No Room of Her Own by Desiree Hellegers is a collection of fifteen stories of women who have been or are suffering from homelessness. Hellegers interviewed these women in Seattle, although the problems that they address are far from unique to the Pacific Northwest. It's not quite ethnography - Hellegers did not appear to live among the homeless as she interviewed them - but it's not quite just a series of interviews, either.
The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in 1948. One of the signatories was the United States. It's thirty articles detailing fundamental human rights. I draw your attention to Article 25:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
It is appalling that hundreds of thousands of people in a country as resource heavy as the United States don't have shelter, millions of households face food insecurity, and 10% of the population puts of health care because of costs. It's mind-boggling and it's horrific to think that we can't figure out a way to make sure we meet the basic human rights of all of our citizens. It's a systematic problem, of course, but it seems to me that there are ways to solve this problem. Give people who currently don't have safe shelter a home. It's cheaper in the long run and much more humane.
If you can't tell, this is an issue that I care deeply about. I care about the homeless population, the lack of affordable housing, and I have spent hours in front of classrooms going on about mixed-use neighborhoods and how if we could just fix the housing crisis, we could solve so many other issues.
I thought of this book as really diving into three main themes: the systematic and pervasive problems in our society that allow homelessness to flourish, the trauma and abuse that are frequently direct causes of homelessness, and the everyday indignities the homeless population must face.
Systematic and pervasive problems:
"The past several decades, moreover, have seen the progressive redirection of federal spending from investment in education, housing, social services, and domestic infrastructure to investment in the military and the prison industrial complex." (6)
"Since the 1980s, prisons have increasingly served as one of the largest purveyors of publicly subsidized housing in the United States for low-income people, and people of color, with a corresponding massive transfer of wealth to corporations that increasingly serve as the cornerstone of the prison industrial complex." (7)
"I have often said that people have personal problems, of course, but personal problems don't cause homelessness. Personal problems don't dig the hole in the sidewalk; they just influence who is going to fall into it. It's systematic factors that create the hold. I might have had the same personal problems if there was social justice, economic justice, environmental justice, and everything the peace and justice community is struggling for. But would I have become homeless even with the same personal problems? I would have had more teeth left because I could have gotten dental care even during the times when I had no money. My physical health would have been better...I wouldn't be in chronic pain all the time." (80)
"Homelessness is not going to change until you change the whole system. You have to change the way everybody does business, not just the Homeless Services Committee, and not just the homeless people themselves. You have to change the way that government does business; you have to change the way business does business; you have to change the economy; you have to change the criminal justice system..." (90)
"I have a support network. If I don't have that support network, I know I'm going to end up on the streets again." (133)
"The problem with homelessness in general is that society looks at the homeless as garbage. That's how I felt when I was homeless at times. I was nothing, you know? Because we're invisible to their eyes. Who I am is not homeless. I'm a human being named Jesse. That's' who I am." (133)
Trauma and abuse:
"Back then a woman without a partner was nothing - wasn't even a human being hardly. A woman was just part of a partnership. My identity has always been linked either to my husband to my children or to my parents." (30)
"The sexual abuse started when I was thirteen. I guess I should have been old enough to handle it by then. My mother, she was working nights at the post office, which was really convenient for Daddy. At fourteen, I was raising five of his kids, keeping his house, cooking his meals. No wonder he thought I was supposed to fuck him to. I mean, shit, I did everything else a wife did except that." (32)
"When we were born, we weren't born addicts. We weren't born drunk. We were conditioned to become that by abuse." (47)
Everyday indignities:
"Among the few and heavy things homeless people carry, their stories about their lives and experiences are the most precious." (3)
"If you're not sleeping and eating good and getting the proper rest, when you're running around in teh streets all day from shelter to shelter and food line to food line, it makes you crazy. It makes you psychotic. One minute you're okay, next minute you feel like flipping out." (123-124)
"That's the big thing about homelessness. It's not set up to accommodate people who want to work. First of all, you have to take your stuff everywhere. You have to wait around to get a locker, and you're not guaranteed one...." (151)
"Right now I feel like I need to be in a hospital, because I'm having pain in my joint area, and I'm relating to pulling heavy bags, and [having to] keep going everyday, moving, always consistent movement that's very stressful to me, not only physically but mentally as well. The way things are designed in these shelters, they have indicated to us that if we left our bags there overnight, they would throw them away into the trash dumpster. Why would you hurt someone if they're already down and out by throwing away something that could be so special to them?" (177)
The stories told in this book are gut-wrenching and I think Hellegers did a good job of showing the gamut of the homeless experience - from those who needed shelter for a brief period of time to those who suffer from chronic homelessness, from those who fled domestic violence to those who sank into the miasma of drug and alcohol abuse, from those who became homeless with children to those who made their ways on the streets alone.
We've been so busy criminalizing homelessness - creating new laws prohibiting sleeping in public places, loitering, and urinating in public - that we've lost sight that every individual, no matter how sick or addicted, deserves to be respected. Part of that respect is safe and stable housing. I think Hellegers is to be admired for her dedication to these interviews, particularly with the women who she followed up with over the span of many years, but I also think she's to be admired for letting the women speak to their own experience so that we can all get fired up about this terrible problem and take steps to fix it.
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