“Homelessness in America”: Stephen Eide’s Eye on Reality
My third and last book to recommend this month is Stephen Eide’s Homelessness in America: The History and Tragedy of an Intractable Social Problem (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).
Author Stephen Eide has a Ph.D. in political philosophy but two compensating merits: He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute rather than a trekker on the tenure trail, and he writes for publications that people actually want to read, like Politico, the Wall Street Journal, and even the New York Post. He knows history: “Urban renewal did not much improve the lives of the homeless, but it did destroy their housing and neighborhoods.” He discards euphemisms and takes seriously a person who is mentally ill, instead of calling him merely a “person experiencing homelessness.”
Eide’s book came out on the 30th anniversary of a 1992 New York Times interview with Nancy Wackstein, a former New York City bureaucrat and homeless advocate. He quotes what she said then that is even more evident now: “Like every advocate in town, I had hewed to the party line that the solution to homelessness is housing. The belief was that if you focused on drug problems or family breakdown, you played into that blaming-the-victim mentality.” We’ve had 30 years of lying, with the goal of gaining public support for “Housing First” policies, but Eide concentrates on root causes rather than roof ones.
Eide also knows that, hard a problem as homelessness is now, a century ago a higher percentage of Americans were homeless. He knows the words used in those bad old days: hobo (someone who moved and worked), tramp (moved and didn’t work), and bum (didn’t move, didn’t work). Cities now have tents along freeways, but Eide quotes historian Arthur Schlesinger’s description of life back then: “With no money left for rent, unemployed men and their entire families began to build shacks where they could find unoccupied land. Along the railroad embankment . . . there appeared towns of tarpaper and tin.”
So homelessness is not new, but much of it in our more affluent society is “iatrogenic.” That’s a word for an illness or injury caused by a medical or surgical treatment. Declared an enemy instead of a way to keep people from sleeping on streets, thousands of SRO (single room occupancy) hotels bit the dust: Many had smells, noises, shared bathrooms, and plywood walls topped with chicken wire, but beds were cheap and better than cement or dirt. In life the perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good, and the good is sometimes the enemy of the bad-but-better-than-nothing.
The closing of psychiatric hospitals and asylums also had iatrogenic effects. Eide notes that from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s “the average length of a psychiatric hospitalization fell from 211 days to 38,” and people on the street “die with their rights on.” Mentally ill persons who won a lawsuit that gave them independent living were soon in “waste-strewn apartments swarming with bugs,” leading to “gruesome infections and other health problems.”
Eide makes good policy suggestions, starting with “Share more housing.” He points out that some people want to avoid doubling up in apartments, but that’s better than being on the streets — and we should explore ways to make doubling up more tolerable, and economically beneficial. He also notes that “dorm-style living is not inappropriate for housing that’s supposed to be temporary and needs to be brought online rapidly to respond to a crisis.” (I’d say no one should have to sleep on the street in America, but there is no right to a private apartment wherever you want it.)
Eide wants us to “ease up on Housing First requirements in federal programs.” In response to the slogan “Housing is Healthcare,” he notes some studies of “permanent supportive housing” that show residents tend to die at a remarkably high rate. We may prioritize housing over working, but what if giving housing vouchers to a large cohort of homeless families reduces the adult head’s level of employment? In any event, we should “take a ‘fix it first’ approach to affordable housing: redouble efforts to work with the current stock, even if low-quality.”
Many homeless advocates operate high on the ladder of abstraction, but Eide knows we should go lower and pay attention to addiction, unemployment, untreated schizophrenia, and other deep challenges, rather than saying a rise in housing lifts all boats. Eide reminds all who think of government as savior that the “thread of good government reform’s unintended consequences runs throughout the history of urban renewal, vagrancy law, and deinstitutionalization.”