By Anna Daniels
Quick— imagine a homeless person. Did you conjure up the image of an utterly ordinary looking seventy year old white woman attending classes at SDSU? or a neatly dressed young Latino waiting at a bus stop? or a pregnant African American woman passing by your house? or a neighborhood kid who disappears and reappears and seems disconnected, rootless?
We don’t hear much about these men and women, young and old, who are homeless. Instead, we read about the uptrodden who have to deal with homeless people crapping on the sidewalk in front of their expensive condos downtown or the bad optics and shabby aesthetics of the tents and battered pieces of cardboard where the homeless visibly bed down every night, also downtown.
The reflexive stereotyping of the homeless demands little of us individually and collectively. It is therefore no surprise that our civic efforts in housing the homeless in San Diego have been such a dismal failure.
It will continue to be a dismal failure as long as property owners, not the homeless themselves, are seen as the real victims of our inability, if not unwillingness, to recognize the complex ways in which massive wealth inequality, decades of war, the lack of mental health services, misogyny and racism have left whole swaths of our society vulnerable to homelessness.
I did not leave my house in City Heights with the intent to find and write about homeless people. Random conversations across the front gate of my home, in a maternity ward, on a college campus and at a nearby bus stop have revealed the chilling, creeping reach of homelessness. Initially I was stunned to find so many people who don’t look homeless revealing that they are unhoused and hungry. Now I am stunned by how many homeless are among us who remain invisible and uncounted.
Eviction from public housing Shawna appeared at the gate in front of my home in City Heights last summer. It was late at night and I was sitting on the porch. She initially asked for a cigarette, but then said “I’m hungry. Do you have anything to eat?”
She eventually told me that she was sleeping at night in an unsecured empty apartment a few doors away. I had never seen her—she would slip out of the apartment very early in the morning while it was still dark to avoid detection. Her days were long and exhausting and she was terrified of being alone at night in the empty apartment. She spent time in the local library, appreciative of the public computers, books and comfortable chairs. She would shower at the Y. I would also find out that she was twenty weeks pregnant.
When I met Shawna she had been homeless for almost a year. She had previously lived with her four children in Section 8 subsidized housing. A family member would often stop by to spend time with her and the children. At times he was homeless and would stay with her. When he was charged with a crime while staying with her she lost her housing. Harboring someone involved in criminal activities was a violation of policy. She also lost custody of her children who were put in foster care and every shred of financial assistance that she had relied upon.
When losing your job means losing your home Joey approached me while I was waiting at the crosswalk for the light to change on University Avenue. He said that he was hungry and asked if I could help him out. I had just eaten lunch with a friend and had a large portion of it in a to go box which I handed to Joey.
Joey was not just hungry—he was also homeless and unemployed. He had worked as a live in personal care attendant for an older man with disabilities. When the man’s condition deteriorated and he had to leave his home to live in a chronic care facility, Joey lost both his home and employment. He was waiting for his unemployment checks to arrive and found it almost impossible to apply for jobs while he was couch surfing with friends or living in the streets when he had worn out his welcome.
Joey has not been homeless very long. His vulnerability and sense of bewilderment were palpable.
When rent becomes unaffordable I met Lorraine at San Diego State University. We fell into an easy conversation, two older women talking about feeling isolated on a campus filled with energetic young students. Lorraine was taking advantage of a tuition free program for senior citizens and loved the opportunity it provided to continue the education she had started at a community college.
I was not prepared to hear her confide that she is living in her car. She said that her rent had become unaffordable on her fixed income.
Falling through the cracks in the foster care system When I visited Shawna in the hospital when she delivered her beautiful little baby boy, she introduced me to her friend Robert John, who looked familiar to me. He had lived in City Heights off and on for a number of years while he was in and out of foster care during his adolescence.
When he was removed from his home by Child Protective Services, his uncle provided him a foster home. It was a rancorous situation for Robert John and he would leave, stay with friends or find shelter in a City Heights alley and then return to his uncle’s house. His school attendance was intermittent and then he dropped out completely. By the age of eighteen he had been without a stable home for a full decade.
Could you go from housed to homeless? Conservatives are quick to point out the poor judgement, lack of responsibility and moral failings of people who are homeless. The implication of course is that those of us who are housed exercise good judgement, defer immediate gratification and are morally upright.
That narrative is infinitely more comforting than acknowledging that so many of us who are currently housed are one rent increase, one catastrophic health emergency, one car breakdown, one paycheck away from being in the street.
How long can we hate or ignore what we, too, may become?
Author note: I have changed the names of all the people in this article because my conversations with them were not conducted as a formal interview. I am also a property owner in City Heights.
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Anna Daniels
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Anna, thank you for being involved in this issue. I have been doing some research on affordable housing in San Diego. The first thing that I noticed is that no one on the various boards that are supposedly dealing with this crisis is from the homeless or homeless advocate community while many of them have connections with the Chamber of Commerce.
The second thing is why is the San Diego Housing Commission (SDHC) even concerned about building market rate housing. Their concern should be building housing for low income and poor people and homeless which means apartment type rental units not single family houses. Let the market take care of market rate housing. Why is government even meddling in that?
The third thing is that their one of their recommendations for bringing down cost is bringing down financing costs. The way to do that is not to go to Wall Street for financing, but to create a public bank in San Diego like they have in North Dakota. Then financing costs will not only be minimized, but profits will devolve to the San Diego General Fund meaning they will come back to the People of San Diego.
Putting 2 + 2 together, the involvement of Chamber of Commerce people plus their priority for market rate housing equals more profit for developers, and that’s really what the SDHC is all about despite their protestations to the contrary. Affordable housing is the screen they hide behind so that they can profit developers and 1 per centers who make up much of their Board and advisory groups.
thanks for sharing human stories – SD should provide more housing and services to deal with this social problem.
Thank you, Anna, for a realistic and heartbreaking documentation of the plight of the “invisible” homeless. The sad fact is that this is not only City Heights’ plight, but true of many other communities as well. The “visible” homeless downtown are well covered in the press and even they are living lives on the streets and without adequate attention and help. The problem is pervasive, but seems unfixable.
Our mayor and city council do exellent lip-service on this issue. We hear about great plans to fix our plighted neighbourhoods, help the homless, repair the streets and so on, ad infinitum.
But all we seem to focus on is big plans for big money in downtown development. Development is inevitable and necessary, but at what cost?
I have lived in San Diego for 45 years and can tell you that I have heard all this for all these years and still have not seen much change in how we run the city. The offical philosophy -if you can call it that- has not changed much. Lip-services are offered on all levels and the idea of basic human compassion and concern for longterm improvments for the truly needy, on all basic levels, continue to be neglected. America’s Finest City????
Really, just saying….
Why is the simple truth so rarely found in print, in this town?
“Instead, we read about the uptrodden who have to deal with homeless people crapping on the sidewalk in front of their expensive condos downtown or the bad optics and shabby aesthetics of the tents and battered pieces of cardboard where the homeless visibly bed down every night, also downtown.”
Thank you, Anna.
I’ve been told that most people don’t want to hear about homeless people because they don’t want to confront their own fear of becoming homeless. Stories like these that Anna shared here should evoke heartache and moral outrage in our fellow human beings. But we have all become so conditioned to misery, getting a constant dose of it in the media… getting accustomed to walking over people sleeping on the sidewalk… seeing the blue tarps draped over shopping carts… Seeing old women who can barely stand, perched on intersections with cardboard signs pleading for help… Without the outrage, how do we create the political will to make compassionate choices to change the situation? Instead, our politicians do the bidding of those with the most money/power – sweeping away the destitute like so much trash. Thank you for sharing these stories – making homeless people human is the first step towards helping them.
The minimum we all can do is, hand over a buck every day, every day,
to the first homeless person we encounter. Heartlessness is a serious
condition that worsens every day we practice it.
No… A buck here and there does not help. Even $200. Even $1000. How would $1000 help a homeless person. $600 for one month rent at the adult hostel with roaches and bedbugs crawling all over you? No thanks. I tried that and found myself much relieved to go back to sleeping on the street. So, maybe $1000 could get you first and last rent on a room in a normal shared house. But, you’re homeless. Stinky. Dirty. With staph infections. You think people in a “normal” house are gonna say come right in, borrow my loofah? Even if they did, then what? What about food, clothes, toothpaste, sheets?
So, you see? It takes more than even $1000 to get a homeless person off the streets.
Maybe $2000 could do it, but what if they get fired from that new job and can’t afford rent the next month?
Fact is, there are two types of homeless people: 1. Able bodied adults who just need to be positioned to where they can be self-sufficient. 2. People who are not able to be self-sufficient.
There needs to be different solutions based on need.
I am a PROUD and unafraid student activist. An activist that is not ashamed to announce that I have left my mark, my legacy, forever at SDSU. The ECRT, economic and crisis responce team, was created after my continual efforts in working with our administration in dealing with this issue. Their concern? “No numbers”. My goal was to first establish an oncampus food pantry…..which has led to Shirley Weber creating a bill on the issue because of all of the coverage and attention we were able to raise. I am in the middle of publishing my research. I spoke out about the issue and won the Common Experience Theme Award on my presentation “Hungry and Homeless”, and am in the midst of creating a food pantry myself with the help of AGAPE HOUSE. <3 in lak'ech. I too have suffered the effects of downturn.
These few tales are emblematic of what I say to myself when I see homeless people: there, but for fortune/grace go you or I.
Anna, I hope by reading this people will realize that they could be homeless tomorrow. We all have friends and family members that would benefit from low cost housing, or some other innovative answer to this problem.
Do you want to know the actual cause of homelessness?
It is the unnatural Western concept of “land ownership”. The native Americans, as I was taught in school, felt the notion absurd. No less absurd than someone claiming to own the air, clouds, or rain. How can you own the Earth?
Imagine if someone told you that you were tresspassing in the shade of their cloud. You might ask yourself how they came to possess that cloud in the first place. Certainly there must have been a time, e.g. shortly after the cloud appeared, when it had no owner. Clouds don’t engage in contract negotiations; so then what logical procession of events resulted in the claimant’s supposed legal ownership? Answer: a person or group of people originally took ownership through threat of force (guns, laws, royal privilege, magic, yelling, etc..)
The above actually makes logical sense when one is talking about a person’s private abode. The private space that you physically have control over and exist in, your tipi, is yours; and such a concept is so intuitively obvious to man and beast that it is not even bolstered by laws. Laws cannot govern a man’s tipi.
The confusion arises when trying to claim ownership of something you cannot physically defend perhaps because it is too vast for you to simultaneously be aware of, and control, or so vast it is simply shared by all living things as a matter of fact (e.g. air, rain, The Earth).
It seems self-evidently fair that a person could claim ownership of “this cup of water”; and no one would object. But if an ancient native American tried to claim ownership of all cups of water, and to demand rent for usage, they probably would have found an arrow in their back. Besides claiming absurdities, that guy would be trying to withold a basic human necessity from other people. And that is simply not something that is possible for one Indian to do… unless of course he were backed by the full lethal force of the United States Military-Prison-Industrial complex. In other words, our little warrior could make such claims and deprive others of their fair share, if and only if, other people with guns supported his absurd and otherwise impossible assumptions of ownership and greed. It is simply not possible for one man to concern himself with more than about one acre of land. Want two acres? Hey, wtf?! Worry about your own acre. You have fruit that needs picking, weeds that need pulling.
And that is why we have homelessness. It is not the fault of the homeless person. It is the fault of other people who have taken more than their fair share. It’s the rich person on a hill who bulldozed the native landscape and put a fence around his private hilltop. It’s sprawling middle-class homes with sterile front lawns and vacant back yards. It’s the city planners who turned every single city block into concrete, instead of… how bout, every other block? Can you imagine anything benefical arising if every single block in your town was not concrete?
Homeless people don’t take up much space. Most require no more square footage than what’s occupied by a shopping cart and a bus bench. Homeless people are not telling you it’s illegal for you to exist, beat it. Homeless people did not weave this untenable net of laws and unsustainable infrastructure, nor do they support it or desire it. Homeless people just want to be left alone, by you! It’s you who facilitated piping up all the streams so there’s no where to wash clothes. Your system that pruned all the bushes so there’s no where to relieve oneself in private. You who is unaware that food grows for free on trees, if there were any in a five mile radius of your unorganic grocery store. So now that you’ve happily taken all the free water, shade, and food and made it a crime to pee, sleep or eat, you’re comfortable paying to put people in cages for participating in those inevitable life necessities? Does that make sense?
Not only have you healthy-happily-housed fucked up your own environment, and trapped yourselves in a fucked up dystopian necropolis, you’ve gone on to fuck up other innocent people’s lives. I don’t care what justifications you can imagine; no matter what you say or laws you fabricate, sleeping (in your fruitless parks) is not a crime. Sitting (on your benchless sidewalks) is not a crime. Walking (across your lawn) is not a crime. And for Christsakes, peeing is not a crime! Just put some portapotties, geeze.
You: “Officer, arrest that vagrant betwixt my fenceposts before he sleepeth below my clouds!”
As ususal it was the technological advance of the invention of precise surveying instruments that allowed for the commodification and parcelization of land. That made it possible to buy and sell parcels of land. The Indians had no such way of dividing up and selling the land. The Western European immigrants did. Also some Indians willingly sold off parcels that they did not understand the boundaries of for a few trinkets and some firewater.
And of course superior weaponry and war resulted in the white man taking the Indians’ lands.