DANICA NOVGORODOFF/YH

Homeless need more than good intentions

I am certain that they will comfort students for many years to come, since no one in New Haven city government seems capable of getting them off the streets. Perhaps some extreme measures are in order. I have heard the Swiftian suggestion that we ought to eat our homeless, though that seems an unlikely solution—they're far too stringy and they lack vital nutrients.

Or maybe we could found a "homeless barge," a low-rent Love Boat, the U.S.S. Emma Lazarus, which could ferry our homeless from state to state, asking if anyone will take "our tired, our poor" out of the kindness of their hearts. And if the ship were to disappear, the unforeseen victim of an iceberg, what more prosaic end to our city's problems could one imagine?

If these ideas seem unforgiveably cruel, they have at least one advantage over the New Haven plan: they actually do something for the homeless population. The current model makes my barge concept sinisterly literal. In New England's most frigid weather, homeless are asked to go from one shelter to another, Columbus House to the Cedar Street Shelter to Immanuel Baptist to the Overflow Center, like a boat seeking a friendly port. Instead of lamenting these deplorable circumstances, administrators congratulate themselves on efforts they acknowledge are inadequate and crow that their $1.4 million annual homeless budget is far higher than any city in the region. Apparently, it is not high enough.

Last Sun., Jan. 31, homeless New Havenites expressed their grievances outside City Hall at a Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project-sponsored speak-out. Shouting both prepared and impromptu statements into megaphones, they told stories of winter overcrowding, mistreatment by staff, and unhygienic living conditions in overflow shelters.

In response, they got rhetoric and empty promises. Director of New Haven Human Services Alma Ayala, CC '86, for example, the only New Haven administrator to attend the event, echoed the dubious comments that she had made in the Herald several weeks ago ["Unexpected cold spurs one shelter to action," 1/21/00]. Here is why she claimed New Haven only needs extra beds in the winter: "A portion of our clients spend most of the year in places other than shelters—the shelters aren't a very pleasant place, you know." This is the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt. If the shelters are unpleasant, don't they need to be improved and made more pleasant? Ayala continues, "They stay with family or friends; some people stay under bridges." Evidently, the grime and car fumes surrounding municipal construction are far preferable to city-funded projects.

The difficulty isn't so much the statement of unacceptable conditions as their acceptance as status quo. Admittedly, homeless people aren't always easy to help; many suffer from mental health disorders, others are inveterate drug users. A large group also actively avoids using municipal services for fear of criminal prosecution.

Yet, there must be more to do than irresolute head shaking. Perhaps the problem is endemic to a system where the cure is just as bad, if not worse, than the affliction. Escaping homelessness means not only living in admittedly substandard government subsidized conditions. It also involves submitting to a potentially humiliating and dehumanizing system. During an interview I conducted last year at Davenport House, a transitional housing facility for men, my subject referred to his movement off the streets in the terms of divine salvation—the standard rhetoric of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is also no mistake that many shelters and homeless support projects (like Inner City and other "homeless" newspapers sold in New Haven) are sponsored by church groups. Churches embrace the poor as part of their charitable mission. They also make homelessness into a moral issue as well as an economic one.

This language of morality might be appropriate for self-improvement, but it transfers too readily into the public sector. "Poor" easily becomes equated with "bad," to the extent that it often seems like people without houses deserve what they get. No one, I think, questions the dedication of the people working to fight homelessness. However, the shelters won't improve until the stigma improves, and until "poor people" can be perceived as more than an unfortunate problem to be solved.

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