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3: Homelessness and Its Consequences
- Northeastern University Press
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= 3 = Homelessness and Its Consequences Just tell people never, ever let this happen to them. You have choices, but a lot of people don’t know. I mean, if anytime you even suspect that it’s gonna happen or it happens one time, get help. Just get help. Don’t let the stories continue. Do not let—don’t take the “It’s never gonna happen again, I’m sorry”—it don’t work. It don’t work. Once they hit they’re gonna keep hitting. Once the drugs start, it’s gonna continue. Just make better decisions than some of us have made because it’s not worth it and you’ll end up either dead or being homeless, or whatever. It’s just not a good road to take. There are people out there—there are a lot of places to help . . . get the help . . . It’s not worth it. It’s just not worth it. —Diane As we discussed in the previous chapter, homelessness is a heterogeneous set of experiences and material conditions, not a monolithic event in life that every victim goes through in the same way (Burt, Aron, and Lee 2001, chap. 6; Wright, Rubin, and Devine 1998). We look now at the di=erent types of homelessness. Homeless Histories As noted, Culhane and associates (1994, 1997, and 1999; Kuhn and Culhane 1998) have distinguished between transitionally, episodically, and chronically homeless people. The transitionally homeless are those who experience some calamitous incident, such as job loss, >re, eviction, divorce , abandonment, or some other transitory misfortune. These people, by de>nition, are homeless for only a short time before they transition back into a stable housing situation, perhaps never to be homeless again. Remarkably , in studies where this group of homeless people can be identi>ed, 44 HARD LIVES, MEAN STREETS they account for the substantial majority (more than three-quarters) of the homeless population. The episodically homeless consist of people who, like Rena, move in and out of homelessness, typically with each episode lasting only a short time. (You will recall that Rena has been homeless on and o= since she was sixteen , with around six or seven episodes of homelessness). These people have recurring episodes of shelter use that vary in length. The episodically homeless represent about a tenth of the total in Culhane and associates’ studies. Last are the chronically homeless, people who become homeless and stay in that condition for extended periods of times, often years or even decades . They are likely to use the shelters as long-term housing rather than emergency shelter. The chronically homeless comprise roughly a tenth of Kuhn and Culhane’s (1998) samples, yet they consumed about half of the total shelter days. They tend to be older, nonwhite, and—consistent with the u.s. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s de>nition of “chronically homeless”—they su=er high rates of mental illness and substance abuse. (According to that de>nition, two years of continuous homelessness is su;cient to establish chronicity.) Interestingly, a bare majority of women in our study, 52 percent, were experiencing their >rst episode of homelessness when we intercepted them to participate in our study. Only time will tell if this >rst experience with homelessness is a unique and transitory event, the >rst in a series of homeless episodes, or the start of a chronically homeless existence. (Panel data would be necessary to answer this critical question.) The remaining 48 percent of the women had been homeless on previous occasions, 17 percent of them four or more times (with a maximum of thirty times). For almost twothirds of our sample (64%), the longest period of homelessness ever experienced was less than a year; only 9 percent had ever been homeless for longer than two years. Indeed, the time spent homeless over the lifetime (cumulated across all homeless episodes) was less than twelve months for 63 percent of the women and more than three years for only 19 percent, with a median across all participants of 0.51 years. Thus, in the substantial majority of cases, these women were relatively new to homelessness and perhaps only transitionally homeless; very few would qualify as long-term or chronically homeless women, consistent with the >ndings of Culhane and associates. [54.224.100.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:18 GMT) Homelessness and Its Consequences 45 To begin to understand the complexity of their lives, we sought to determine the women’s living circumstances...