars, religious mendicants who gave to beggars "sundry lessons in hypocrisy, and taught them, in their tales of fictitious distress, 80 how to blend the troubles of the soul with the infirmities of the body...

...that is, it contains many women, whites, elderly, and large numbers of those who are indisputably and conspicuously disabled...

...Of course, the Salvation Army is there but is not much involved in the new advocacy movement...

...HOMELESSNESS, then, is symbolic not only as a designation but as a new direction in the public response to the poor...

...About the vagabond vocabulary he writes, "Truly, such Beggars' Cant has come from the Jews, for many Hebrew words occur in the Vocabulary, as any one who understands that language can perceive...

...These outcasts then came to symbolize, and in turn stigmatize, the larger groups who resembled them in their poverty, ethnic identity, or other demographic characteristics...

...3) the creative use of the courts and legal tactics in addition to traditional social work and activist approaches...

...On January 1, 1982, the Lighthouse Rescue Mission was condemned by the city after 28 years of operation, along with the Helping Hand Mission, which had functioned 34 years...

...And at times it has played an active political role...

...The organizational division of labor that established poor laws, workhouses, and public welfare allowed individuals, in a sense, to turn over their charitable impulses and obligations to those specialists who were supposed to "care for" the poor—and who often "cared very little" for them...

...She also learned that he knew his condition was 83 deteriorating and that he would probably accept an offer of decent public shelter, were it forthcoming...

...An impressive group (or movement) has been formed, first in New York City and now nationally, the Coalition for the Homeless...

...Many are especially sympathetic figures because, for the first time in memory, they are women, "shopping-bag ladies," who have known better times and are now far down on their luck, just as our own kin could some day be...

...The Community Service Society, a civic group, has taken some major organizational initiatives, and the city of New York has also been there, with a human service record at least equal to that of other American cities...

...The young leaders of the Coalition for the Homeless are perhaps right to be so suspicious of academic studies and statistics, so often offered as substitutes for action...

...The group does not seem to count much on extensive research, conferences, or actions by the homeless as means—or on the remedial efficacy of psychiatric or other professional services for them...

...He then contends that poetry became estranged from the nobility, the citizen, and the scholar (who forsook verse and rhyme for more prosaic and mercenary pursuits), and allied itself with beggars and vagrants...

...The sole remaining refuge will be the St...

...The stigma attached to the outcast, as previously noted, tends to spill over onto adjacent groups with similar characteristics, but the deinstitutionalized have no related groups...

...In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation...

...The ranks of these "old-timers" have been joined by at least two other groups...

...4) the presence of religiously motivated individuals and groups who have assumed a special mission to the homeless...

...2) the sharply critical response of many New Yorkers to current national welfare and economic policies...

...The economic and ideological reformations that severed these ties created new groups of outcasts and attached new meanings to them, as can be seen with some clarity in a small volume edited and introduced by Martin Luther in 1528 entitled Liber Vagatorum, "Book of Vagabonds and Beggars...

...The city challenges the figure but the fact that every public shelter newly opened by the city is soon filled suggests that demand far exceeds supply...

...Ribton-Turner, p. 33.] In the best of medieval times, of course, people were ordinarily attached to family groupings or communities from which they were seldom totally outcast...

...The designation for these new and old street people—"the homeless"—reflects the response of a new group of their advocates and the causes and "cures" they perceive for homelessness...

...It merely says that they are "without homes" and that their primary need is for shelter...

...RETURNING to Marx's Manifesto for traces of the profounder sources of the shifting historic conditions and meanings attached to the outcasts, we find that early in the industrial revolution the rising bourgeoisie, allied to the religious reformers, . . . put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations...

...the conversion into longer-term residences of city-owned properties in all five boroughs...

...but it may be one part of the overall political strategy of those who favor decent welfare policies...

...After the Protestants closed all Catholic monasteries in Elizabethan England, for example, the realization that the swelling ranks of beggars and vagabonds were joining in religious rebellion finally led to the enactment of the first English poor laws...

...A major park was closed to discourage sleeping, and all existing public shelters and a Salvation Army program are being shut down, along with existing soup kitchens...

...It led to the institutionalization of begging, and it failed to provide the poor with the welfare entitlements that we now cherish...

...But as a supplement to the latter, this hands-on exercise can benefit the giver as well as the recipient...

...They are isolates, and their visible presence tends to distract people from other stigmatized groups—the "undeserving and dangerous poor...

...Many citizens, of course, are repelled or terrified by the sight of so many disturbed and homeless people on their doorsteps, but an astonishing number of them respond to the homeless, especially to the "deinstitutionalized," with perplexed compassion and charity...

...The hotel's doormen provide showers for him, and others on the hotel staff, as well as passers-by, regularly give him food...

...The term is neutral rather than pejorative, unlike such designations as underclass, lower class, lower depths—or such popular words as bums, tramps, or drunks...

...Quite obviously, the mini-movement for the homeless, generated by concerned citizens, as well as by those who simply want the poor off the streets, cannot by itself turn around the nation's voters or the welfare system...

...herself standing by the King and pouring water on their hands...

...The historical dialectic of love and hate, compassion and contempt for the outcast has also played itself out in our own time, first in "the war on poverty," in which the poor themselves played an active and sometimes even violent political role, and on into the darkening period of reaction to welfare, street crime, "big government," and high taxes...

...Their presence has helped to open the doors of public shelters to other homeless people, so it may also help extend more adequate public welfare and hands-on charity to others...

...In the best of medieval times, it was likely to be a cherished symbol—the hapless children of God whose misery was a test of the faith, hope, and charity for the more fortunate...

...The Coalition's major limitation has been (as some observers see it) that, while its goals involve political advocacy, it does not yet have either the political skill or the drive to mobilize available public support...

...Hayes now has left his Wall Street law firm to work full-time for the Coalition...

...and its absence can allow citizens a certain detachment and moral distance from the harsh, punitive decisions now being made about public welfare...

...82 one lone ranger, a young lawyer, Robert Hayes, who successfully sued the city on behalf of homeless men—using the language of the state constitution concerning public responsibility for shelter...

...As for the response of religious groups, Catholics have been notably more active than others (though working far from full capacity), and to some extent the medieval poetry of the poor, the sense of the hapless and deranged being closer to God, has reappeared with the Catholic Worker group providing an active, enduring model for others...

...The word "outcast" is applied to them because it suggests what is inevitably true: their condition results from being cast off, degraded, uprooted, excluded from rewarding work—by other classes, by economic policies, and by a value system that cherishes individual achievement, despises individual failure, and is profoundly suspicious of "misfits...

...Appearing to the public as a "dangerous class" that resembled the unemployed in their homelessness, age, race, etc., they tended to stigmatize the sturdy unemployed and the legions of hobos with whom they were associated in the public mind...

...It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation...

...This is basically a political issue and one of crucial importance to the homeless and to other impoverished people...

...The group's leanings are toward advocacy and the law as means, and toward establishing smallscale residential communities for the homeless...

...In that sense, it may be a tragic but somewhat fortunate political circumstance that the institutionalized were so abruptly released from their confinement, even though they have not yet found the care and welcoming communities that were supposed to follow their release, along with an extension of their basic civil rights...

...The book has three parts: the first shows the methods by which mendicants and tramps get their living...

...5) a good and sympathetic press and, finally, the special qualities of the city and its inhabitants—that Big Apple with its fairly big heart and (relatively speaking) fairly big pocketbook...

...In New York, the charitable mettle of residents is being tested as perhaps never before...

...In the two decades following 1960, more than half a million people 81 throughout the country were deinstitutionalized, and an unknown, but perhaps similar, number have been refused voluntary hospitalization...

...This new impoverished group has come to be known as "the homeless...

...It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest and callous "cash payment...