National Housing Law Project Housing Law Bulletin

Another Look at Homelessness in America: Two New References

There's No Place Like Home

There's No Place Like Home¹ is a collection of essays that address the lack of shelter - one of the most basic elements of human adaptation - now experienced by many Americans. Based on the presupposition that shelter is a basic human right in the world's richest nation, the authors of these essays look closely at the causes of the current low-income housing crisis and homelessness. Ten anthropologists and a mental health worker use participant observation and other ethnographic methods to observe and document the experiential and geographic diversity of homelessness in this country. Each chapter focuses on a specific geographic area - urban, suburban or rural - and a specific category of homeless people - families with children, single adults, or both. Based on their findings, the authors present policy recommendations to ameliorate the housing shortage and prevent homeless at local, state and federal levels. The book also contains an index and a list of references.

One critic has remarked:

The anthropologists' lens employed in these essays throws a new and vivid light on the experience of homelessness in America. It is a problem with which we have grown weary. But these essays recapture our attention and revive our moral conscience by showing how totally homelessness changes and damages the human struggle for a life.²

Another has called the book a "must read for citizens and policy-makers."³

There's No Place Like Home was edited by Anna Lou Dehavenon, founder and Director of the Action Research Project on Hunger, Homelessness, and Family Health. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology in Community Medicine at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine (CUNY).

How to order. There's No Place Like Home may be ordered by sending payment to the Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 88 Post Road West, P.O. Box 5007, Westport, CT 06881-5007. Cost: $55 + $4.00 shipping and handling ($5.00 to Canada; $1.00 for each additional book to the United States or Canada). Maryland, Connecticut and Canadian residents are subject to applicable taxes. To place a credit card order, call 1-800-225-5800.

Homelessness in New York City

The Action Research Project on Hunger, Homelessness and Family Health has just issued its eighteenth annual report on the increasingly desperate situation facing homeless families in New York City.⁴ It is based on direct observation and in-depth interviews with 220 families who sought shelter at the city's Emergency Assistance Unit (EAU) and another 280 families who were interviewed while they still lived doubled up in the apartments of friends or relatives because they could not afford their own. The report cites four principal factors contributing to the current state of affairs. First, there is less permanent housing available to homeless families already in the shelter system, due to:

• the city's continuing failure to implement a special permanent housing subsidy program for homeless families, as recommended in 1992 by the New York City Commission on the Homeless;
• the recent city reductions in rent supplements paid to landlords under the EARP/Section 8 housing program, and the reduction in the number of New York City Housing Authority and Housing Preservation and Development apartments available to homeless families; and
• Federal government cutbacks on Section 8 rent subsidies. Less available housing has put increased pressure on the shelter system and the city's last remaining Emergency Assistance Unit.

Second, the city continues to advance its goal of reducing the number of shelter units available to homeless families, including the privatization of the family shelter system. The matter has gotten even worse through the city's administrative policy of "churning," whereby after two nights at the shelter, homeless families are shunted off to an "Assessment Center" for another night or two, only to have their cases closed and be told that they could reapply for shelter after "staying out" of the system for at least 24 hours. Staying out often meant spending the night in the subway, in building hallways, or outside "on the green grass" or on the street. This cynical revolving door policy has enabled the city to claim that it now "places" families within two days of coming to the EAU.

Third, since 1995, the city has narrowed its definition of homeless and deemed automatically ineligible for the EAU those families who had been doubling up with friends or relatives - no matter how untenable or tenuous their situations may have been. In many cases, doubled up families faced eviction. With statistics and wrenching case histories, the report repudiates the notion that most doubled-up families were merely feigning homelessness and actually had housing to which they could return. Finally, the general political climate, exemplified by last year's passage of welfare reform and the increasing criminalization of homelessness, is generally hostile to poor people and less sympathetic to the daily problems they face in meeting their most basic needs.

In addition to its description and analysis of poor people's efforts to access the EAU, including copious personal accounts of individual experiences, the report contains 23 recommendations for city, state and federal action to prevent family homelessness and a list of reference works. Appendices include New York City's August 23, 1996, Guidelines for Determining Eligibility of Doubled-up Families for Temporary Housing Assistance; a discussion of recent and ongoing litigation relating to operation of the EAU and assessment centers; Action Research Project's questionnaires for EAU applicants and for host and guest families living in doubled-up situations.

The report concludes:

[T]he ability of these families to perform basic domestic functions in accordance with the norms of contemporary American culture was absolutely compromised by their lack of housing. Therefore, it is also concluded that a generation of low-income children has been exposed to the threat of the serious mental and behavioral stress and illness associated with the doubled-up conditions this report documents and further isolation from American life because of their poverty.⁵

How to order. Copies of From Bad to Worse may be ordered from the Community Food Resource Center, 212-344-0195, fax. 212-344-1422, 90 Washington St., NY, NY 10006. $10 includes postage and handling. Note: Please make checks payable to the Action Research Project (or ARP).

¹There's No Place Like Home: Anthropological Perspectives on Housing and Homelessness in the United States, Anna Lou Dehavenon, ed. (Westport, CT, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996) (ISBN 0-89789-484-7) (232 pp.). See end of this section for details on ordering copies.

²Frances Fox Piven, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, City College of New York.

³Carol Stack, author of Call to Home and Professor of Women's Studies and Education, University of California at Berkeley.

⁴The Action Research Project on Hunger, Homelessness, and Family Health, From Bad to Worse at the Emergency Assistance Unit: How New York City Tried to Stop Sheltering Homeless Families in 1990 (Dec. 1996) (120 pp.). The Action Research Project is located at 1150 Fifth Avenue, Suite B, New York, NY 10128, Tel. (212) 289-0768, Anna Lou Dehavenon, Ph.D., Project Director. See end of this article for information on ordering a copy.

³From Bad to Worse at 99.