Reckoning with Homelessness.

• Author: Baron, Jane B.
• Position: Book Review

RECKONING WITH HOMELESSNESS. By Kim Hopper. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 271. $19.95.

Could it be that understanding homelessness and poverty is less a function of understanding the homeless and the poor than of understanding how the wealthy come to ignore and tolerate them? This is one of the more intriguing suggestions of anthropologist Kim Hopper's Reckoning with Homelessness, (1) and it echoes claims made by lawyers who, like Hopper, have spent much of their careers advocating on behalf of the homeless. (2) While Hopper's new book is first and foremost a work of anthropology, (3) its structure strongly parallels recent work by legal scholars who have sought to assess the effects of litigation and lobbying efforts dedicated to homelessness. (4) Looking back on his own twenty-five years of work on behalf of the homeless, Hopper laments that his and his colleagues' detailed ethnographies of the lives of homeless people provided "vivid documentation and lively analyses, but at the cost of ensuring that the product could be safely ignored" (p. 209). The legal advocates' assessment of their efforts is even more downbeat; they fear that their own litigation strategies--even when successful--may have aggravated rather than resolved the problems faced by their clients. (5)

We know a lot more about homelessness today than we knew in the 1980s, when homelessness began to be understood as a crisis. Indeed, studying the homeless has become a veritable industry. (6) One thing on which pretty much all scholars agree is that homelessness and poverty are strongly related. Homeless people may or may not be alcoholics, mentally ill, substance abusers, single, or male, but they are, all of them, poor. (7) As historians of welfare have repeatedly shown, poverty alone has not reliably produced sympathy in the hearts and minds of the American public and its legislators; indeed, the poor have as often been regarded with hostility as with compassion or even acceptance. (8) But at least for a time, the plight of the homeless poor did evoke sympathy and compassion, (9) and substantial social resources--ranging from shelter beds to health care--were mobilized to help them. (10)

Part of what enabled that sympathy was the work of Hopper and his fellow anthropologists, who struggled to themselves understand the lives of the homeless, and then to convey those lives to the rest of us. As Hopper puts it, "impelled by an elemental moralism, we set about telling the story of homelessness in all its unsettling specificity.... We gave them names, showed you their faces, ransacked our fieldnotes for arias of heartbreaking tragedy and quiet heroism" (p. 193). Another part of what enabled sympathy for the homeless was the legal strategy, partly parasitic on the ethnographies, that traded on the "involuntariness" of homelessness. How, advocates argued, could those who "have no realistic choice but to live in public places" be punished for acts such as sleeping in parks? (11)

What seemed like success at the time, or at least progress, now appears less rosy, Hopper argues. In his pessimism about advocacy for the homeless, Hopper is joined by legal colleagues who wonder about hidden costs of apparent victories. First, homelessness has been approached less as a long-term problem of housing or employment than as a short-term emergency that can be remedied by more shelter beds and mission meals. (12) Second, advocates have sought to differentiate the homeless, to define them as having unique problems and particular (albeit ultimately logical) ways of coping with those problems. This strategy has "orphaned" the homeless from the rest of the poor (p. 198-99). Finally, the legal and anthropological approaches both somehow left race out of the picture--a disconcerting omission given the overrepresentation of African Americans among the homeless. (13)

One of Hopper's main goals in his book is to "take stock" (p. 193) of these phenomena--which he ultimately regards as advocacy failures. Though Reckoning With Homelessness has a retrospective cast, Hopper's reflections on what has and what has not "worked" have implications for future work on behalf of the homeless. And we will need to do some thinking. Homelessness has by no means gone away, (14) and, if the front pages of our nation's major newspapers are any indication, homelessness seems to be on its way to being a "crisis" again. (15)

In this Review, I take up the themes in Hopper's book that bear most on how we are likely to confront--or maybe avoid confronting --this new crisis. Part I considers how the social science world has studied homelessness--both its generation of "facts" about homelessness and its framing of the debate over whether individual or structural forces cause homelessness. As Reckoning with Homelessness reveals, this debate continues to this day to structure much thinking about homelessness. Yet, on reflection, it is not entirely obvious why those terms of debate are still so powerful. The line between the "individual" and the "structural" is extremely unstable, and as Hopper himself (sometimes) recognizes, the rhetoric of individual responsibility can easily backfire.

Part II considers how the individual/structural debate has interacted with, or, as Hopper argues, failed to interact with, other important debates about poverty and race. Here, Hopper's assessment tracks those of legal advocates who litigated on behalf of the homeless. These assessments together raise important questions about why alliances between "the poor" and "the homeless" were never explicitly drawn. Hopper and legal analysts agree that race has figured far less than it should have in debates about homelessness, but they are not entirely clear about why that omission has been problematic.

Part III considers Hopper's provocative indictment of his own studies of the attitudes and coping mechanisms of the homeless poor. How could these ethnographies be "safely ignored," as Hopper asserts? More particularly, I take up Hopper's provocative suggestion, also echoed by legal advocates, that only by studying wealth--and its reaction to homelessness--can we understand poverty. Hopper writes:

[It] no longer suffices (if it ever did) to ask what it is about the homeless poor that accounts for their dispossession. One must also ask what it is about "the rest of us" that has learned to ignore, then tolerate, only to grow weary of, and now seeks to banish from sight the ugly evidence of asocial order gone badly awry. (16) Without dismissing the potential importance of studying the wealthy and their attitudes, (17) this Review suggests that at least part of what confounds understanding of homelessness is its embodiment of a difficult-to-fathom state of what might be called "no property." Ethnographies focus on who the homeless are, but the defining attribute of homelessness consists of what those people do not have. It is not easy to study a negative or lack, and far easier to study what it is a lack of. In this sense, my proposal is consistent with and parallels the conclusions--implicit in Hopper's work and explicit elsewhere--that to understand homelessness we must first better understand wealth. But in my view it will not be enough to stop with the psychological or cognitive defense mechanisms that allow those with property to ignore or even disdain those who lack it. For "no property" is not only a lack, but a legal and social state of being. In this legal state, one can plausibly seek rights to sleep outdoors and panhandle aggressively (rights, that is, to be homeless effectively) but one is not entitled to housing or public welfare benefits (rights, that is, to have property). To understand homelessness, we must at least confront the complexities of this new "no property" category.

1. SOCIAL SCIENCE AND THE STUDY OF HOMELESSNESS

   Reckoning with Homelessness does not purport to summarize the massive amount of social science research that has been conducted on homelessness over the last twenty years. (18) Yet Hopper's descriptions of and reflections on his own work touch on some of the important recurring methodological issues that arise in studies of the homeless, and his conclusions echo themes that run through a wide array of otherwise disparate social science research. Because these themes continue to characterize debates about homelessness, it is worth describing them, even if one has to paint in broad strokes.

   A huge issue for homelessness research has been the question of how many homeless people there actually are. (19) The quantification problem partly derives from a secondary methodological issue: How should homelessness be defined? (20) Are people "'homeless" only if they are using a shelter today? What about people doubled up with friends and family? How about people who sleep in flophouses or hotels three weeks of the month, until benefit checks run out, and then are without shelter for the week until the next check arrives? How about people who are housed today, but who have lived in shelters for the previous six months? These methodological questions are not trivial: if there are not "a lot" of homeless people (and of course there is controversy, too, about what "a lot" might be), then perhaps there is no serious social problem requiring public response. (21)

   But even if the number of homeless is large, there is another question that determines how important the problem is: Who are the homeless? Again, study after study of the homeless attempts to analyze the demographics of the homeless population. (22) Are they single? Are they families? Male? Female? Black? Educated? Employed? Drug addicted? Mentally ill? And in what proportions? To some extent, these are quantitative questions, answered by collecting and then crunching data. (23) Numbers, however, do not fully capture who the homeless are. Thus, sociologists and anthropologists have attempted to describe the homeless by...