Why Do People Live on the Street?
By Greg Paul
The real reasons have little to do with new-found romanticized freedom or lack of motivation.
“I like the freedom and lack of responsibility.”
“Too lazy to get a job.”
“I don’t fit anywhere else.“
I have a handful of friends who have been sleeping in doorways, ATM enclosuresor under bridges for years. Some are the shaggy, multi-layered folks with haunted eyes that are immediately identifiable. Others you’d pass by without guessing they spent the night huddled in the stairwell of a nearby condo.
The shaggy types seem so “out there” they seem a different order of humanity from you and me. (Indeed, with Toronto’s policing practices, it doesn’t pay to be visibly homeless.) The others can look so much like you and me that you can’t help but think, “Why doesn’t he just get a job?”
Both of these are the “chronically homeless,” the ones politicians, social workers, journalists and church people struggle to find a humane answer for. I’ve heard all of the explanations quoted above and a few more from the mouths of homeless friends, but I don’t believe any of them any more. I’ve been around long enough to hear the heartbreaking stories behind the bravado and the anti-establishment bluster.
Is it freedom when you live out your life within a dozen square blocks of a downtown core and are unable to use the washrooms in a coffee shop? Is a person who hustles 16 hours each day, every day, walking miles for meals, begging or boosting for change, carrying everything he or she owns everywhere, just to make it to the next morning—is that person lazy? Can a person with the improvisational skills and the sheer will to survive that kind of life really not fit in anywhere else?
It’s true that some of my friends have addictions so ferocious that given the choice between sleeping warm and dry for a month or getting high for one night, the money goes to the dealer in a heartbeat. It’s true that a room in a flophouse takes all but a handful of change from the welfare cheque—if you can find a room at all. True, also, that an “affordable” bachelor apartment in my city rents for a couple of hundred dollars more than the monthly welfare payment. Or for full-time workers earning minimum wage, almost three quarters of a month’s pay packet before taxes. And it’s true that perhaps a third of my homeless friends are afflicted with psychiatric conditions that make it difficult for them to get or keep housing.
Although these “reasons” are some of the huge problems to be addressed if my friends are ever to find homes, these aren’t the root cause why they have ended up living on the street. Experiences of significant and repeated physical and/or sexual abuse—which many studies correlate with roughly 85 percent of homeless youth—now that gets a little closer to the bone.
“Greg,” one friend told me years ago, when I asked why he’d bailed out of a good situation and ended up back on the street, “I’m just a piece of ****, and this is where I belong.”
What he said wasn’t true, of course, but it revealed how deeply his soul (his “self-image”?) had been broken. He was living out what he believed he deserved.
Christian communities are uniquely qualified to provide the kind of healing, whole-life embrace necessary to make a difference in such broken lives. The barriers to be overcome are huge— there simply are no easy, five-second-sound-bite answers.
At least we begin with these deep “good news” convictions: healing is precisely for the broken; forgiveness is for the guilty; and grace is for the undeserving. For people like us.
Originally printed in Faith Today July/August 2005. Reprinted with author’s permission.
Greg Paul is director of Sanctuary (www.sanctuaryministries.on.ca), an interdenominational ministry and faith community in Toronto, and author of God in the Alley (Shaw, 2004). He is also a member of the EFC’s Roundtable on Poverty and Homelessness.
