Out in the Warm: Homelessness in San Diego, Part 1

 This is a small homeless encampment in the park next to the USS Midway, the massive aircraft carrier that anchors (so to speak) a tourist area south of downtown San Diego. Although it’s hard to see clearly, there are people sleeping on the grass or on blankets. Tourists on their way to the Midway Museum stay on the walking path and mostly look straight ahead.

I’ve been working on homeless issues for a long time. I’ve conducted a dozen focus groups with homeless people, supervised two citywide homeless surveys, and worked with the people who run Milwaukee’s shelter system for over ten years. So when I go to another city, I’m always on the lookout for homeless people.

What catches my eye as much as homeless people themselves is how other people react to homeless people. For most folks, the safest bet is to steer clear, give the strange-looking guy and his stuffed grocery cart a wide berth, maybe nod hello as if he was a nice office worker out for a stroll on his lunch break.

In San Diego, there are homeless folks in nearly every park, one or two walking bicycles with baskets full of belongings, small knots of people with their carts and gear, chatting at picnic tables or lying on the grass. Driving by the park next to the Midway and seeing the encampment, I mentioned to my husband how people in Milwaukee always talk about how much easier it is to be homeless in places where it’s warm, as if homelessness was an Olympic sport with degrees of difficulty attached to each location.

Long story short, I decided to ask whether it’s easier to be homeless in San Diego than in Milwaukee. And I did it for two reasons. First, I actually wanted an answer. And second, I wanted to force myself to talk to homeless people face to face without the protection of a focus group under the watchful eye of a shelter director.

I wanted to stop hiding behind my clipboard. I want to be a better advocate.

So I left my husband in the car, and set out to have a conversation.  Scanning the possible options, I aimed for the two women attached to the grocery cart in the picture.

I talked with a woman who described herself as a “true blue alcoholic,” a veteran of eight years on the street, who had quit on the idea of going to a shelter a long time ago because of shelter rules prohibiting drinking. She looked every inch the alcoholic although she seemed completely sober – reflective and detailed in describing her situation. She introduced me to her street daughter, a woman six months pregnant, lying on a blanket in the shade next to their shared grocery cart. Two other people, both men, rounded out the ‘family’. The woman I was talking to was mothering all of them.

In the space of ten minutes, she told me a lot — why she was there, what had happened in her life, how she managed day to day. And she said, in answer to my last question about whether it’s easier to be homeless in a place like San Diego, “Homeless is homeless no matter where you are.” She could not have been friendlier or more open. Once I introduced myself as working on homeless issues in Milwaukee, she talked without hesitation, with no suspicion apparent, a smile – although sometimes sardonic – always on her face. Her street daughter was the same, quieter but sweetly friendly. Our conversation ended when the older woman said she had to help one of her men friends to the bathroom.  She was so clearly the mom of the group, after all.

So for the past day or so, I’ve been thinking that to write about this woman in any detail would be exploitative – that she shared her story with me so freely and was so genuine, that it would be wrong to retell it here in this blog. So the things she told me about her life and how she’d ended up in this park on this day are maybe best summarized by her statement that she never thought she’d end up like this.

Homelessness in San Diego, especially unsheltered homelessness is a much bigger problem than in Milwaukee. A city twice the size of Milwaukee, San Diego has nearly 5,000 people living on the street – at the last homeless census, Milwaukee had fewer than 150. My ‘sample’ of two homeless people felt that being homeless in San Diego was plenty tough, the weather notwithstanding.  (Another blog will delve deeper into the comparisons between Milwaukee and San Diego.)

What I appreciate about my conversation with these two women was that, albeit unwittingly, they  helped me break past my devotion to surveys and focus groups and the safety of professional life to connect in a more real way. It was a little lesson in how to listen to the story without checking any boxes or rushing to the next question.  I hope my colleagues in the world of homeless policy do this now and then but I’m not sure.  Sometimes when I listen to policy discussions, it seems like we’re pretty far away from the day to day of homelessness.  I intend to get closer.  Yes, I do.  Because I need to get smarter and I think that’s the way to do it.

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Here’s a link about San Diego’s 2011 Point in Time count of homeless people.  http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/feb/14/san-diego-countys-homless-numbers-rise/

Bonehead Move: The Destruction of the Downtown Residential Hotels

My new favorite term is generational error.  Developer Gary Grunau used this phrase to describe Governor Walker’s refusal of $810 million in federal high speed rail funding.  Blowing up downtown hotels that provided housing for hundreds of low-income singles in 1980 is another epic generational error.  The Randolph, Antlers, and Plankinton House provided over a 1,000 units of what would now be known as SRO (Single Room Occupancy) housing.

The downtown hotels offered cheap rooms — $8 a night plus a $2 key deposit in 1974 — coffee shops, a sense of community, access to stores and services in the community (what there were at that time), and independence.  People with disabilities or long-term addictions or family estrangement could just plain live on their own.  It was affordable and available. 

In the place of the downtown hotels, we have the fabulously successful Grand Avenue Mall, a development that has suffered in concept and reality practically since the day it opened.  We have rows upon rows of condos. And a lot of new buildings with the retro look that John Norquist loved so much and that is so reminiscent of of the old residential hotel era.

And we have a lot of homeless people – most of them single adults (76%) – and a large shelter system.  I’m not saying that these two facts are directly linked (well, I guess I am) but it’s an interesting coincidence that the Antlers and Plankintown Hotels were blown up in 1980 and the Guest House Emergency Shelter for Men opened in 1982.

The City of Milwaukee’s decision to acquire and raze the homes of about a thousand poor people was tied to the belief that commercial redevelopment of the downtown was a higher value — that the area’s economic resurgence would benefit the entire City.  Truth be told, it wasn’t just the downtown hotels that interfered with strategy, it was the people who lived in the hotels.  They weren’t good for downtown’s image and so they had to go.  And they did.  But we’re not better off.  We’re worse off. 

The community is scrambling to create truly affordable housing for very low-income people.  We had the opportunity to do that in 1980 when, if we had followed the lead of other cities like New York and Los Angeles, we could have upgraded the residential hotels to be more acceptable neighbors in the revamped downtown.  It could have been done.

That it wasn’t, that these historic buildings were blown up with so little regard for where poor people could afford to live is one massive generational error.  And we’re still paying for it.

Kindness

I’m a big believer in the power of words or images to guide one’s thinking.  Sometimes these little snatches of time and thought actually put a person on a different course.  Scott Greer, the poet who was an urbanist who was a teacher, said many times that one good social story could outweigh all the data in the world.  And he was right because it’s the story that sticks with us. Not the numbers.

A few weeks ago, I conducted a focus group with several women at a homeless shelter.  The room was large, the dozen or so women seated in a circle about 15 feet across.  As I have come to expect and trust, the women were friendly but cautious.  I don’t think they were suspicious of my motives.  They were waiting to see if I would be respectful and if I will truly listen.   In these situations – mindful of the imposition of asking people their stories of trouble and hardship – I try to be as present as I can possibly be – to witness their stories beyond the research dimensions of the task. 

I asked them to tell me what it was like to call the shelter for help.  I asked them to tell me how they were treated. 

The second or third woman to answer started to speak.  She described talking to a shelter intake worker on the phone.  She related a statement the worker made that could have been taken in a lot of ways but she received it as a hurtful comment.  She began to choke up. So, of course,  I started to tear up (seeing other people cry always makes me cry).  I hear her — her humiliation, her anger, her surprise at having to seek shelter after having been employed and living in a house for many years.

While we are all sitting quietly, waiting for this woman to continue, one of the other participants, a very prim lady with her hair in a neat pageboy and dressed in a skirt and sweater, stood up, walked the 15 feet across the circle, took the woman’s hand in hers and started rubbing her back.  She stood next to her doing this until the woman was finished with her story and the next person began speaking.  She then walked back to her seat and the discussion continued.

After the meeting, I talked to prim lady.  “That was an act of kindness for you to go comfort your friend.”

“Oh,” she said.  “I don’t know her. She just looked like she needed comforting.”

The picture of prim lady has stuck with me for the last few weeks.  This morning’s story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel provided a bit of an echo to the feeling I’ve been having.  See “Wauwatosa man out to change the world one click at a time” at http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/112136384.html. 

We can’t fix everything, but sometimes we can fix a small thing. 

Prim lady couldn’t solve the hurt woman’s homeless problem.  She couldn’t find her an apartment or a job.  She couldn’t change the past and bring this woman’s family to the door to help her out.  But she could make this terrible, scary, and frustrating situation less harsh.  And that’s what she did.

Thanks, prim lady.  I won’t forget it.

The Ethics of Asking

Tonight I’m going to Guesthouse to ask a group of homeless men to talk to me about how the shelter system is working for them.  This is the kind of thing I do pretty frequently in my work.  Listening to consumers makes for better programs, systems, and results.  I like to think that the work I do begins and ends with real people but the fact of the matter is that agency directors, funders, government officials often hold more sway because they are more consistently present and control the resources.

More and more, doing focus groups like this bothers me.  And here’s why.  I feel like we often use the stories of poor people to advance our own agendas.  Tonight, I’ll be giving focus group participants $10 gift cards.  And for the gift cards, I want these men to give me their stories so I can create an analysis of the shelter system.  Because I’m well intentioned and reasonably skilled, I’ll represent their stories well.  I won’t twist or bend their truth or leave out the stories that don’t confirm my already pretty well-formed notions of how the shelter system could improve. 

But I probably will tell one man’s story over and over.  It’ll be the person whose personal narrative struck me particularly hard.  Or maybe the person I think that audiences will most readily relate to.  And in turn, people who hear the story will repeat it.  Maybe it’ll be like that telephone game kids play at camp.  What will end up being the final story told?  Will it get completely distorted in its reiteration?

The real ethical issue is that by asking people what needs to change, you lead them to believe you are in the position to make those changes.  If that’s not true, the focus group question is, “Just for curiosity’s sake (and because someone is paying me to do this), how could the homeless services system work better for you?”  In essence, I’m asking these men to trust me with their stories and then, later, asking the powers that be to trust that I am telling the stories accurately and drawing the right conclusions.

Anyway, this is starting to feel like exploitation.  So I thought that one way to make it better is to bring one of the ‘powers that be’ with me.  At least then, in addition to gathering data, there can be a Speak Truth to Power opportunity.  So that’s my plan.  I think it’s a better strategy but we’ll see.  I’ll report back later.