Grappling with Homelessness

Abstract

Grappling with Homelessness Joel Blau (bio) Ella Howard . Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2013 . 276 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $45.00 . Homelessness is a pliable subject that lends itself to many interpretations. There is the homelessness of desperate poverty and the homelessness of an indulgent shelter system. There is the mid–twentieth-century homelessness defined by a single “Skid Row” neighborhood and the unbounded homelessness of contemporary American cities, where Skid Row may be the only place for the down and out—but if it is located in a city’s central location, it may become a real estate opportunity and primary target for gentrification. And then there are the homeless people themselves, who have, in different periods and from differing perspectives, been identified as tramps, bums, alcoholics, and the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, as well as the victims of a globalized and increasingly harsh economic system. It takes a subtle and sophisticated book to explicate all these dimensions of homelessness, but that is exactly what Ella Howard has written in Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America. Relying primarily on the Bowery in New York City as the quintessential American Skid Row, Howard traces the evolution of homelessness over the last hundred years. Although the police, benevolent charities, social workers, urban planners, and politicians have all tried to make the problem go away, homelessness has stubbornly refused to yield to their interventions. The population may grow or contract, and demographics may change from older male alcoholics to young mothers of color with several children, but homelessness itself remains—a deeply rooted and troubling reminder that even in relatively prosperous times, there are some people who barely scrape by. Howard’s book begins at the turn of the twentieth century, when migrant and seasonal laborers populated the Bowery and other skid rows. Typical of the homeless population in an industrializing America, these sites gathered in their men during the winter, when the availability of outdoor work declined; and then—in good economic times, at least—saw them emigrate to work in the factories and farms when spring beckoned. This economic rhythm imbued skid [End Page 524] rows like the Bowery with the cultural attributes of a community predicated on casual male labor. It had bars, prostitutes, and, in the best of shelters, “a hot and a cot.” The existence of the shelters troubled those who thought that the men of Skid Row were less likely to work hard if they had ready access to cheap housing. Yet the culture of the place also aroused the indignation of an equally large number of social reformers. Determined to control the behavior of casual laborers when they were not at work, these social reformers railed against the stench, filth, and crime of squalid urban neighborhoods. Certainly, the men in these neighborhoods might be impoverished, but couldn’t they at least aspire to becoming the worthy poor and live decently? The Great Depression is the next major period that Howard covers. By early 1931, seventy-nine different New York City breadlines were serving some 70,000 daily meals. In the winter of the following year, 175,000 Chicago families were receiving assistance. Although private charities organized large fund-raising drives such as the $12 million raised by New York City’s Gibson Committee, the magnitude of the problem overwhelmed the voluntary sector, and “Hoovervilles” sprang up across the nation. The sight of so much public poverty, especially among women and children, unnerved social reformers and reenergized all the old debates about aid and dependency. While hard-headed groups like the Welfare Council instituted a registration system to prevent duplication and obstruct the path to permanent mendicancy, others noted “that the hungry must be fed, and it is not regarded as a major catastrophe if a man should happen to get two bowls of soup instead of one” (p. 47). Standard accounts of the 1930s rightly emphasize the spurt in demonstrations and political organizing. When, for example, the Trade Union Unity League assailed the municipal shelter’s cap of five nights a month, protestors demanded unlimited lodging, three meals a day, free clothing, and use of laundries for...