9:50am June 10, 2014

A thing I don’t get…

feliscorvus:

(Disclaimer: I’ve never been homeless. FWIW.)

…is why so many people ask questions like “oh how do I deal with the homeless?” or “how do I respond to homeless people in my area?”

Because, it seems to me like there’s a fundamental flaw in treating everyone the same way (or thinking it’s appropriate to do so) based on ONE aspect of their life. Being homeless doesn’t destroy your individuality. Any two given homeless people are going to be as different as any two non-homeless people.

I wonder if they mean, ‘What ways should I offer help?’ In which case, the answer is still… ‘No two people are alike.’ You should just ask people what they need help with, instead of looking for a one-size-fits-all ‘solution’ to any homeless person you meet.

Or do they mean ‘How should I talk to them?’ Which is… the same way you’d talk to any stranger, I guess? I once talked to one dude at length about literature.

One time I was living on the streets for a few days. I wasn’t exactly homeless, I had a home, the problem was my home was being flooded with concrete dust and every time I went there for more than five minutes I ended up in the emergency room. But anyway I was living on the streets with a woman from the same building who also had respiratory problems with the dust. And we decided to do a protest out there about the living conditions in our apartment building, to shame our housing authority into relocating us somewhere safer.

So anyway we were sitting there. And this guy threw money at us. And we gave it back to him and said “Thanks, but we don’t need your money, so go ahead and keep it.” And he became really irate, he was like “If you don’t need money then what the fuck do you want from me!?” That whole experience, even though it lasted five days tops, was like a crash course in how people treat you when you’re homeless.

Another thing was there was this man who found us within maybe ten minutes of us being out there. We noticed he walked in circles around the downtown area. And anyway he offered us a home with him. But we checked with a homeless woman, and she said “Oh yeah everyone knows that guy, he offers homeless women a home and then he takes them home and rapes them. Stay away from him.” We turned down his offer and he started screaming at the top of his lungs to anyone who came by, “DON’T LISTEN TO THEM! I OFFERED THEM HELP AND THEY DIDN’T WANT IT. THEY DON’T WANT TO GET OFF THE STREETS!”

The hardest thing though was knowing how conspicuous we were to be out there with two wheelchairs, and not being able to hide the way an able-bodied homeless person could hide. If we’d been there much longer we were pretty sure we’d have gotten beaten and robbed, at best. We had already been looking for a new spot to move to and hide, when they decided to relocate us.

But basically the response we got when we were picketing in front of City Hall, was “The Housing Authority does wonderful things for you people, you should be grateful you get housing at all, you need to stop making a spectacle of youselves, you look like ungrateful idiots.” When we tried to talk to the mayor, he went past us so fast we couldn’t talk to him, and he said to us “[name of the head of the housing authority] is a wonderful man who has done wonderful things for you people, I’m not listening to anything you have to say against him.”

The head of the housing authority had, in front of tenants of our building, referred to our building as his “dumping ground” because it’s where he put the scariest criminals when they needed a place to stay and were elderly or disabled. He had no actual respect for us and was not trying to do any of us a favor. And he was covering up the fact that a former housing authority employee, now treasurer of the tenant’s association, was embezzling from the tenant’s association. So no, he was not this wonderful person who did all these wonderful things for “you people”. But everyone was really angry that we would have the nerve to protest against a place that gave housing to poor people. Even though we literally couldn’t live in our own building because they weren’t following federal law by relocating us during construction of a sort that, according to the construction workers themselves (we talked to them), “We never do this work in occupied buildings.” There were literally people walking past us in hazmat suits while we had no protection at all.

But that whole thing gave me a much better appreciation of the expectations people have of homeless people. And the one that gave me the best idea, was when the guy gave us money and became irate when we wouldn’t take his money. (We felt like it would be dishonest to take his money when we both had an SSI check that was covering our food and stuff. If we’d needed money it would’ve been different, but we had money.)

Notes: