Читать книгу In the Midst of Plenty - Marybeth Shinn - Страница 21

The patterns seen today by age, gender, race, and family status are a relatively recent phenomenon. After the “Hoovervilles” of the Great Depression (shanty towns of people without jobs) and up until the early 1970s, most people who experienced homelessness were older white men who no longer were able to do the physically demanding work of their younger years, currently had no job or intermittent, poorly paid jobs, and often had disabilities (Bogue, 1963). These men rarely slept on the street, although they were certainly “inadequately housed” in single‐room occupancy hotels (with no kitchen and a bathroom down the hall), mission dormitories, or flophouses. Many of the latter were divided into windowless five by seven‐foot cubicles with partitions that did not extend to the ceiling or floor. The wire mesh that filled the gap, allowing for minimal privacy and security, gave rise to the moniker “cage hotels” (Rossi, 1989, p. 30). Before public drunkenness was decriminalized, some slept in police stations and jails. Researchers focused more on the men's lack of social ties than on their housing circumstances (Bahr, 1973; Grigsby, Baumann, Gregorich, & Roberts‐Gray, 1990). Although several studies estimated that only about a quarter of men were alcoholics, researchers emphasized this problem, for example, entitling a book about New York's skid row Old Men Drunk and Sober (Bahr & Caplow, 1973). Many observers thought that the problem of homelessness would disappear as this older generation of men came to the end of their lives (Bogue, 1963).

But homelessness did not die off. It changed. By the late 1970s, “the new homeless,” younger men, often African American, along with some women and even families, began to emerge (New York City Commission on the Homeless, 1992). Further, the shrinkage of skid rows associated with urban renewal made the residual “old” homelessness more visible. The decriminalization of vagrancy and public drunkenness meant that people who might once have sobered up in jail were now on the streets (Shlay & Rossi, 1992). Efforts to count and categorize people experiencing homelessness led to wildly differing estimates of the composition and characteristics of people experiencing homelessness during the 1980s. Nevertheless, across 60 studies conducted from 1981 to 1988, 26% of people identified as homeless were women, over 40% were black, and the median age was 37 (Shlay & Rossi, 1992), a far cry from the older white men of the 1960s.

The age distribution of homelessness has continued to change, quite separately for single men and for parents in families. Men born in the latter half of the baby boom, from the mid‐1950s to the mid‐1960s, continued to dominate the numbers from 1988 to 2010, both in decennial census data (when the census conducted shelter counts) and in data from the Department of Homeless Services in New York City, which has the longest, most complete records of shelter usage. The age at which a single man was at highest risk of being found in a shelter (relative to the numbers in the overall population), peaked at 34–36 in 1990, 37–42 in 2000, and 49–51 in 2010 (Culhane, Metraux, Byrne, Stino, & Bainbridge, 2013).

In the New York data, it is not the same people who continue to experience homelessness across the different decades, but newcomers to the homeless system are most often drawn from the same cohort of late baby‐boomers (Culhane et al., 2013). In‐depth interviews with homeless individuals sampled at a New York City drop‐in center for older adults found that roughly half of the sample (42 of 79) had led conventional lives with long periods of residential stability and employment through middle age (e.g., a grocery store manager, an army colonel, a fundraiser for a nonprofit) until some event, and usually a cascade of events, pitched them into homelessness. The other 37 people had more long‐standing patterns of housing instability, although not necessarily literal homelessness (Shinn et al., 2007).

Similarly, in San Francisco, successive groups of literally homeless adults found at shelters and free meal programs in San Francisco in each of four time periods, had a median age of 37 in 1990–1994 and a median of 46 in 2003. The earliest group had been homeless for 2 years on average, but the last group reported 6 years of literal homelessness (Hahn, Kushel, Bangsberg, Riley, & Moss, 2006).

The national data reported by HUD show a similar aging trend. Among people experiencing homelessness as individuals, the percentage 62 years and older grew from 4% in 2007 to 8% in 2018, and the percentage between 51 and 61 years old grew from 20 to 26% (Henry, Bishop, et al., 2018).

The story for families with children is different. In the New York City data, from 1988 to 2005, the modal age of heads of families remained 21–23 (Culhane et al., 2013). More recent national data on families suggest an older typical age, as only 23% of adults in families using shelters at some time during 2017 were between the ages of 18 and 23. There was only a very small aging trend between 2007 and 2017 (Henry, Bishop, et al., 2018). Because infants and preschool children are common in families experiencing homelessness, it may be the age of children rather than the age of their parents that is critical for families. About half of the children in families using shelters over the course of a year are under the age of 6, and 11% are infants less than 1 year old (Henry, Bishop, et al., 2018). The slight increase in age of mothers may be because the mean age of U.S. mothers generally at the time their first child was born increased from 24.1 in 1988 to 26.8 in 2017 (Martin et al., 2018; Mathews & Hamilton, 2002). The number of adult men in homeless families is increasing (Henry, Bishop, et al., 2018), but this may be a function of the increasing willingness of shelters to accommodate couples rather than the changing composition of the families themselves.

The last decade has seen important changes in the numbers of people experiencing homelessness—changes that are particularly marked for people with chronic patterns of homelessness and for veterans. Overall, the number of people counted nationally in PIT counts decreased almost 15% from about 647,000 in 2007 to about 553,000 in 2018. Most of the drop of close to 100,000 total people was among people who were unsheltered. The numbers of people in shelter (on a single night) stood at about 391,000 in 2007, rose a bit during the aftermath of the Great Recession, came back to 391,000 in 2015, and has dropped a bit—to 358,000—since then. The additional progress in the last 3 years has been partially offset by a smaller increase in the unsheltered population (Henry, Mahathey, et al., 2018).

The number of people with chronic patterns found on the night of the counts decreased 26% from about 120,000 to less than 89,000 over the same period (Henry, Mahathey, et al., 2018).¹⁵ We think that decrease is real, not just a matter of reporting, because we do not think that systematic changes have taken place in the way communities nationwide count chronically homeless individuals. We also think the drop is consistent with the success of permanent supportive housing programs that combine housing with voluntary services, as we will discuss in Chapter 3, on ending homelessness for people who experience it.

The number of veterans experiencing homelessness nationally fell even more dramatically from about 73,000 in 2010 (the first year data were available), to about 38,000 in 2018 (Henry, Mahathey, et al., 2018). We believe that federal and local policy efforts that we will describe later, in Chapters 3 and 4, account for cutting veteran homelessness nearly in half. These decreases, especially for veterans, show what can be done with concerted effort.