Homelessness plagues the American city. It is a simple description of a complex reality, and part of what has brought the issue to its current level is an erroneous conception of “community integration.”
Make no mistake, the idea of community integration is good. When people are able to live as a cohesive whole — with opportunities of which they take advantage, and with social trust high — things are ideal. If something goes wrong along the way, as Manhattan Institute senior fellow Stephen Eide told the Washington Examiner, that is “an experience of social disintegration.” It is the chronic homelessness we see so often. And the goal, Eide said, is to “reintegrate a person who lost integration,” largely through resocialization.
The problem is that this requires a much more well-formed society than our modern one, and so a version of “community integration” also brought us to where we are now. It began with appropriate reforms and ended as the activism we see today: That, essentially, disabled people need abundant access to non-disabled people, and it is unjust to prevent as much. These motivations enabled the deinstitutionalization that took place in the United States from the 1950s onward, profiled in detail by City Journal associate editor John Hirschauer, and it remains among the many identity- and equity-based causes that wind up denying life.
Surely the option, rather than the broad mandate, for institutional living should be available. Serious reform of mental institutions might have sufficed — but a sweeping shut-down resulted.
Miscalculation
It has left mental illness and the homeless population intertwined to a near-inseparable degree. Speak with a given number of homeless people, and it will be plain that most have some sort of personality disorder. Those who do not are dragged down by their surroundings just the same.
The reason is that the “integrated settings” movement achieved the exact opposite effect of its purported goal: Homeless people, themselves, have become the societal plague. That is a widespread impression evidenced by the common person’s habitual avoidance of homeless people — but it also means that the movement’s notion of human dignity was off from the start. Institutions’ closures moved severely mentally ill people, who constitute the majority of the present homeless population, onto the streets or into “cruel” tent cities to be neglected and diminished, with less freedom than before.
Of course, there are other drivers of homelessness: Running out of money, leaving an abusive family, and addicting oneself to drugs are all familiar and decently straightforward circumstances. Not everyone is schizophrenic — some are just chronically homeless and without support. But nor are these incidents isolated: The homeless who do not have — or do not start out with — much mental affliction are especially vulnerable to the lifestyles of those who do. Of the cases involving someone who is disabled, many could be solved by reinstitutionalization, and their perpetuation is a symptom of the failure to do so. Instead, in an age where there is almost no recourse to institutional help, the condition of mental illness coincides all the more with hard-drug escapism, family estrangement, joblessness, and loneliness.
Merge those two groups — the relatively sane and the definitely ill — and they produce what any other social environment would: People who pick up one another’s habits and grow complacent. Together, they comprise what we know as the homeless population. And people belonging to this set are, for the most part, unable to form the relationships that can pull them out of it.
Oversaturation
That is the irony of the ill-fated “community integration” framework: Obsession with access has meant that the disabled have even less of a relationship with the non-disabled. This reality applies to homeless people, generally.
In particular, there is no real relationship between the homeless and the non-homeless, which is the opposite of the deinstitutionalizers’ stated goal. Most homeless — ones who are not in encampments or under bridges — sit on sidewalks or street corners either dejected or in plea. And most common people hardly glance at them. There is zero connection. Whatever community responsibility the “integration” movement envisioned amounts to latent guilt in the passerby.
The reaction is understandable. People living on the streets are usually volatile, and there is no way to tell beyond taking the risk. On top of safety, guidance on what to give, and even whether to give, lacks consensus. But this situation is the result of the misguided integration attempt: Contrary to its claims, the message of deinstitutionalization is not that the severely disabled and homeless are a vulnerable group who require extra attention, but that they need to feel no different from non-disabled people in order to feel free and happy. Homeless people are oversaturated with access to people who feel no obligation toward them and who offer no acknowledgment of them.
Physical loneliness only covers half of the effect. The rest is the interior experience of worthlessness and invisibility that comes from never hearing one’s own name or noticing revulsion from others. Most homeless people already feel abnormal: When I met Ryan, a man living on the streets of Denver, he told me, “You guys are normal people, and we aren’t.” These psychological conditions combine with social immobility to produce people who accept such living conditions as eating out of trash cans and residing in filth. Then do housing and simple labor change from “difficult” to “undesirable,” a natural result of grand dehumanization.
Alienation occurs within the homeless group almost as much as without it. On top of furthering the distance between the homeless and the non-homeless, deinstitutionalization activists have stripped the severely disabled of ingroup community. Would-be residents of long-term mental institutions live instead on the streets, where friendship is rare.
And while not all homeless are severely mentally ill and missing out on institutional community, they all have their realities decided by the relational outcomes of “community integration.” Most will note that, no matter how much time they spend bumming out with others, they would not trust them to watch their belongings. Authentic trust is low or non-existent when shared experiences range from drinking to theft and, sadly, these do not overcome pure self-reliance.
Slow reversal
A deep flaw of deinstitutionalization is that it proposes only that the disabled know the non-disabled, not the other way around. Pride kills, and we see it in the height of homeless mortality rates.
Resocialization, then, lies with people who are willing to pursue simple, genuine interactions with the homeless. Comprehensive policy proposals are in order, but short-term rehumanization efforts are what will reverse the damage already done.
Even so, frustration from public officials who take issue with charitable groups is a valid counter. Food, clothing, and especially money can enable stubborn street life. As with anything, there is a prudent limit. Those material goods only reach a surface level of the homeless condition — the point is that they need relationship to set them in motion.
A mere focus on making the disabled feel not disabled lacks two vital components: The first is the fact that some severely disabled would live better in an institution. The second is that there is reciprocal benefit in friendship between the disabled and non-disabled, homeless and non-homeless.
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Maybe it is a big ask of people to befriend strangers, especially homeless ones. There certainly is personal commitment involved: The best work will be done by missionary organizations, such as Christ in the City, that devote years to developing consistent relationships with the homeless. Some eventually get off the streets; all of them at least feel cared for or sociable.
While true, the claim that homelessness is out of hand fails if those living on the streets do not agree. The eternal struggle is to convince the addict of his addiction. Some need told once, some need slow convincing, and some need the decision made for them. The only way to figure it out, though, is to ask.