Sentimentality vs. Compassion
I almost let 2024 slip away without a column about the 30th anniversary of The Homeless, an important book by scholar Christopher Jencks published in 1994. It included these sentences: “The homeless are indeed just like you and me in most respects. . . . But important as such similarities are, our differences are also important. To ignore them when we talk about the homeless is to substitute sentimentality for compassion.”
Advocates, Jencks noted, “want to convince the public that the homeless are victims of circumstances beyond their control, [but that] inspires incredulity among the worldly, and it leads the credulous to underestimate how much help the long-term homeless really need.”
Jencks cited major reasons for homelessness, including abolition of involuntary commitment for the mentally ill, a lowered frequency of marriage by women with children, long-term joblessness among working-age men, and the destruction of cheap skid row housing.
Little has changed in 30 years, except for the number of immigrants. Back then, mental illness was evident: Some studies showed that one-third of homeless interviewees heard voices or noises that others could not hear, saw things others could not see, thought they had special powers, or felt their mind was taken over by external forces. I’ve heard many similar accounts in recent interviews.
Back then, civil liberty lawyers “thought individual autonomy so important that they could hardly imagine patients who would be better off when other people told them what to do.” Same deal today, even when that policy endangers others. Jencks wryly remarked, “America has always been a land of second chances. Violent psychotics get a second chance just like everyone else.”
What about substance abuse? Jencks described crack cocaine addicts who could afford low-level indoor accommodation but preferred a crack high: realistically, he wrote, “a significant proportion of today’s homeless will spend any additional cash they receive on drugs or alcohol.” He estimated the proportion as somewhere between one- and two-thirds of the homeless population. Today, while prices vary from city to city and month to month, a crystal meth high per hour is cheaper than a crack cocaine high. With fentanyl use, the overdose hazard is greater.
Jencks offered various cultural theories for homelessness, including the decline of marriage. Poor women with children out of wedlock were endangered from the start, and unskilled men outside of marriage wandered. Maybe “men work regularly at unrewarding jobs only if the people with whom they live depend on their earnings to make ends meet.” Smaller families mean fewer opportunities to couch surf. Potentially, homeless people “are more likely to have grown up with only one parent and one sibling.” If invitations from them are not forthcoming, “they often have no claim on anyone else.”
Jencks also wrote about the moral hazard inherent in well-meaning government programs, such as sponsoring subsidized housing and giving homeless individuals priority.
“If doubled-up families know this, some of them will begin wondering how long they would have to spend in a shelter to get a permanent subsidy. . . . Some actually told inquiring journalists that they had moved into a shelter or a welfare hotel in order to qualify for subsidized housing.”
Jencks discussed the upside of behavioral rules, noting that,
“Shelters are like neighborhoods: once ‘undesirables’ move in, everyone else tries to move out. No sensible person wants to spend the night in a dormitory that admits all comers, drunk or sober, sane or mad, violent or catatonic.”
A downside was inevitable: Many homeless individuals “avoid shelters with strict rules.” Jencks stressed that “whatever housing entitlement we adopt for the homeless must be available to everyone else as well. Otherwise, we will create both perverse incentives and egregious inequities.”
Jencks saw that finances would not allow giving tens of thousands in expensive cities their own apartments. He proposed building new cubicle hotels that would charge small amounts so that four hours of work would pay for room and board: private spaces but not private apartments. (Otherwise, getting an apartment becomes like winning the lottery.) Jencks proposed public day labor markets, with jobs cleaning up parks or public buildings for those who couldn’t get day jobs.
Jencks concluded that America had big cultural and economic problems, yet only a small minority of the populace became homeless. Why? Jencks noted that even the mentally ill often had friends or family members willing to make room. That’s not all that different from today, although family breakdowns, spiritual problems, and deindustrialization effects may be more severe. Thirty years after Jencks wrote, we’re no closer to solutions.
Happy New Year.