In this series
In this series
While staying in homeless shelters as a reporter, I heard dozens of stories of abuse, many of which I was able verify with court records and counselors. One person whose story particularly moved me was Michael, a felon and poet who lived downstairs from where I stayed in an old Joplin, Missouri, building called The Forge.
Michael was a participant in The Forge’s 16-month program. During breaks in the schedule and over meals in the dining area, he gradually offered details about his past, and I’m relaying them here after asking staffers about them. Michael grew up the only boy among five sisters, an overwhelmed mom, and a Hell’s Angels stepfather who “never called me by my name, always called me Susie” (after the song “A Boy Named Sue”).
His stepdad beat him: Once, when Michael cried, the stepdad made him put on a dress and stand in front of the stepdad’s pals: “That humiliated me real bad.”
It’s no surprise that Michael ran away from home and, starting at age 13, stole cars. Time spent at the Boonville Correctional Center didn’t correct him: “It was a gladiator school for people from 18 to 25 where I learned how to do more crimes.” Michael surrounded himself with drug addicts, knifed one of them, and spent six years in prison.
Other crimes put him behind bars for 17 more years, “and in prison,” he told me, “you’re either white or Black.” For self-protection, Michael joined the Aryan Brotherhood, which “was full of hatred and bred more hatred.” In and out of prison, he became a soldier in drug wars. In 2016, while he was sleeping, a competitor shot him in both legs: “Getting shot opened my eyes.”
Later, he lived for four months in a house where everyone else was Black. “That cured me of racism,” he said, but it didn’t cure everything. Michael quit selling drugs and made some money by tattooing but kept messing up. He started writing poems: “Comfortable with the pain, alone is where I live / At the bottom once again, without a lot to give / Another tear, another year, will I ever make it home?”
I’ll tell more of Michael’s story later in this series. Sadly, it’s a fairly typical story for those who live on the street. More than half of homeless adults hold in their memories four or more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), which include repeated physical, sexual, or emotional abuse and neglect, and exposure to domestic violence. William Wordsworth observed in 1802 that “the child is father to the man,” and ACEs are often the father to adult problems.
When families are catastrophes, the common solution now is foster care—but abundant research shows a “foster-care-to-homelessness pipeline.” Large studies have shown that 31 to 46 percent of homeless adults have foster care backgrounds, with the average number of foster placements at seven or eight. The results include a long list of troubles: attachment problems, anxiety, eating disorders, separation anxiety, personality disorders, and more.
In theory, foster care replaces troubled birth parents with competent and caring foster parents. But in practice, when children are moved so often, they lose not only consistent parenting but any relationships they’ve developed with teachers or friends at school. Moved-around children feel no place is home: If a place begins to feel like home, many among the homeless feel they are fooling themselves. Foster care can be training for homelessness.
Rob Henderson’s Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class shows how his ten placements left him unable to see “reliable connections between good choices and good outcomes and bad choices and bad outcomes.” Whether he was good or bad, Henderson learned, he could still be moved. University of Texas social work dean Rebecca Jean Gomez similarly writes that foster care “encourages dependency [and] learned helplessness.”
Leaving children in abusive homes is no solution. I know that from my interviews but also from papers by Nebraska professor Kimberly Tyler on pungent topics like “Growing Up Before Their Time,” “The Effect of Victimization,” and “Trading Sex.” Her article in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence quoted homeless people regarding their childhood influences: “My dad and my mom both drank really hard … My grandfather died from alcohol abuse … My dad’s three brothers are all alcoholics and do drugs … My cousins, they’re all drug dealers … Dad gets abusive every time he’s drinking.”
But here we’ll look at the good news in the bad numbers. While around one-third to one-half of people with foster care experience some homelessness by the time they turn 26, that means one-half to two-thirds never become homeless. Foster care does help many, and most adults with multiple ACEs are not helpless or a threat to others. They may victimize themselves with drugs, alcohol, and other risky behaviors, but they can also find jobs and build lives for themselves.
Deprived of embedded family relationships and accustomed to being on the move, many have it tough. They often have to find places to stay at the bottom end of the housing market. I’ve written before and will show in this series why and how social Darwinists and social universalists—idealistic but unrealistic—ended up destroying the bottom. But I don’t want to rush to a discussion of affordable housing before looking at why some people are more likely to be homeless than others.
After all, one survey showed that more than half of American adults do not have enough savings to cover three months of expenses. A Federal Reserve report said that 51 percent could not cover an expense of $2,000 or more using only savings. But only 1 percent of Americans become homeless in any given year, which means most figure out other solutions, including help from families or friends.
Those on the edge, unless they have severe mental illness, usually still have agency—the ability to stay on their feet. But those with a fistful of ACEs are more likely to fall off a cliff.
