MYTH: Unhoused people want to live that way, that’s why they don’t better themselves.
RESPONSE: Experiencing houselessness is one of the most difficult and degrading things a person can live through. Cleaning your clothes, getting new shoes, brushing your teeth, getting reliable access to meals or taking a shower all become huge obstacles when you are on the street. What’s more, without access to these things it becomes nearly impossible to find or maintain employment.
MYTH: People experiencing homelessness are all adults who make bad choices.
RESPONSE: In LAUSD there are a staggering number of children experiencing homelessness. Estimates range from 17,000 in the city to as high as 63,000 county wide. Nationally, a 2019 survey of US teachers found that there were 1.2 Million unhoused children across the country. That’s just the children. What’s more, transitional age foster children are extremely vulnerable to falling through the cracks. 20% of foster children will become homeless the day they age out. Untreated trauma, lack of social support and financial resources make it difficult for these children to thrive in adulthood.
MYTH: Climate change impacts everyone the same.
RESPONSE: Climate change is a global crisis with global consequences, but it disproportionately affects poor countries and people, and poor girls and women most of all. Globally, as this crisis deepens there will be increasing numbers of migrants fleeing desperate situations in their home countries for wealthier countries that are able to insulate themselves from the worst effects.
Locally, as the heat rises, droughts intensify, and wildfires grow, living on the street will become deadly.
MYTH: Disabled people can get all the help they need. There’s no legitimate reason they should be living on the streets.
RESPONSE: Living with disabilities - physical, mental, emotional, or otherwise - can shape and reshape every aspect of your life. Everything from getting to the grocery store, to taking a bath can be a challenge. Even when people are still able to work, the stigma against disabled people can be harsh. Physical disabilities do not mean mental deficiencies. Still, the stigma can be difficult to impossible to overcome. For disabled folx who can’t work, current SSI disability benefits are $914/mo for single individuals, $1314 for married individuals. In California, this doesn’t even cover the average month’s rent. Even with difficult to access Section 8 vouchers, and general relief payments, the hurdles for gaining and maintaining a steady place to live can be too much for some people to climb especially if they have little to no family or social support.
MYTH: People become unhoused because they are lazy and don’t want to work
RESPONSE: In LA, approximately 27% of people experiencing homelessness have either part time or full time jobs. The issue for many is that while homeless it is very difficult to find or maintain a job, and for those who do have jobs they aren’t making enough money to pay rent. Wage stagnation, erosion of social safety nets, weakening unions, and trickle down economic policies have left large swaths of the population vulnerable to becoming unhoused. In fact, as many as 59% of Americans are one missed paycheck or major life event away from becoming unhoused. This is plainly unacceptable.
MYTH: Unhoused people are at odds with hard working low income families.
RESPONSE: Unhoused families are low income families. In fact, millions of families across the country are 1-2 paychecks away from falling into houselessness. In 2020 alone, the number of unhoused families in LA increased by 45.7%. That’s 45.7% more moms, dads, and kids. The majority of those kids are under 12 years old. The trauma of living on the street at that age will have lasting effects on their abilities to thrive. Additionally, families fleeing domestic violence are more likely to wind up on the street.
MYTH: People experiencing homelessness are usually men.
RESPONSE: 84% of all families experiencing homelessness are headed by women. This is deeply connected to a larger sexist culture that pays women, particularly poor and working class women, 80 cents on the dollar compared to their male counterparts. Some women may then stay in bad situations because they need to rely on their partners for economic support. Mothers experiencing homelessness are often fleeing abusive domestic partners, and are at higher risk of sexual violence while unhoused.
MYTH: Homeless people have special rights the rest of us don’t have. Beggars can’t be choosers, after all.
RESPONSE: While it can seem strange to say that sleeping on the sidewalk is a right, or that unhoused people have the right to control their own health care options- the truth is these are rights we all have. Becoming unhoused doesn’t mean you surrender your rights, it just means you can’t afford a place to live at the moment. The United Nations has recognized homelessness as a violation of human rights, because everyone deserves a place to live. Temporary solutions like shelters or tiny homes can be helpful stopgaps in a crisis, but too often they become the focus, rather than finding and creating permanent solutions.
MYTH: With marriage equality, gay people no longer experience stigmas.
RESPONSE: 40% of LA’s youth identify as LGBTQ+. More broadly, LGBTQ+ people make up 20-40% of the overall unhoused population, meaning they are much more likely than their cis-hetero peers to become unhoused. The stigma surrounding these issues can contribute greatly to the likelihood someone can become unhoused.
MYTH: The real problem is we go too easy on these people. They need to be locked up, and forced into addiction treatment or mental health facilities.
RESPONSE: Addiction and mental illness as causes of houselessness are often overstated. The biggest reasons are: I can’t afford rent, and not enough income. What’s more, policing the homeless is more expensive than building permanent housing.. In the long run the costs are far greater. When unhoused people are arrested, they are often fined more money than they can afford or spend time in jail where they can be traumatized more. Having been to prison is the #1 predictor of whether or not a person will become unhoused. It also makes it extremely difficult to find a job or permanent housing. This creates a vicious cycle of poverty and houselessness. Adding family dynamics, and generational trauma, and suddenly the long term cost of policing becomes staggeringly more expensive than providing a robust social safety net.
MYTH: I see lots of white homeless people, therefore homelessness has nothing to do with racism.
RESPONSE: Black people make up approximately 8% of LA’s overall population, and 34% of its unhoused population. That’s a 475% over-representation compared to their percentage of the population at large. Every other racial or ethnic group is underrepresented in the relationship to the overall population. That means black people and communities are bearing the brunt of this crisis on their backs. This has to do with many factors including the legacy of redlining and other racist housing policies draining resources from black communities, leaving them generations behind their white counterparts in building wealth. It has to do with the blatantly racist drug policies of the 80’s and 90’s that left generations of black families traumatized and broken by harsh prison sentences. Still today, wealthy black teenagers are more likely to wind up in prison than poor white kids, and when they do, their wealth is drained by the system, because imprisonment destroys wealth. Study after study has shown that black people in the US experience toxic stress related to their race that has detrimental effects on mental health, physical health, and overall life outcomes more broadly.
MYTH: Homeless people refuse to work.
RESPONSE: There is not one single state in the US where a full-time minimum wage job provides enough money to pay the average rent. Read that again, and let it sink in. There is not one single state in the US where a full-time minimum wage job provides enough money to pay the average rent. It is no secret that the last 40-50 years have eroded the power of unions in the United States. Workers are afraid that if they stand up to exploitative bosses their jobs will be outsourced to another country with cheaper labor costs. The fact is for many people without college degrees, finding a job that pays enough money to make ends meet is extremely difficult. Employers know this and can take advantage by exploiting their workers’ situations. Once you become unhoused it is even more difficult to find a good paying job. Unhoused people who work are often coerced into working excessive hours, and sometimes are paid at completely irregular intervals subject to the whim of their boss. For this reason unhoused people and workers often don’t disclose their situation - and live in constant fear of being found out.
Houselessness can often seem like an intractable, natural part of life. It’s not. While the current crisis has been 40+ years in the making, the conditions that create a permanent underclass of people are rooted in capitalism and its relentless pursuit of growth at all costs. The twin legacies of colonialism and slavery, and the violence these two institutions have perpetrated on our land and our bodies- especially the bodies of black, brown, and indiginous people- are still wreaking havoc on our public life today. Gentrification, private property, Drug wars and epidemics, erosion of social safety nets, redlining, and an increasingly global economy are just a few of the many ways that these legacies play out in our daily lives. The fact is, this system thrives on our belief that we are just comfortable enough to justify upholding the status quo- forgoing everything we need in the moment in favor of the utopian future capitalism can provide. But this is an illusion.
We must work together to liberate our communities and each other from these beliefs, but can not do this alone. Everyone cares about at least one of the issues listed above. Everyone has vulnerable parents whose safety nets have been wiped out by illness; or friends whose lives have been disrupted by divorce or domestic violence; friends or family members touched by the opioid crisis or worse; or maybe they know veterans who have been ravaged by the effects of war and PTSD. Everyone on the planet has been touched by climate change. By finding our stake in the solution, and seeing how close to home this issue really is, we can commit to building strong, resilient, healthy communities where people care for one another, but it’s #UPtoUS.