At Home On the Street: People, Poverty, and a Hidden Culture of Homelessness (review)

It is hard not to like At Home on the Street. One opens the book expecting just another bland treatment of homelessness only to stumble into a Southern remake of Cannery Row. All the boys are there: for Steinbeck's Mack, Hazel and the rest at the Palace Flophouse and Grill, substitute Wasserman and Clair's "Hammer," "Big E," "Potato Water," (the vodka lover), "Waffle House," "Motown" and Matty—residents of the Second Avenue and the Catchout Corner Camps.

Many of the same tones sounded in Steinbeck's work echo in At Home: "experts" are hopelessly dense as to the realities of street life and "clueless" pathologizing dogooders determined to erode the will of street people by forcing them to stay in "alienating" "night prisons" "foster dependency" while simultaneously doing remarkably little to overthrow global capitalism.

Of course, Steinbeck, Wasserman and Clair identify many of the same dark forces threatening the campers' freedom and autonomy: competing land uses, law enforcement, up-tight shopkeepers, wealthy loft residents, "legitimate citizens" and blue noses enforcing unreasonably strict standards of public deportment.

For Wasserman and Clair, who initially ventured into homeless camps intending to make a visual sociology documentary, the population they discovered proved to be a remarkably colorful and creative group of characters skilled in "creative resistance" with hidden depths of resourcefulness, pride and fierce independence. They discovered the men to be grossly misunderstood by "experts" and mainstream society: hard, albeit sporadic, workers, mentally-disordered and addicted only because of the structural exigencies of street life.

More interestingly, life under the viaduct apparently consisted largely of joking, laughing, teasing, "stealing time" (easing boredom through drinking and napping) and talking about sports and sex, interspersed with occasional work. Violence only rarely occurs. In one great passage, a man waves a gun around the camp and Clair knowingly dismisses the gesture only to be corrected by a camper, "You should be worried. Jeff doesn't want to shoot anyone, and he will be sorry about it tomorrow, but tonight, he'll shoot you."(123)

Although Wasserman and Clair might be accused of perilously coming close to slipping into "nostalgie de la boue," with their unabashed admiration for the campers, they realistically show street people experiencing joy and the "peace of mind," that they argue results from disengaging from oppressive structures.

A central question that confronts Wasserman and Clair in At Home on the Street seems to be, "why do the 'street homeless' not stay in shelters?" Perhaps to question the received knowledge of experts and service providers? Perhaps because this question throws into sharpest relief the quantum difference between the sheer "peace of mind" of living on the street to the pain of submitting to the strictures of conventional society in the form of shelters and rehab centers? Not to mention trying to sleep in a roomful of "coughin', sneezin', fartin'" strangers.

Wasserman and Clair learn the "pathological" characteristics of shelters not just through camp discussions, but also first-hand from participant observation. Staying one night in a shelter, Clair reported that he was unable to sleep because of the talking, coughing and underwear falling from the bunk above. Wasserman had an even less enviable experience. As an apparently clean-cut healthy young white man, he was immediately labeled as an "undercover cop" and calls of "oink-oink" and "5-0" followed him the next day. Not a good experience. Perhaps if they had a history with the people at the shelter, bringing them food and toiletries as they did with the men under the viaduct, they would have been treated with the same acceptance that they had slowly built up with their friends at the camp.

Regardless, Wasserman and Clair promptly returned to the much more nurturing environment of Catchout Camp with their friends whom they concluded possessed just too "strong of personalities" to submit to inhumane organizational expectations.

Wasserman and Clair...