Homelessness Here, Homelessness Now
The troubling cycle of silence
—By Samantha Nelson
On a chilly Sunday evening in late November, I found myself cozied up in Espresso Royale, patiently awaiting the start of poetry night. Though my own poetic aptitude is slim to none, my curiosity was piqued by a friend who fondly frequented these bi-weekly readings. After several brave souls took the stage, dazzling us with rhymes and eloquent prose, I felt privy to a new, niche-community of spoken word aficionados, a community I hadn’t known existed a mere forty-five minutes prior. As I sipped down the remnants of my Feel Better tea and prepared to leave, an older gentleman with rich, dark skin and a faded suit sashayed up to the center of the room. Moving with a natural confidence, he grasped the microphone and launched into a sorrowful, brief poem rooted in themes of race and injustice. When he finished, my friend turned to me and said that he’d seen that same man on the streets many times before. The man was homeless. I nodded solemnly and offered a sympathetic remark, but I left the coffeehouse that night without a real understanding of what that word meant.
Whether I understood its extent that night or not, homelessness in Ann Arbor is unmissable. You are hard pressed to walk down State or Main street on any given day without coming across an individual holding a sign or cradling a cup of change. Despite its undeniable prevalence, the reality of homelessness within our community is often brushed aside as an afterthought.
Numbers don’t tell the whole story
At a glance, the numbers on homelessness in Washtenaw County appear to be improving. Every year, a federally mandated survey known as the Point in Time count (PIT) is conducted in January, to gather statistics on unsheltered and sheltered residents within the county. “Sheltered” refers to anyone in a temporary living situation, including shelters, transitional housing facilities or government-paid hotels and motels, while “unsheltered” applies to anyone living in a car, park, abandoned building, bus or train station, airport or campground. Since 2015, the total homeless population in the county has dropped by approximately 25%, and according to the 2018 PIT, there are currently 256 sheltered residents and 28 unsheltered residents in the county, a sharp decline from the 292 sheltered and 80 unsheltered in 2015. Despite this overall trend of improvement, the complexity of the homelessness crisis can’t simply be illustrated numerically.
Jennifer Hall, Executive Director of the Ann Arbor Housing Commission (AAHC) is concerned about the homelessness stigma and stresses the need for more involvement from the broader Ann Arbor community. A government funded body, Ann Arbor Housing Commission’s objective is to provide housing and assistance to low-income families and individuals, some of which are homeless, through partnerships with like-minded local organizations like Avalon Housing, Food Gatherers, Ozone House and Community Action Network to name a few. For the AAHC, housing is equally important as any other fundamental right. In fact, Hall identifies housing to be, “the first line of defense for mental health, financial health, emotional health and physical health.” Hall further emphasizes community engagement as one of the greatest challenges. “We can’t operate in a vacuum. We need public support to provide funding to our programs and all of the non-profits who work in the community.”
Aside from the need for more involvement, a significant barrier that AAHC faces is a housing shortage. Especially in Ann Arbor, where high housing costs and limited supply make finding somewhere to live a struggle in itself. Hall expresses,“The UM is acquiring more and more private properties and is both taking them off the tax rolls as well as preventing those properties from being developed as housing by the private sector.” As a possible solution, Hall proposes that, “UM does not have to provide more dorms, but could partner with the private sector to build mix-use higher density developments on campus properties, especially along commercial corridors like State Street and Plymouth Road.”
Daniel Kelly, Executive Director at Shelter Association of Washtenaw County shares a similar perspective, believing that fixing public misconceptions of homelessness is essential. Though Kelly acknowledges that there are “a lot of caring folks in the county and in other local non-profits,” he stresses that there is still a high degree of misperception of the homeless populace. “If you go on google and type in the word ‘homelessness’ you see certain stereotypes played out. I think there is a general, societal misunderstanding around who is homeless. There is this idea that it has to be somebody who doesn’t want to tie up their bootstraps and work hard, or a drug user, or someone who is against society’s goals. And that could not be farther from the truth.” Kelly is excited to see the rising levels of sheltered residents that can be observed from the latest PIT, but, like Hall, still worries about the far-from-resolved issue of affordable housing. “We have a lot of units at risk of losing their affordability status, there is a lot of concern due to the market in this area about whether folks who are low income or homeless are getting squeezed out.”
Students reach out
Local government bodies and non-profits aren’t the only ones determined to initiate positive change for homelessness in Ann Arbor. Within the University of Michigan, students and staff are actively in collaborating with the homeless population and striving to better educate the student body. Bridging the homelessness awareness gap is a top priority for Michigan Movement, the only student organization on campus directly focused on homelessness. Michigan Movement’s goal since its 2017 launch has been to give aid to individuals, families and students who are experiencing homelessness and poverty in Washtenaw County. Through volunteer events, like a yearly care package distribution, and maintained contact with the homeless community, the club aims to create a two-way relationship with the community members they serve.
Charlotte Yang, a junior at University of Michigan and a member of Michigan Movement’s leadership team, emphasizes the club’s attention to providing the homelessness community with what it actually needs, instead of making assumptions: “Part of our mission is that we really want to listen to those people who we serve before we make any decisions on their behalf.” Yang explains that care package recipients can make requests for the types of products they would like to receive. While items can range from food to clothing to hygiene products, the club has recently started including more health items in like Vaseline and diabetic cream. “We wouldn’t just put these items in any bag,” Yang points out. “We’d ask people what they want.”
In terms of promoting more student participation, Michigan Movement holds a Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week every fall. “We are trying to raise awareness and bridge the gap between the student population and the more invisible homeless population,” Yang notes. Within the club itself, Yang underlines that, with such a wide agenda, from volunteering to outreach, to other events, narrowing the focal point and investing in one event at a time could be a step in the right direction. One event that Yang is hoping to push for next fall is a replication of the Tent City project that she witnessed in Ohio, which involved a coalition of tents set up for a day to provide services from medical screenings to clothing giveaways, here in Ann Arbor. “There would be a medical tent where people could get screenings, one tent where they can get clothes and tents where people can get help with Medicare forms and birth certificates, so they can get jobs.” Yang anticipates that implementing an Ann Arbor Tent City won’t be without difficulty due to bureaucratic policy within the city, but is optimistic. “The policies are definitely not set in stone. They’re changing. In order to really improve [affordable housing], we need to make policy changes.”
Another way that the club has found success is through its partnerships with local nonprofits, one of which is a newspaper called Groundcover News. Groundcover’s mission is to encourage self-sufficiency and economic growth among low income individuals by employing them as newspaper vendors. Audrey Carey, a social work intern at Groundcover shares her insights into the beneficial potential of the organization. Much of Carey’s work at Groundcover involves interacting directly with vendors. Aside from providing papers for vendors to purchase, Groundcover also offers community meals, social hours to foster camaraderie among venders and staff and writing workshops to promote creative writing. A former employee at the Delonis Center, a local shelter in Ann Arbor, Carey’s perspective on homelessness has unquestionably adapted over the years. “Working at Delonis and working at Groundcover has kind of opened my eyes to what a lot of the homeless community faces and how difficult it is to find housing here in Ann Arbor. I guess I didn’t really realize how bad the housing market was for low income people here until I started working with that population.” Much like Kelly’s sentiment, Carey observes that there is unfortunately a one-sided, hostile image that the general population associates with homelessness. “There is a lot of blame that’s attached to it and, in my opinion, it’s unfair blame because I don’t think that we are creating an environment here in Washtenaw County for people to be successful.”
Families on the brink
Through conducting research and constructing classes, educators at the University of Michigan are set on their own crusades to improve schooling about inequality, race and homelessness. School of Nursing professor Laura Gultekin’s latest research is primarily focused on victims of domestic violence in Detroit, but she explains that family homelessness is often a directly related factor. In identifying some of the most significant differences between family and individual homelessness, Gultekin illuminates the telling statistic that about 80% of families experiencing homelessness in the country are led by single, female parents. What’s more, a sizable 50% of those women are African American and have young kids under age six. “They are different from individuals, not in the sense that individuals don’t have these other traumatic experiences, but we know that [these single mothers] have trauma related to domestic violence that goes untreated for long periods of time.”
Through her research, Gultekin has been exposed not only to immensely problematic perceptions of homeless populations, but also to the problematic treatment these populations receive. “We hear families talking to us in Detroit about their experiences when they go to receive services or apply for funding. Oftentimes they are called derogatory terms by the people who they are attempting to access services from and when they don’t have the paperwork they need, they are treated very poorly.” This poor treatment stems from gross misperceptions and overall ignorance to the hidden factors behind homelessness, something that Gultekin has an increasing understanding of through the stories she hears from domestic violence survivors. “It is really interesting to me, if you read the national data on family homelessness, you can identify that the majority of people leading those families are single females, but the data says nothing about domestic violence. It says nothing about the traumatic events that have happened in their lives. It just says ‘hey, they don’t have money and they don’t have jobs.’”
Creating trust
On the other side of campus, School of Education professor Debi Khasnabis is tackling homelessness stereotypes through another avenue. In collaboration with fellow School of Education professor Simona Goldin, Khasnabis offers Homelessness in Schools and Society, a semester-long course, open to students of all academic disciplines that explores the intersection between race, class, gender and other aspects of identity, and offers the opportunity for outside-of-the-classroom involvement with local homelessness through a partnership with Avalon Housing, a nonprofit that develops and manages properties geared toward low-income families, and their youth afterschool program. As a former middle school teacher in Detroit, Khasnabis’s first real introduction to homelessness came through observations of her student body. “I had many students living in poverty and some who were homeless, so it was certainly a topic that I was concerned about as a teacher.” In terms of how teaching the class has shifted her own perspective, Khasnabis reveals that her attitude has undoubtedly been altered. “Perhaps now I am more…disgusted with our society. Before I might have seen it as such a sad thing, now I am pretty much just horrified at a country that allows this to persist. I feel abhorred that we would let down so many people.”
Khasnabis’s concentration is also on homelessness among school-aged children, which, unfortunately not unlike homelessness as a whole, severely lacks awareness. Before our interview, Professor Khasnabis sent me a Click on Detroit article that laid out some of the major obstacles with the intersection between the Ann Arbor public-school system and homeless families. Through the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, public schools are federally mandated to carve out a position dedicated to making sure all kids, homeless or not, have the tools necessary to get an education. But the act alone isn’t enough to eliminate the trying task of establishing trusting relationships with parents. Avalon Housing Associate Director Lauren Velez explains, “Poverty is very generational…the families that are experiencing homelessness have experienced poverty or instability or even homelessness in their own childhoods, and they don’t always have a super strong, positive experience with school from when they were growing up.” This initial distrust is exactly what Velez argues makes it, “harder for them to develop good relationships as parents with school sometimes.”
The “quiet statistic”
Both within the public-school system and outside of it, race is a key component of homelessness that rarely receives sufficient attention. As of 2018, 71% of Washtenaw County was categorized as white and 13% was categorized as black. Problematically among the homeless population, however, 38% are white and 48% are black. While preparing for the course, Khasnabis and Goldin struggled to find in-depth studies to highlight this racial discrepancy, which understandably came as a surprise, given the county’s racial makeup. Eventually, but not without extensive investigation, Khasnabis and Goldin discovered an adequate source, but the sheer amount of time it took to find that information was troubling. Khasnabis elaborates, “We started to call it, just between me and her, the “quiet statistic” of homelessness because it is there. We wanted to name it and point it out to our students that not only is it important to say that people of color are overrepresented, but also that we have a history of having only quiet statistics around this, so we are complicit in perpetuating the problem if we don’t talk.” This responsibility for awareness is not just something that Khasnabis places on her students, but on anyone working within the service sector. “People who work in these service roles have to be thinking about race because most often we have people of color facing homelessness and people in the service sector who are white.”
Be it race, ethnicity, gender or any other factor, more than anything else, Khasnabis’s goal is for her students to be aware of their identities, their privilege and how both come into play depending on their environments. “There is quite a risk that, when you are privileged, you are unaware of all the ways that you are carrying that privilege.” Khasnabis will ask her students, “when you walk into the room, what do you think you should do? Where should you stand? What should you bring? How should you speak?” When she and her students visit Avalon as a part of the off-campus learning component of the course, Khasnabis iterates the type of mindset she wants them to take on. “You want to be a guest in that space. You don’t want to walk in and assume that you are the center of that space. Check your identity, check your privilege, check your complicity. And none of them are quick, check-off items. They are things you have to constantly be thinking about.”
Hidden voices
Through writing this piece, I feel inspired to learn about the extensive force of nonprofits, educators, students and countless others who are speaking up, raising awareness and nurturing positive change for homelessness in Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County, Detroit and beyond. That said, there are so many essential voices that are harder to hear, the voices within the homeless community. In hopes of obtaining this missing perspective, I attended Michigan Movement’s Homelessness Here banquet, where I had the opportunity to listen to the personal testimonies of three formerly homeless Ann Arbor residents.
One of those residents was Lit Kurtz. After losing her job as a Detroit public-school English teacher, though at first living off her unemployment money, Kurtz soon found herself struggling to make ends meet with pilling expenses of food and housing. Living in the Delonis center for a time, it wasn’t until Kurtz started working at Groundcover that things started to turn around. Groundcover presented a new opportunity, a chance for Kurtz to apply the writing skills she already had from her teaching job and create a new career for herself. She now works as a vendor and writer, owns a t-shirt company and is in the process of writing a book. Kurtz’s advice? “Be original. Always have a sense of urgency. When you lose your home, and have nothing to eat, there is a sense of urgency.”
Toward the end of the evening, Ken Leslie, a formerly homeless comedian, Emmy-winning producer and strong advocate for the homeless community made a powerful point that left the audience stunned into silence. Leslie paced around the room and asked everyone to state all of the things they disliked about homeless people. At first, there was silence, as people turned their gazes downward and an uneasy discomfort filled the air. Gradually, however, people started to speak. “Dirty,” an anonymous voice murmured. Egged on by Leslie, adjectives began spilling out around the room. “Smelly. Lazy. Drugs. Alcohol.” This went on for a few minutes until the voices died down, and Leslie brought the crowd back together. He then asked the underlying question: who in the room did not know of someone in their own lives that didn’t fit or exhibit at least one of those qualities. Chances are, we could all pinpoint at least one friend with bad hygiene. Maybe we have a relative who has struggled with substance abuse. And if we are being completely honest, who among us hasn’t been lazy? The core of Leslie’s activity could not be clearer. If we could accept those people in our own lives who were a little smelly, or who had addictions or who were lazy to a fault, what makes homeless people so different? How is their laziness, smelliness or addiction any worse than our own?
As I headed home from the banquet that night, I couldn’t help but connect Leslie’s exercise back to that cold night in November and the gentlemen in the faded suit. I had perceived him only through one dimension of his identity: homeless. By not taking the opportunity to ask his name, his story or even offer a smile, I devalued who he was as a person and, whether consciously or not, I made the awareness gap just a little wider. Homelessness is not an issue with a one-size-fits all solution. It’s complicated. It’s messy. It’s uncomfortable. But it isn’t something that we can close our eyes to and wish away. We have to see each other with open eyes and open hearts, regardless of our backgrounds, living situations and identities. We are all people and we all deserve respect, dignity and love. It is only through the embodiment of this belief that we can truly progress as a society to a place where housing is no longer a privilege, but a right.
Feature photo: Groundcover Newspaper and Homelessness Here Banquet Program, taken by Samantha Nelson