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When someone says, imagine a homeless person, what first pops into your mind? A wino in a filthy overcoat, sleeping behind a dumpster? A drug addict? A cheap street prostitute?
Those are, to be sure, the usual stereotypes. But how about … a student in the Kalamazoo school system? Would you believe there are more homeless students in Kalamazoo, prosperous middle-class Kalamazoo, than in any other school district?
That’s right, according to a recent study from the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions program, “A Snapshot of Homelessness and Housing Instability in Michigan Schools.”
Everyone knows that doing well in school is hard enough, especially for adolescents with an excess of hormones and a shortage of intellectual discipline. Add to that the insecurity of not knowing where you’ll sleep tonight, and you don’t exactly have a recipe for success.
To be sure, I think this study is somewhat marred by the likelihood that, as the authors put it, “a large under count of homeless students is taking place in Detroit.”
But what is shocking and indisputable is that Baldwin Community Schools in Lake County has the highest percentage of homeless students in the state. More than one-quarter of the students in that mostly rural district are homeless. This is also, for what it’s worth, a small county that’s heavily dependent on tourism to survive.
When you look behind the raw numbers, it is clear that getting the homeless into housing isn’t just a nice thing to do for them, it is critically necessary for all of us.
Our society is, for many reasons, deeply threatened by homelessness. The homeless are, increasingly, families and children. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines a homeless person as any individual or family who lacks a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence. In Detroit, thousands of these folks live on the streets of abandoned buildings, or trudging nightly from shelter to shelter.
According to many studies, the vast majority of women who are homeless have been physically or sexually abused. More than a third of all homeless people suffer from mental illness, and perhaps half abuse, or have abused, alcohol or drugs or both.
There is a huge myth, perpetrated largely by those who don’t want to feel and be held responsible for their fellow man, that being homeless is a “lifestyle” people choose.
There are some mentally ill or drug addicted people who probably do not have the mental capacity to imagine living any other way. But nobody sane would choose to be homeless in Michigan in February. Nobody sane would choose to be cold, dirty, hungry, scared, doomed to live without a bed or a toilet and prone to be a victim of violence at any moment.
Certainly none of the children who are homeless want or deserve to be that way. It is very easy to ignore the homeless and to avert our eyes from them; I’ve done it myself.
But their presence among us doesn’t say anything bad about them, but is an indictment of us, our callousness and indifference to evidence of a creeping cancer on our society.
By the way, I’ve talked to homeless men at the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries who once wore a tie to work and never dreamed this could happen to them.
And if you honestly think that it couldn’t happen to you … I hope you never find out just how wrong you are.
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