Ready? I’m starting off my column by throwing a scrap of insight to the freshmen. Pay attention because this is something I was never told three years ago: you will, inevitably, fall into homelessness at some point in your life, probably within the next four years. Indeed, the phenomenon of collegiate homelessness is a tragically understudied issue. It’s reality though, so the sooner you get used to the idea of sleeping on a park bench, the better. Don’t believe me? Listen to this …
My foray with homelessness lasted about a week and a half at the beginning of the summer. Having been given just a week’s notice about a job in D.C., I headed down in June with naught but the address of an international youth hostel. After a week passed and I still hadn’t found a reasonable sublet, I grew tired of paying too much for a cramped bunk, and decided to just wing it. Thus began my spell of homelessness. It actually worked out well for the most part — I breezed through the couches and air mattresses of three gracious friends. Only for one night was I truly sans indoor accommodations — having left a party at about 2 a.m., I soon realized that I was in no state to try and figure out how to get to my friend’s place at the border of Maryland, and decided my car was a much more appealing option. The irony of this situation was that my summer job was with ACORN Housing, working on foreclosure prevention to keep people in their homes and off the streets.
So maybe you don’t think my week-and-a-half of exploiting friends’ apartments counts as real homelessness. True, my situation did differ slightly from the conditions faced by the majority of America’s homeless. My “homelessness” stemmed from my being too cheap to continue paying for the youth hostel, I still had an apartment in Ithaca and a house in Cleveland waiting for me, and I put an end to it all with some vigilant Craig’s List-ing. Still, experts in housing point out that homelessness does exist on many different levels. Fellows at the Urban Institute (a think tank second in academic renown only to the Roosevelt Institution) explain that the constant rotation of the temporarily homeless adds real numbers to the issue of American homelessness on the whole, and should be addressed by any policy that aims to combat this tragedy. Indeed only 20 percent of those who spend part of the year in homelessness pass the entire year in such conditions, and one out of 10 Americans living under the poverty line endure some part of the year without housing. Many of these people even have consistent jobs, and many of them a high school education. So while we tend to label individuals as either “homeless” or not as if it were a characteristic of the individual, a much more informed approach would be to frame the issue as a dynamic spectrum of quality to not-so-quality housing.
Anyway, if we can concede various brackets of homelessness, I think we can also add to the mix “poor foresight homelessness,” “lost homelessness” and “just-don’t-care homelessness,” all of which I have been party to at some point. Freshmen, if you’re lucky, you’ll end up in one of the latter categories instead of in the legit “I register to vote at street corners” homelessness camp.
Actually, after having done a bit more research I learned that I chose the right city for a venture in homelessness. The District of Columbia plays host to a number of phenomena, such as portable-billboard trucks and black hipsters (seriously, this is pretty much the first thing I noticed upon arriving in D.C. — black hipsters aren’t the rare exception to the rule as in any other city I’ve ever been to, but are the norm. If you have any insight on the subject please contact me ASAP). Additionally, however, the nation’s capital has one of the highest homeless rates in the country. This seems counterintuitive, right, that the nation’s capital seems to be failing those residents to whom it is accountable on both a local and national level. The factors at play, however, are quite understandable. In hopes of dispelling the tone of enigma that seems to shroud all conversation of homelessness, let me suggest some more tangible reasons for its existence.
First, there’s a strong overlap between homelessness and mental illness or general disability. Although there’s no definite causality, there are also very high rates of homelessness among veterans. Again, counterintuitive, as would think the government might want to look out for those who have put their lives on the line to uphold the nation’s ideals. Mainly, however, homelessness is a function of real estate and the housing market. As real estate prices increase, affordable housing becomes a sparse commodity unless the state is committed to preserving it through mixed income housing initiatives. At the moment, D.C. is the third worst state in terms of housing cost to income ratio. One final point of significance is that rates of homelessness are highly volatile from year to year, evidencing the strong role that public policy plays in its ebbs and flows.
There you have it. Homelessness is an objective issue — not a mystery — and those that it affects are often less “abnormal” than one might like to think. So while your spare change won’t likely bring our homeless citizens out of poverty, nor will you offer them the “individual incentives” to accomplish the feat on their own by walking past. Oh and speaking of registering to vote on corners, it doesn’t really matter where you’re registered, but if you haven’t done that yet you should probably take care of it like stat.
Tim Krueger is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at thk7@cornell.edu. Educating Your Guesses will appear alternate Thursdays this semester.