You stupidly locked yourself out of your house. The keys are on the front table.
And it’s almost 12:30 – time for lunch. But you can’t have lunch. Lunch is in the kitchen, on the other side of that locked front door.
If you don’t resolve this situation in the next 15 minutes, a team of social workers will sweep down and lavish all manner of “services” on you. You are a pathetic, homeless, hungry client.
Almost no area of the social services empire is so lacking in precision and focus as hungry-homeless services. To even define the target audience of potential victims is fuzzy, funny business.
Imagine being the marketing director for a consumer product or service that defined its customer base as people who are sort of hungry, except when they aren’t; or, perhaps, are well-fed for three days, but never-the-less, are afraid that they might be hungry. Maybe.
Imagine being that same marketing director with consumers who don’t really have a home, except when they do have a home, until the family kicks them out, or until they wander the streets for a few days, at which point, once again, they may or may not have a place to live. Maybe.
That is the curse, or the benefit, of serving up social services to the hungry-homeless. While the social service professionals will send out armies of volunteers to count up who is hungry and who is homeless, the academic researchers snicker a bit at the results. The folks doing the counting tend to distort the data, in favor of “the more victims, the better.”
Defining A Definition
The issue is not only exaggeration, of course. There also is concern about undercounting.
One can understand that wandering the mean streets of New York City or Hartford looking for homeless people might be challenging work. Who is it, exactly, that you should be counting? If they have an “address,” but they prefer to wander the streets, or have been pushed out “temporarily” by frustrated relatives, are they “homeless”?
If I am “homeless” today, but the Hartford Business Journal pays me for this column tomorrow, and I grab a room at the Last Resort Motel, I am no longer homeless, according to some definitions – but according to other definitions, I am still in danger of homelessness, and thus, “homeless.”
Much the same problem occurs when counting the hungry. Various government and non-profit agencies frustrate themselves and others, attempting to define how hungry one must be to be hungry enough to trigger the next federal grant – or access to the food kitchen.
The hungry-homeless population is, at best, elusive and not necessarily cooperative. One solution, of course, is to simply turn on the government faucet, let the money flow like water, and keep building cheap housing and food kitchens until every last theoretical homeless-hungry person is out-of-sight and fed.
The real problem with lack of precision, of course is not the care and feeding of the homeless-hungry population, but the care and feeding of the social service community that earns a living providing “services” to those in need.
Last month, a collection of the “helping” professions and non-profits, from the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, to the Corporation for Supportive Housing, sent out volunteers to the grimmest neighborhood in the state, to “count” the homeless and report back on the inevitable “crisis.”
Yes, they came back with numbers: about 2,800 single adults, about 430 families, about 800 kids.
Assuming the numbers are valid, the challenge comes in the details. Who, exactly, did the volunteers find wandering the streets? Until we know who they are, the “solutions” may well be expensive and futile and wasteful.
For instance, in Alaska, government officials are going after a particular class of “homeless” – the “chronic inebriates.”
The drunks don’t get much sympathetic press treatment, but they do represent a significant share of homeless. The Alaska strategy: build a “residential wet house,” which will get them off the street, but still let them drink. The craze at the moment is “transitional housing,” in which homeless folks are vacuumed into “temporary” quarters, then transformed by social service types paid to do the work.
The research data on effectiveness are mixed. But we’ll keep counting our homeless and hungry, until, at least, we get the numbers right.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
