Garrett Kennedy: Facing the reality of homelessness

Entering Wawa. Walking past an outstretched hand shaking from the cold, dirty and calloused, stretching from below the old sweatshirt that hardly provides protection from the increasingly cold Philadelphia nights. A defeated voice asks for money -- any bit of change left over from the purchase of late-night coffee.

There is a quick dehumanization, a swift thought that removes the humanity from the homeless. The immediate reaction is not to look at the homeless as a people but rather a part of the scenery. It has happened time and again, and not just on the individual level; Salt Lake City shipped their homeless to Las Vegas before last winter's Olympics in an attempt to beautify the city.

This weekend, Penn's Civic House will host the 15th Annual Conference of the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness. The weekend will be host to a number of events, with speakers including Bill Shore, Penn alum and founder of Share Our Strength, and Donald Whitehead, Executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

The problem of homelessness is nothing new to the urban environment and yet is an issue that has never been properly dealt with. The quick answer has always been to blame the homeless for their situation; in the mid 1990s, Clinton took this approach and cut back on welfare, basically only providing for single mothers and people with physical or mental disabilities.

The idea was that if there were no source for help, then people would be forced to get jobs. This is something like taking aspirin to cure a broken femur -- it doesn't really do anything but superficially seems like an attempt to ease the pain. While statistically the number of people on welfare dropped, this is because people could no longer receive it, not because they were suddenly able to find work or affordable housing.

Homelessness is a multifaceted problem and not simply one limited to gainful employment. While too many to list in this column, a glance at some of the more obvious major issues is in order.

One of the primary causes has been that affordable housing, of which there has been an increasing shortage since the 1970s. In this time period, the supply has declined from a surplus to a large deficit of affordable units. The general standard for affordable housing is paying roughly 30 percent of one's income to pay for housing. Large portions of the poor in the United States pay upwards of 75 percent of their annual income on a place to live.

Another issue often cited is that of declining value of minimum wage. While the price of housing has been declining slowly, the real value of minimum wage has declined to well below the value of a living wage. In 2000, according to the Living Wage Campaign, $17,050 a year, or $8.20 per hour, working 40 hours a week was considered a living wage for "a full time worker... support[ing] a family of four above the poverty line."

While variable by state, the current highest minimum wage is $6.90 in Washington, although most states follow the federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour. Welfare provides no more relief, considering that it's real value had declined some 39 percent from the 1970s to the mid-1990s, and still provides a standard of living well below a living wage for those eligible to receive benefits. The catch-22 with welfare, of course, is that once one starts working, welfare stops and therefore there is little to no incentive to work.

It is very easy to look at homelessness as a problem that affects a small number of people. And on any given day, that is true. Point-prevalence looks at homelessness have estimated that some 250,000 to 500,000 people are homeless on any given day. However, over a four-year period from 1988 to 1992, a study by Dennis Culhane, a professor of psychiatry and social work who teaches in Penn's Urban Studies Program, estimated that some 3 percent of the American population had in fact been homeless.

This is the significant number -- the one that brings to light the fact that homelessness is not simply a problem affecting the down and out, but rather a large proportion of the U.S. population. The problem of homelessness is not merely one of the presently homeless. It affects an ever changing and growing number of people nationwide.

Garret Kennedy is a senior Anthropology major from Wayne, Pa.

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