Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness

Peter H. Rossi is the Stuart A. Rice Professor of Sociology and acting director, Social and Demographic Research Institute, University of Massachusetts.

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the contribution of the Jensen Lectureship and the American Sociological Association toward publication of this book.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1989 by Peter H. Rossi

All rights reserved. Published 1989

Printed in the United States of America

98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90     5 4 3 2

ISBN 978-0-226-16232-4 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rossi, Peter Henry, 1921–

Down and out in America : the origins of homelessness / Peter H. Rossi.

p.   cm.

Annotated bibliography of the combined homeless studies and studies of the extremely poor: p.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-226-72828-5 (alk. paper)

1. Homelessness—United States—History.   2. Urban poor—United States—History.   I. Title.

HV4504.R67     1989

362.5'1'0973—dc20         

89-31598

CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

DOWN AND OUT IN AMERICA

The Origins of Homelessness

Peter H. Rossi

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

For America’s extremely poor and homeless

Contents

Preface

1. On the Bottom and Out on the Fringe

2. The New Homeless and the Old

3. Counting the Homeless and the Extremely Poor

4. The Condition of the Homeless and the Extremely Poor: Location and Economic Circumstances

5. The Demography of Homelessness and Extreme Poverty

6. Vulnerability to Homelessness

7. Why We Have Homelessness and Extreme Poverty and What to Do about Them

Appendix A. Annotated Bibliography of the Combined Homeless Studies and Studies on the Extremely Poor

Appendix B. The Design of the Chicago Homeless Study

References

Notes

Index

Preface

Although I have been poor, I have never been extremely poor or homeless, for which I am thankful. As I will show in this book, neither condition is pleasant, healthful, or comfortable. To be extremely poor or homeless is to be outside the American mainstream: it is unpleasant, unhealthful, and full of pain. But lack of direct experience does not dictate an absence of either understanding or sympathy. I wrote this volume out of concern for the plight of the extremely poor and homeless of America and in the conviction that we must have good knowledge about both groups before we can devise effective means to alleviate their condition and adjust our institutions so that their numbers will eventually decline and, we hope, diminish to zero.

This book had its immediate origins in a survey I designed and directed on the homeless population of Chicago, but it is rooted in a lifelong concern for those on and outside the margins. My work as a sociologist has consistently centered on the policy concerns of social programs dealing with problems of the less advantaged of our society. My most fervent wish is that this book will help those who are homeless now and prevent others from falling down and out to the fringes of our society.

I owe a debt to George Orwell for paralleling the title of his insightful and sensitive Down and Out in London and Paris, one of the best descriptions of living close to destitution.

I wish I could say I had been following in Stuart A. Rice’s footsteps in studying the homeless and the extremely poor. In point of fact, at the time I chose his name for the chair I occupy at the University of Massachusetts I did not know that Rice had published several important studies of homeless men in New York during the First World War, stemming from his experience during a short term as the superintendent of New York’s Municipal Lodging House. It was a great surprise to discover that the man whose name I had chosen out of admiration for his technical contributions to social research had also done important early work on homelessness.

My labors on this book have been lightened by the help, kindness, and generosity of many people. First, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Memorial Trust provided funds so we could undertake the Chicago Homeless Study, upon which I draw heavily in this book. The Illinois Department of Public Aid also underwrote a portion of the costs. Funding the Chicago Homeless Study meant taking risks, and I admire its benefactors. It was not clear at the time they funded this research that my colleagues and I had the right solutions to the problems of studying a population whose members had no fixed abode.

Second, I have been blessed with the best possible set of colleagues and collaborators. The staff of NORC: A Social Science Research Institute were true partners in the design of a data-collection strategy that solved the knotty problem of how to reach, count, and interview homeless persons. I am especially indebted to Dr. Martin Frankel, Dr. Mary Utne O’Brien, Dr. Sara Siegal Loevy, and Ms. Ann-Sofi Roden of the NORC staff. At the Social and Demographic Research Institute (SADRI), I was fortunate to have Professor Gene A. Fisher as a working colleague. His contributions to the measurement of mental illness among the Chicago homeless are the basis for much of chapter 6. In addition, he undertook most of the task of preparing estimates of the size of the homeless population of Chicago. Ms. Georgianna Willis, an advanced graduate student at SADRI, worked prodigiously to prepare the Chicago data tapes for analysis, always with great energy and care. Professor James D. Wright also made many contributions to both the design and the analysis and was always ready to read and discuss anything I wrote.

Third, a special feature of this book is that it benefits greatly by drawing upon a variety of data sources; I was given access to them all in the true spirit of scientific collegiality. I would not have been able to enrich this work in that fashion without the extraordinary cooperation of a number of people who gave me access to their raw data. I am particularly grateful to Mr. Matthew Stagner and Dr. Harold Richman of the Chapin Hall Center for Children of the University of Chicago, who gave me copies of data from their studies of clients of Chicago General Assistance and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Professor Charles Hoch also was gracious in providing data from his study of Chicago SRO (single-room occupancy) hotel residents. Perhaps the most unusual generosity was shown by Professor William J. Wilson of the University of Chicago, who gave me copies of data from his Chicago Urban Family Life Study before he himself had had time to analyze them.

Writing this book was made far easier by a half-year sabbatical granted by the University of Massachusetts. A gracious grant from the Rockefeller Foundation made it possible for me to take a full-year sabbatical and to entice Mr. Jeffry Will as a research assistant whose skill and dogged persistence helped speed the task. I am deeply indebted to the Rockefeller Foundation’s support and to Mr. Will’s valuable help.

A quick start on the book was made possible by my being appointed to the Jensen Lectureship in Sociology and Social Policy at Duke University. The set of lectures I prepared for presentation at Duke early in my sabbatical served as a detailed outline for the manuscript that took me the rest of the leave to finish.

My tender comrade and wife, Alice S. Rossi, helped me along at every step, ready to listen to my problems and to offer advice that materially improved the book. There is no way I can overstate the value of the steady warmth, friendship, and intellectual excitement that surround me in her presence.

I have been helped by so many. May the virtues of this volume do honor to their kindness. Its faults are due to my inability to take full advantage of their help.

ONE

On the Bottom and Out on the Fringe

Portraits of the Down and Out

Extreme poverty and homelessness are useful abstractions that only dimly reflect the concrete human details of the extremely poor and the homeless. Most of this book concerns those abstractions. Some intimate knowledge of the people described by the terms extremely poor and homeless can be gleaned from this handful of composite case histories.

JOSEPH FISHER

Joseph Fisher, a black man, was thirty-three years old in 1986 when he was interviewed in a Chicago shelter. He was born in Chicago and had lived there all his life except for a two-year enlistment in the navy. His parents, now divorced, still live in that city, as do his older brother and a younger sister. Mr. Fisher did not graduate from high school, although he did qualify for a GED (general equivalency diploma) in the navy. He was employed for a short time doing factory work after his discharge in 1976 and has not worked steadily since. Mr. Fisher has been homeless this time for about eighteen months but has been homeless before for shorter periods.

Mr. Fisher looks considerably older than his age. He is thin and seems undernourished. He rates his health as very poor and says he has problems with his kidneys and heart, both conditions that impair his ability to work.

Before becoming homeless, he lived with his mother and younger sister in their apartment, but his mother asked him to leave. He would like to go back with his family but does not believe they would take him in again. He has never been married, although he fathered a child with whom he currently has no contact. He phones his mother every month or so and sometimes sleeps at her apartment.

Mr. Fisher earns ten to fifteen dollars a week hawking newspapers to drivers stopped at downtown traffic lights. Occasionally he receives some day work through a labor contractor. He was on General Assistance but somehow lost his eligibility. Mr. Fisher would like to have steady work but no longer even tries to find regular employment.

Mr. Fisher sleeps most nights in a shelter run by evangelical missionaries, lining up with several hundred others in the late afternoon to be signed in and receive a bed assignment. In the mornings the shelter turns him out. Some days he can get a batch of newspapers from a circulation truck that comes to the shelter looking for men to peddle them. Most days he spends wandering around within a few blocks of the shelter, getting lunch from a local food kitchen. Sometimes he panhandles.

Mr. Fisher is an alcoholic: when he has money, he often spends it on cheap wine, sometimes sharing his fifth with other homeless men. When he has no money, he sometimes gets drinks from friends who happen to have cash.

When interviewed, he was sober, clean, and neatly dressed, though in shabby, unpressed clothing. According to the interviewer he was coherent and articulate in his answers. However, he shows the clinical signs of major depression: he sees no hope for the future, often has no appetite, and thinks about suicide several times a month.

WALTER JOHNSON

Walter Johnson was interviewed while waiting in line to receive a meal at a Chicago food kitchen set up for homeless persons. He was thirty-five at the time and lived in a room in a nearby SRO (single-room occupancy) hotel, for which he paid $200 a month.

Mr. Johnson works twenty to thirty hours a week as a busboy in a downtown restaurant, earning $80 to $150 depending on the hours. His earnings allow him to pay his rent regularly but do not give him much leeway for other expenses. Once or twice a week when his cash is low, he joins the food lines. Buying a new pair of shoes forces him to show up regularly in the food lines for a week or so.

He went to work in a metal fabricating plant when he finished high school and worked there more or less steadily until the plant closed four years ago. Since then the only jobs he has been able to pick up have been at slightly more than minimum wage. He has tried repeatedly to get steadier employment at higher wages. Despite high-school graduation, Mr. Johnson does not read or write with any ease. Indeed, one of his major problems is that he cannot fill out an employment application without help.

He has a few friends, mostly fellow residents in his SRO. Occasionally he goes to a local bar with them. He does not drink heavily, saying he cannot afford to.

Mr. Johnson has never married. He lived with his parents until he was twenty-five but moved out when his mother died. He is not sure where his father is now living, nor does he know the addresses of his brother and two sisters.

Mr. Johnson seems very depressed about his future. He worries about what may happen if he loses his job, fearing he might have to resort to the shelters.

PHOEBE COTT

Phoebe Cott, a white woman, was thirty-eight when she was interviewed in 1985. Born in Chicago, she lives with her mother and several younger brothers and sisters in a small apartment. She was interviewed because she is a General Assistance recipient, receiving a monthly check of $154 from the Illinois Department of Public Aid. She gives her mother $75 each month to help pay living expenses. Occasionally she works, usually as temporary help in local stores.

Ms. Cott married at eighteen and was divorced after two years. She had no children. Since finishing high school, she has been employed fairly steadily, mostly at low-level clerical jobs—receptionist, retail sales clerk, data entry, and such. None of the jobs lasted long, but until 1983 she was able to rent small apartments by herself or occasionally with a live-in partner.

In 1983 she was injured seriously enough in a car accident to require several weeks in the hospital and a long period of recovery. When she left the hospital, she went to live with her mother while she recovered. She has not worked steadily since. After exhausting her unemployment benefits, she applied for General Assistance and has been on the rolls for about six months.

Ms. Cott hopes to find work soon. She has looked consistently, prodded somewhat by the General Assistance requirements for job search. When she finds steady work, she would like to have her own apartment.

DENNIS CALDER

Dennis Calder was interviewed standing in line at a food kitchen in downtown Los Angeles in 1986. He was then thirty-two years old and had lived in that city since early childhood, when he arrived from Texas with his parents and siblings.

Mr. Calder was married for a few years in his early twenties and is now divorced. He has not been in touch with his ex-wife or his two children for several years. Since the breakup of his marriage, he has lived by himself, mostly in rented apartments. For some of the time he lived with his parents, usually for the few weeks between his employment episodes. His parents moved back to Texas in 1980.

Mr. Calder has been intermittently employed since he left high school in his junior year, working in low-paying jobs such as parking attendant, busboy, and wallboard installer. In 1980 he was convicted of breaking and entering and sentenced to a year in a minimum-security California prison. This was his fourth arrest on felony charges; the previous arrests had led to dropped charges or probation. With time off for good behavior, he returned to Los Angeles in 1981. Since his release he has had a hard time finding and keeping employment and has worked less than six months out of every year.

In 1986 he was on California’s General Relief rolls, receiving $212 a month. He lived in an SRO hotel most of the time, but the benefits were not enough to cover a full month’s rent, food, and other expenses. Mr. Calder got along by sleeping in shelters for about one-fourth of the nights each month and by frequently patronizing food kitchens, clothing depots, and other services set up for homeless people in the downtown area.

Mr. Calder does not consider himself an alcoholic, although he does drink moderately heavily. His health is good, and he is neat and clean. Scars from an old facial injury mar his looks. He is not a sanguine person and believes he has little future. Although he looks for work every week, he doesn’t have much hope that he can find steady employment. Something always goes wrong with me, he replied when asked why he had trouble finding work.

RUTH CORONOD

Ruth Coronod was interviewed in 1985 in a Chicago South Side shelter for homeless families, where she had been living for a month with her two daughters, aged two years and six months. She is a slight black woman who was then twenty but looked sixteen or seventeen.

Ms. Coronod has never been employed. In her last year of high school she became pregnant with her older daughter and dropped out. After the baby was born she lived in her mother’s home, supported by an AFDC grant. The child’s father initially contributed small sums for his daughter’s support but has not done so for more than a year. Her younger daughter was fathered by another young man.

A month before the interview her mother asked her to move out, and she found that the shelter would keep her for two months while she looked for an apartment. Although her AFDC benefits will increase when she finds a place to rent, those benefits plus other programs do not provide enough funds for any but the cheapest apartments. She expects to find a place soon and to leave the shelter. Shelter housing counselors are helping her search.

Ms. Coronod would like to work but has only a vague notion of how to find a job and even vaguer ideas about what kind of work she might do.

HENRY KUBILIK

Henry Kubilik, a white man, was fifty-five years old in 1985 when interviewed in his room in a Chicago SRO hotel. He has been living in SRO hotels since the breakup of his marriage in 1975.

Mr. Kubilik worked in a South Chicago steel mill from high-school graduation until 1974, when he suffered a heart attack. After recovery he needed a less physically demanding occupation and took a job as a salesman for a home-renovation firm. His income declined and became erratic. He tried to go back to the steel mills, but by that time the company had cut back production severely and could find no place for him except in very poorly paying positions. His marriage began to go to pieces as his earning ability declined. He left his wife and three adolescent children in 1975 and was divorced in 1980. His wife has remarried.

He sees very little of his children, who are now married. He occasionally visits his widowed mother and his married siblings but does not consider his relationships with these relatives very close.

Since leaving sales, he has held a number of low-paying, low-skill jobs. When interviewed he was working as a guard for a private security firm, earning $100 to $300 a week depending on how often he was called to work. He would like to find steadier employment.

Mr. Kubilik has been homeless several times for short periods when his bouts of unemployment exhausted his cash reserves. During his homeless episodes, he lived in shelters while he looked for work.

He is worried about his health, in particular how he would survive a second heart attack. Without health insurance, he fears he would not get proper care.

EUGENE SNAPPS

Eugene Snapps is a slight white man of twenty-five with a strong regional accent. He is a recent arrival in the Sun Belt city where he was interviewed, having traveled from the small rural market town one hundred miles away where he grew up.

A high-school dropout, Mr. Snapps has held a succession of low-paying jobs in construction, gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and retail stores. The jobs have never lasted more than a few months; most he has simply left. In his hometown, employment has become harder and harder to find.

He came to the city to find work. After exhausting the $200 his father gave him as a stake, Mr. Snapps came to the Salvation Army for shelter. Under shelter rules, he is allowed to stay five days, then he must find a bed elsewhere for ten days. When barred from the Salvation Army shelter, he sleeps in public places—parks, vestibules, bus stations, and so on. He has been in the city for the three summer months.

Mr. Snapps was interviewed in a local park, where he was sitting on a bench talking to several other men. He was dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, both reasonably clean. At the time he had heavy facial stubble and needed a haircut. Mr. Snapps says he has trouble filling out employment forms and doing arithmetic.

He hopes to find a job soon and makes the rounds of construction companies weekly. If he doesn’t find work soon, he intends to go back to his hometown. He hopes his father and mother will make a place for him in their home.

JOHN DORE

John Dore¹ was interviewed in 1986 as he huddled in a sandwichlike arrangement of cardboard over a steam grate in Washington, D.C. He was unkempt, wearing soiled and ragged clothing, and his face and hands were dirty. He had difficulty understanding the questions, and they often had to be repeated. His answers were confused and sometimes contradictory.

Mr. Dore is forty-five years old but looks in his sixties. He has been homeless in the District for more than four years. He never graduated from high school, leaving when he was sixteen. When younger he worked primarily as a warehouse laborer for the General Services Administration, running a forklift that shuttled paper supplies into and out of inventory, loading and unloading trucks. He lost his GSA job in 1970 for repeated absences and being incapacitated on the job.

Mr. Dore is an alcoholic and claims to have undergone half a dozen detoxification sessions. He drinks whenever he can get the money to buy pints of cheap wine. His only source of income is panhandling, and he averages a dollar or two a day. He was sober when interviewed, or so he claimed. Indeed, the interviewer promised him a fee of $5, which he planned to spend on wine.

Mr. Dore has never married, nor does he claim to have children. Until 1980 he lived with his parents, who provided food and lodging. When he worked, he gave them some money for room and board. In 1980 his father died and his mother moved to Pittsburgh to live with his married sister. For a year he rented rooms in cheap hotels using money his mother sent him. After she stopped sending money he slept in one shelter or another, but as each shelter came to recognize him as a chronic alcoholic, he was refused admission because his behavior upset other clients. Except when he admitted himself to a detoxification unit or was taken to a hospital, he slept on the streets, usually on the same steam grate.

Mr. Dore’s decades of heavy drinking have probably impaired his mental functions. He claims to hear voices that constantly urge him to drink. He is certain FBI agents are trying to kidnap him and send him to Cuba or Russia. He is subject to alcoholic seizures and has been injured several times when he fell in traffic. He was not sure what year it was or who was the current president of the United States.

IDA MADIGAN

Ida Madigan was thirty-five years old when interviewed in a woman’s day shelter on New York’s West Side, but she looked fifty. Although she seemed freshly washed up, her overall appearance was of unkempt frowsiness. Although it was a hot day in July, she sat on a bench in the shelter wearing a ragged winter coat over a wrinkled rayon dress. Her hair was uncombed and straggled across her face.

Ms. Madigan has been homeless for several years. In 1982 she committed herself to a psychiatric hospital out of fear that she would commit suicide and stayed six months. After her discharge, she lived for a time in an SRO hotel, supported by Social Security disability payments. She does not understand why her eligibility was terminated in 1984, but since then she has lived in shelters and on the streets.

Ms. Madigan held a number of clerical jobs after finishing high school, the longest being four years as a billing clerk for a department store. She lost that job when she began to have severe depressive episodes and could not get to work. Subsequently she held a series of short-term clerical jobs. Since her discharge from the hospital Ms. Madigan has not worked, and she does not believe she has the strength to hold a job because of her nerves.

Before her hospitalization she shared a small apartment with her sister and several other women, each contributing a share of household expenses and rent. During Ms. Madigan’s periods of unemployment, her sister would pay her share. While she was in the hospital her sister married and moved to Atlanta. She does not know what happened to the other women.

Ms. Madigan has never married and has no children. Her parents are both dead. She has not been in touch with her only sister for a number of years.

JOHN DEIRING

John Deiring, a forty-seven-year-old white man, now dead, came to a medical clinic for the homeless in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1986 for treatment for severe bruises and a slight cut on his arm, received when he fell on the streets.

He claimed to have been homeless since he was twenty, when his parents asked him to leave their home because of his heavy drinking and irregular work habits.

In his younger years Mr. Deiring worked as a construction laborer, usually day to day. For the past few years he had made a living as a scavenger, collecting discarded cans, bottles, and cardboard and anything else of value that could be found in the garbage. He had fashioned a high-sided cart from the chassis of an old baby carriage and scrap lumber. Wheeling the cart through the back alleys behind stores and offices, he collected enough salvage to earn up to $10 a day. He paid $20 a week for a small basement room beneath a store whose owner believed his presence was a security measure.

Mr. Deiring was an alcoholic. When he finished his early morning rounds of scavenging, he was one of the first customers at a package liquor store. He claimed to drink several pints of wine a day.

In the course of his several visits to the medical clinic he was found to be suffering from a variety of debilitating conditions, including leukemia and chronic pulmonary obstruction, in addition to the injuries that brought him there.

The last entry on his medical chart is a report from the hospital on his death. A final mugging had left him with a lung punctured by broken ribs as well as brain injuries from a blow that fractured his skull. He apparently was killed for the proceeds from the thirty pounds of aluminum cans he had collected that day.

The vignettes are composites, made up from the life experiences of many of the people who have been interviewed in one or another of the studies undertaken since 1980. Some are homeless, living in shelters or sleeping in public places. Others live in the cheapest housing available or stay with relatives or friends.²

All share the condition of extreme poverty, with incomes that are very small and often erratic. Most have disabilities that make it hard to obtain and hold steady employment. Severe skill deficiencies, chronic mental illness, physical disabilities, and serious criminal records are common.

Although most are well into adulthood, they are alone in life. Some have never married, and the others’ marriages had broken up some years ago. Except for those living with parents or siblings, ties to immediate family and other relatives are characteristically tenuous. These are not people at the centers of strong networks of family and friends.

In many ways the extremely poor, those with homes and the homeless, are off the margins of our society. The homeless are especially afflicted, unconnected to the worlds of work and family and subsisting at levels far below an acceptable minimum.

The Connections between Extreme Poverty and Homelessness

This book started out to be entirely about the homeless of America. But the more I looked into homelessness the more it appeared to be misstated as merely a problem of being without shelter: homelessness is more properly viewed as the most aggravated state of a more prevalent problem, extreme poverty. As the cases described above illustrate, it is difficult to distinguish consistently between those with homes and the homeless among the extremely poor. There are many points at which the two groups are indistinguishable. A recent study (Sosin, Colson, and Grossman 1988) showed that more than half the people waiting in Chicago food kitchen lines or using medical clinics for the homeless were living in conventional dwellings. A respectable minority of shelter users also have homes.

As a consequence, the scope of the book soon expanded to include all those Americans who get along on close to no income, people with a precarious hold on the basic amenities of life that most of us take for granted. The extremely poor constitute the pool from which the homeless are drawn; they are at high risk of becoming homeless and from time to time find themselves in that condition. Some become homeless for long periods, although fortunately they constitute only a small proportion of the extremely poor. Most are homeless for a few months at a stretch, but many have had several episodes of homelessness over the years.

This is not to make homelessness trivial. There can be no doubt that literal homelessness,³ as I have come to call having no home to go to, is a condition of extreme deprivation; but it is only a step away from being precariously housed—having a tenuous hold on housing of the lowest quality. Like the literally homeless, those with precarious homes are extremely poor. It is the major thesis of this book that extreme poverty is at the root of both literal homelessness and being precariously housed.

Although there is clearly a line between those with homes and the literally homeless, that line is easily crossed. A life of extreme poverty is one of extreme vulnerability. For most Americans it is easy to roll with all but the major punches life can give; most of us can absorb the shocks of