In this series
In this series
“We need a witness for a hearing. Can you get us a homeless family: mother, father—father out of work in the past four months from an industrial plant?”
That’s the question many politicians and journalists addressed to “homeless advocates” in the 1990s, as described by economist Thomas Sowell in his powerful book The Vision of the Anointed. I had the 500 freshman and sophomore communications students in my class at The University of Texas at Austin read it, because that question was not the right question to ask if the goal was and is to get an accurate sense of homelessness.
Homeless families in that mold exist, of course, especially following layoffs and illnesses. It’s important to tell their stories and show practical compassion to homeless families in real crisis, especially those headed by single moms as they usually are. (I’ll discuss their plight later in this series.)
Yet it’s also vital to view a more typical demographic among homeless people in America: men who should be responsible and instead are Naked Nomads, to borrow the still-relevant title of George Gilder’s half-century-old book regarding some “unmarried men in America.” If we avoid the reality, Sowell said, we treat homeless individuals as “mascots.”
I’ve interviewed 200 long-term homeless men since the 1990s, including many recently during my overnight stays in five homeless shelters and villages. Their stories, like those of Juan, whom I met early this summer at Community First! Village (CFV) in Austin, sometimes deepen from day to day as we spend more time together. (To protect privacy, as in other stories in this series, I’m using only Juan’s first name here.)
When Juan saw the press badge dangling from my neck, he immediately said a Seattle Times reporter had written about him two years earlier. I dug out the story, with its headline about how Seattle-area officials had come to CFV to see how it works, because they aim “to replicate Texas’ huge solution to homelessness.”
The account noted that Juan “suffers from PTSD from his time in the U.S. Navy,” that his left leg had wounds from “drugs injected directly into flesh,” and that he “goes to a methadone clinic for his opioid addiction.” It was a fine first-day story with its note that Juan “used to live in an apartment before he became homeless. But he said shared walls and hallways didn’t work for him.”
True enough—yet the story of Juan’s life is not as straightforward as it might appear when a reporter hears a brief account. On our second day of conversation, Juan began to fill in the details. He spoke of how his father instilled discipline in him as a 4-year-old by turning on the bedroom light and demanding an immediate wakeup: both feet on the floor within seconds. Then, when Juan was 5, his dad died.
Juan eventually did emergency response work on an aircraft carrier—but he started doing drugs, and the Navy dumped him. He went home, worked in low-paid jobs, and his wife dumped him too.
For years, he turned to heroin and meth, both using and selling. The cost of housing was a problem, but he stipulated to me that it did not push him into homelessness: In San Antonio, “you could have a place for under $600 a month, but all my dollars went to drugs.” He said he overdosed seven times and would be dead except for Narcan.
It’s true that housing costs are an issue. The Department of Housing and Urban Development uses 30 percent of earnings as a benchmark for affordable housing payments (including utilities) on a monthly basis—a price for rent or a mortgage that, at least in theory, leaves workers with enough to pay for everything else.
A job for $15 an hour, which puts a person at about the tenth percentile of wages (meaning only one of ten workers is paid less, while nine are paid more), means about $700 for rent plus utilities is affordable. It’s hard to find housing at that price in many cities, which means two salaries or sharing a home is essential. We’ll explore later in this series the availability of those alternatives.
A Craigslist posting for Austin this summer offered a $520-per-month bedroom in a “Comfortable Home for Responsible Tenant”— but “comfortable” comes with “responsible.” Juan acknowledges that he was not responsible. On my third day at CFV, he talked more about his history. To get heroin money, he began breaking and entering: “Peek in, no one there, kick down the door.”
In Austin, Juan paid $100 per week to stay at the Bel Air motel on South Congress when that street was a sketchy center of prostitution. He became homeless “after someone turned me in. I took off running. Lived in a cubbyhole under the bridge at Ben White and Congress.”
Juan said he did some jail time and lived for five years in the woods mostly with a girlfriend, using propane for heating in the winter: “Not bad, but you had to stay alert.” He kept dealing and using heroin and meth, but when “girls came for drugs,” his girlfriend got jealous. When she “told the cops, I was running some more.” Then he heard about Community First! Village, and decided it was time to settle down.
Juan said it took him two years to settle in at CFV and not be on edge, ready to get both feet on the floor at a moment’s notice. He’s been there several years now, is a neighborhood leader, makes all his methadone appointments, and helps out with maintenance around CFV four days a week for four hours a day. Paid $240 per week, he has enough money for his $360 rent per month for his tiny home.
Juan said he still has periodic PTSD. He described 10–15 minute “blackouts” every month or two during which he thinks someone is out to kill him: “I don’t know where I am. I never hit anyone, but I swear at them.” We interrupted one of our discussions so he could speak with a counselor, who assured him that the blackouts will not result in him being kicked out.
One part of Juan’s history makes him atypical among the chronically homeless, but not unusual among those who have found a home. As we sat one day under a huge fan by the CFV Unity Hall, home to a Sunday afternoon service, Juan offered the good news that he’s now a believer in the Good News.
