Our annual reminder that homelessness exists

The latest numbers on homelessness in New Jersey are far from encouraging. According to the report from Monarch Housing:

• On the night of January 28th, 2014 a total of 9,202 households, including 13,900 persons, were experiencing homelessness in New Jersey, according to the 2014 Point­‐ In‐Time Count.
• A total of 1,499 individuals, in 1,246 households, were identified as chronically homeless.
• 876 households, with 931 persons were unsheltered on the night of the count.

Overall, this is an increase of 15.8 percent — though the total still falls below the 2011 homelessness count. Part of the issue is the difficulty of counting such a transient population — the single-night count gets as close to an accurate census as it can, but it depends on a lot of factors, including the weather and how aggressive individual counties are at looking for homeless individuals and families.

This is the explanation offered to NJ.com by Monarch:

Jay Everett, an associate on the Ending Homelessness Team at Monarch, said the increase may be attributed to an increase in people staying in homeless shelters because of frigid temperatures. In previous years, those people may have been outside, and not easy to find.

“We had a very cold winter and a very cold night,” Everett said.

Everett said a handful of counties also counted people receiving temporary rental assistance from the Board of Social Services who meet the definition of homeless. Those individuals had not been counted in previous years.

The subtext here is  that annual count only tells part of the story. The numbers can fluctuate for a lot of reasons, so the increase this year is no more an indication of failure than the two-year drop-off from 2011 to 2013. This is a one-night snapshot and it is not a pretty picture. It is, however, our annual reminder that homelessness exists and is a problem.

Unless you live in places with large numbers of homeless (Newark, for instance) or in areas where a tent city has popped up (Lakewood, Toms River, Camden), you do not have to think much about the way we treat the people we’ve decided are of no value to our economy — the mentally ill, the substance abusers, unauthorized immigrants, the long-term unemployed. The American economy is consumption based and corporate run. Nearly everything is assigned a value and those things that are deemed valueless — like the homeless, like the greenhouse gases we spew — do carry costs, which are ignored by corporations that are perfectly happy to collect their profits. Those costs — in health problems caused by poor air quality, for instance, or the potential dangers of having people living on the streets — are passed along to the rest of us. They are socialized, when they are acknowledge at all.

I’ve written a lot about this issue over the last couple of years (see my profile of Jeffrey Wild, a founder of the New Jersey Coalition to End Homelessness and reports for The Progressive, The Progressive Populist and In These Times, along with a piece by NJ News Commons on the work I did with filmmaker Jack Ballo and photographer Sherry Rubel). I’ve talked with people who are homeless and those who now find themselves — because of a medical disaster, long-term unemployment or some other catastrophe that is fast-becoming normal in the 21st century — one step from the streets.

The immediate needs are obvious — cash to help with immediate bills and more temporary shelter space with services (assistance in finding work and treatment for mental health and substance-abuse issues). The longer term efforts — at least those that our capitalist economy will accept as legitimate — include expansion of low-cost rental housing, a livable minimum wage, income supports, real universal health care and a continuation of the services offered to those in immediate needs.

Ultimately, though, addressing the issue of homelessness is going to require us to re-evaluate how we treat people. Are we just human capital, useful only if we can provide a service to our economic masters or do we, as human beings, have some intrinsic value, whether we can perform a job?

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