Gimme Shelter: A Social History of Homelessness in Contemporary America.

• Date: 22 March 1992
• Author: Schwendinger, Herman,Schwendinger, Julia
• Published date: 22 March 1992
• Author: Schwendinger, Herman

The homeless are being treated across the U.S.A. as lepers and criminals. For example, they have been harassed and beaten by police in Phoenix and Tucson. To keep them from sleeping in Tompkins Square Park, despite an acute budgetary crisis New York City is spending millions reassigning police from nearby communities to the park. Similar assignments are being made in Seattle, where people have been cleared out of 13 downtown parks between 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. Seattle homeless have been criminalized and lumped with dope dealers and a younger, rougher crowd with whom they had shared park turf.

To expand our understanding of such events, Gregg Barak's Gimme Shelter differentiates between homelessness, an increasingly acute social problem, and the homeless - victims of societal violence. He points out that structural trends have changed the composition of the homeless. They are overrepresented by families with children (75% of whom are single-parent), minorities (especially African Americans and Hispanics), and such special-needs populations as the mentally ill, substance abusers, and AIDS sufferers. These people have joined the ranks of the "new homeless" - the poor individuals and families who can no longer count on affordable housing. It has been suggested that if such housing is not expanded immediately, there could be as many as 19 million American homeless by the end of the century. In spite of this, Barak notes, federal spending on affordable housing was slashed in the 1980s by an incredible 77%.

In Gimme Shelter, treatment of the new homeless is related to the treatment of the old. The opening chapters observe that homelessness is reinforced by grizzled ideological constructions of the homeless and their conditions. People readily believe the "representative myths" that stereotype the homeless as drunkards, lunatics, shopping-bag ladies, and bums whose homeless condition is based on free will and irresponsibility. These myths are usually juxtaposed with social Darwinist precepts that label the homeless as "undeserving poor."

Barak feels that some social scientists have provided support for such social Darwinian labels. Sociologists influenced by Durkheim, Parsons, and Merton, for instance, have depicted the homeless as marginals, retreatists, and members of exotic subcultures. They have given support to social myths by emphasizing transient lifestyles and lack of ambition. Homelessness, in this view, is a product of deviant behavior, of socially maladaptive or maladjusted persons.

Barak counters these impressions. He points out that many people are forced to become geographically mobile because local labor markets are constricted by die demands of industry. But industry and government make no provision for dealing with the resultant personal adversity. Thus, homelessness, in this context, "meshes with other subsistence activities" that enable individuals to cope by themselves with their unfortunate circumstances. This coping process often produces a lifestyle that is accompanied by the reorganization of the person's attitudes and values as well as a change in status and identity.

Barak adds that contemporary studies of homelessness therefore emphasize...