The New Homeless

They are instantaneously recognizable—their fear is unmistakable. Their clothing is clean, matching and often they are trailing a large suitcase.  They hang back timidly, tears welling up in their eyes.  The environment is crowded and chaotic.  The staff is crazily busy, and the mix of people is representative of those who society deems unwanted. Most often it is the very first time that they have even met or spoken to a homeless person—perhaps they are remembering how they averted their eyes to avoid seeing what can now no longer be avoided. 

This day is the first day of their homelessness. 

If they are lucky, they will speak to a staff person who will give them a dizzying array of information and resources. If they are even luckier, they will speak to another homeless person who will guide them for a few days, showing them where to eat, where to sleep, and, most important of all, the places that are dangerous to them. This is important knowledge, certainly, and sometimes lifesaving information.  However, there is more subtle knowledge to be had, much of which involves unlearning the conventional values of our culture. 

We are taught to value our possessions and to care for them well. It makes housed people angry sometimes when they see their donations carelessly strewn on the ground and abandoned or thrown away. Yet, when you must carry all your possessions on your back, how do you choose which to keep? By weight?  By season of the year? By financial value? By sentiment or emotion?  Each decision must be carefully made. Even a day of pulling a suitcase with you makes it crystal clear that you must lighten your load. 

We are taught to protect others.  It shocks the middle class listener to learn that protecting a person they perceive as vulnerable may in fact profoundly endanger a homeless person. There may be alliances, business relationships, previous sexual partnerships, and acts of revenge simmering under the surface appearance of any conflict. The conflict that appears unjust may be a beating in return for the rape of a friend or girlfriend.  Vigilante justice sounds unappealing but at times it is the only justice people feel is available. Even one day of acknowledging the nature and power of the alliances that spur on this vengefulness is frightening. 

We are taught to trust the police and believe that they will protect us. Once you have slipped down this particular rabbit hole, you learn that the power of the police is far greater than you may ever have known as a housed person. You can be stopped for any reason and asked to produce ID. You can be asked to move locations even if your behavior is completely law-abiding. You can be arrested for sleeping  (or in some states) for being fed in a public place. Most police are trustworthy but there are those that hate homeless people and to question them can be dangerous. 

We are taught to tell the truth. Yet, telling the truth can keep you homeless longer. Those that are known to be homeless are discriminated against in employment and housing.  In the crazy byzantine world of human services, if you tell the truth, you may well come up against eligibility requirements; catch 22 rules, and the terrible scarcity of resources necessary for day-to-day survival. 

Before you judge the person whom you think has blithely lied to you or used your donation carelessly, consider how little you may know about how to survive in this world. If it is your turn to stand hesitantly in the doorway of a homeless shelter, you may learn to perceive the world differently.  

 Joy Eckstine is executive director at the Carriage House Community Table in Boulder, a licensed clinical social worker and a level III addiction counselor.

August 2011 Editor's Note

I was walking to my car near the greyhound station on 19th and Curtis when he stopped me. He muttered something about being cast out and did I have 50 cents. I didn’t, but I made a firm stop to hear him out—not the turn-your-head-over-your-shoulder-and-say-no-as-you-walk-past routine. I think he liked that, so he walked with me for a bit. 

It was cloudy and cool and I welcomed the strange company. He chattered on relentlessly. Something about getting anchored in hell; some strange mixed metaphor about getting married. Beneath a patchy beard I noticed a pinky-wide smooth patch of skin that ran horizontally across the left side of his throat, right down to his Adam’s apple. A thought raced through my brain before I could stop it. The thought was that he must have spent some time doing that. It wasn’t a nice, neat cut. It was wide, like he worked at idet with a plastic knife or something, desperately trying to cut something out.

I don’t know if he noticed me notice this about him, but a minute or so later in his stream of consciousness monologue, he just out of the blue said, “See, this is where I tried to kill myself because I hear voices.” A short pause, then he continued his monologue. 

A month ago I would have assumed he had schizophrenia, but just as we were parting a different thought started to take shape in my brain. Speculation. The way you inevitably start to build a story for the people you meet, filling in the empty spaces to make a cleaner, or at least more complete, picture. This thought taking shape went back to an issue that Street Roots (the Portland, Oregon street paper) wrote about in June, and that we’re exploring again in this edition of the Denver VOICE—Traumatic Brain Injury. 

Nick Patton, the person interviewed for their story, had a severe brain injury. He was homeless, and for years was passed off as schizophrenic. He heard voices and was given anti-psychotic medication to no avail. Only after several years did a doctor discover that small seizures, stemming from an old traumatic blow to the head, were causing the hallucinatory effects. He is now being treated with anti-seizure medication that is helping to control the voices and hallucinations.

Researchers and caseworkers are beginning to see brain injury as a more prevalent diagnosis for many homeless individuals. On the extreme end, one study in Ontario said 98 percent of homeless participants had experience traumatic brain injuries. Several other studies (cited at length in “Getting Ahead of Homelessness” on page 7) demonstrated significant correlation as well. 

While well short of preventing homelessness, being aware of this potential diagnosis can create a clearer picture of what people are going through. Brain injuries can cause victims to appear drunk, drugged or mentally unstable. They can cause people to become irrationally aggressive or loud. The things that generally make up negative stereotypes of homelessness might really be symptoms of a severe injury, and if we can start to identify those symptoms, we might be able to help people recover. 

Like Nick Patton, the man I met the other day might not be “crazy.” I can’t say and personally can’t do much about his individual case, but as a community of homeless service providers, we should coordinate our efforts and improve our ability to identify these cases. The evidence for how pervasive brain injuries are among the homeless is irrefutable, and we’ll have far better outcomes for the people we serve if we’re treating the right problems.

A Note from the Executive Director

Hello! My name is Herb Angle, Jr., the new Executive Director of the Denver VOICE newsmagazine. Like all non-profits, we struggle to make ends meet each month. We have a dedicated staff that works here because they believe that providing a quality product that creates a job for a homeless person is a worthy effort. We provide this paper to homeless vendors for $.25 and have done so since 2006 in order to ensure that they can earn enough money vending the paper to increase their chances of renting a decent place to reside. 

The problem with this equation is the remaining $.75 of the cost of producing the papers. We walk a tight rope every month to produce a product critical to the survival of Denver’s homeless. We have several board members who contribute considerable funds each month to help keep us afloat, but we’ve grown so much that their funds alone can’t sustain the project. Therefore, we must reach out to our donors—the people who support Denver VOICE vendors every month and know how important this paper is. 

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Catch 22 in the People's Republic

“I have to sleep. I go where no one sees me. I get up before it’s light. I do the best I can not to be a violator. But if I choose to stay here, I have to break the law.”

 —Mike Fitzgerald, homeless recipient of six camping tickets

By Tom deMers

When you ask Boulder city councilwoman KC Becker about the tickets given to Boulder’s outdoor residents, aka rough sleepers, she mentions the 10-year plan to end homelessness. It’s a kind of mantra for city officials. Becker calls it a “systemic solution for the long term.”  Okay, but what about years 1-9? How about tonight? “We have a camping ordinance because we have to decide on the best use of our resources,” she says, “in order to keep the city successful. You can be led by your compassionate part or you can focus on permanent housing solutions like Housing First.”

Listening to Becker at the University of Colorado’s law school one evening in April, I wondered why we couldn’t do both. Why we insist on waking rough sleepers with a flashlight and a $100 ticket, all the while planning for Nirvana down the road? Some strange disconnect between the punitive present and the redemptive future. Why not, I wondered, phase the 10-year plan in now as Boulder shelters are closing for the season and a few hundred men and women are forced to sleep rough and break the law? In total, according to the most recent Point in Time survey conducted in Boulder, there are 914 homeless men, women and children in Boulder county on any given night. Where are they all supposed to go?

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Facing Mortality

“It is difficult to think of dying consciously when we notice how incomplete we feel, how frightened we are of life. It is almost as though we were never completely born, so much of ourselves is suppressed and compacted just beneath the surface. So much postponed.”

 —Stephen Levine, Who Dies?

 By Tom deMers

Hank appeared at my door looking exhausted. He was unusually thin. A few months earlier he’d had a tumor removed. He spent the weeks between then and now pursuing treatment, but not the chemotherapy his doctor advised. Instead he chose to go after a worsening of his longtime digestive problems, which now included diarrhea. It was a few days before Christmas when Hank showed up. Although he was Jewish, I’d often sent him a Christmas present. I hugged him and told him he was our baby Jesus. He also had a gift for us although it wasn’t evident at the time. Two months later and two months before his 66th birthday, Hank died.

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