Why are there still homeless people in Indianapolis?
Michael V. Schwing
Sociology 111-OGH
Dr. Carmon Hicks
Why are there homeless people still in Indianapolis?
Here is some personal background on me. I am homeless. By HUD standards and my standards, I am not homeless as I live in co-operative housing for homeless men with incomes called Peter’s House Co-op. I moved back to the Cumberland Peter’s House on 1 October 2010. HUD is the US Federal Housing and Urban Development Agency responsible for seeing that people in this country have adequate housing and utilities and even education. This agency also collects data on homelessness.
I do not do drugs, drink alcohol, come from a poor or low income family, or lack high school education, so I am not the typical homeless person. I became homeless because I stupidly mortgaged my house to help others, then with reduced work hours and my car breaking down thus creating a new bill for car payments, I fell behind in my mortgage payments. I brought my mortgage current with a loan from a friend the first time. The following year I fell behind again. This time I could not bring the mortgage current. I filed bankruptcy, first as Chapter 13, then as Chapter 7. I had no family who would help me, nowhere to turn. I also did not know then that when Washington Mutual Bank, my mortgage holder, refused payments sending my home into foreclosure, I was a victim of a predatory bank. Friends and family blamed me for the loss of my home, including the very people whom I had helped by mortgaging it in the first place.
In Indianapolis, my story has been repeated by hundreds of others. The largest section of homeless people in this city is families who lost their homes in the mortgage crisis. At the CHIP (Coalition for Homeless Intervention and Prevention) Annual Meeting in 2009 at the Barnes and Thornburg Lawyers Office, one of the speakers who works for a family shelter in Indianapolis said that there are now hundreds of homeless families who have lost their homes although they have jobs and educations and “we don’t know how to help them”.
Families with jobs and education becoming homeless change the face of homelessness in Indianapolis. As our textbook says, “In the past most homeless people were older White males living as alcoholics in skid row areas.” (Schaefer, 2010, p. 467). Now most homeless are under 40 and too many are children. The city of Indianapolis conducts an annual homeless count and now also a summer homeless count. This annual homeless count occurs in January. I was housed in the co-op at that count but I was missed in the summer count while sleeping on a bench at the Canal.
In October 2002, the Indianapolis Housing Task Force appointed by Mayor Bart Peterson completed its study of homelessness in Indianapolis and published its strategy to end homelessness here in a book called the Blueprint to End Homelessness in Indianapolis. The agency appointed by the mayor to implement this Blueprint is called the “Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention”, its abbreviation is “CHIP”. It maintains a website at http://www.chipindy.com on which the Blueprint and the emergency Help Manual are located with other information such as the Homeless Count statistics. I am a member of the CHIP Advocacy Council of homeless and formerly homeless men and women who advise CHIP on services needed and gaps in services as well as take the message to the community to raise homelessness awareness and to inform homeless people what services are available and how to access these services.
The following may not stand up to the rigors of “proof” that academicians and professionals demand, but in the world of homelessness, a multi-million dollar “business” in this city, even a published fact could be wrong or quickly become outdated. Some “facts” told to the public, even by their own (and my own—I have voted in all eight presidential year elections since I turned 18) elected officials are lies. Lies said to make them look good to the voters, lies said to look like they “give a damn”.
According to various private and public reports concerning the homeless in this city there are approximately 6000 homeless people through the course of the year, but fewer than 2000 are in the street.
Homeless Count Report
On January 21, 2010, 1,488 individuals were experiencing homelessness in Indianapolis, according to a comprehensive count conducted that night. According to the 2010 Homeless Count Report, 39% or 580 of the individuals experiencing homelessness in our community are members of a homeless family. Our homeless neighbors include individuals who are employed, veterans, women fleeing from domestic violence, and 362 children under the age of 18. Read more…
Many people associate homelessness with panhandling. However, four downtown counts taken in 2008 and 2009 found that none of the individuals engaged in illegal panhandling were homeless, and even those few individuals who were engaged in legal, passive solicitation represented fewer than 1% of the city’s nearly 1,500 people experiencing homelessness. (CHIPIndy.org webpage, accessed 10/5/2010)
Many stay with friends and relatives and in shelters such as Wheeler Mission and the Salvation Army. Now here is another “fact” for you. There are in Indianapolis, as of the homeless count last summer when police officers also counted the number of abandoned buildings, over 5000, some say as many as 7000, abandoned houses in this city. And at any time there are hundreds of non-abandoned houses and apartments for sale or rent. The Indianapolis Housing Authority has at least a dozen buildings, usually full and with waiting lists with apartments for as low as $50 a month. However, the four buildings in the downtown area are now senior citizen and wheel-chair handicapped person’s buildings only. Partners in Housing has at least 13 apartment buildings in Indianapolis, all paid for by the Lilly Endowment and the United Way (their most recent building was purchased for over 6.1 million from Lilly and over 855 thousand from United Way as per the Partners in Housing according to the Partners in Housing website accessible from their Facebook page). While I support Partners in Housing, which is the only real solution which has grown out of the Blueprint to End Homelessness, many of the people they house are not homeless. It also requires the stamp of approval of Midtown (for people with mental health issues or drug-dependency issues) or HVAF (for veterans) to get into one of these buildings. Being homeless is not enough. One must be homeless with another issue such as a physical or mental disability with a check from which to deduct the rent. Only people receiving SSI usually qualify as they have the requirements necessary.
Another new thing on the scene is the co-op. The Peter’s House Co-op which the house I live in is owned by (with mortgage) is one of the first successful applications of co-operative housing in Indianapolis not run by HUD. Peter’s House is a private corporation. It is the master’s thesis in action of William Earl Ross, its founder and CEO. I met William because we are both on the CHIP Advocacy Council. The co-op rents (or in some cases buys) the house from a landlord and promises to pay the rent and keep the property clean and taken care of. The renters, the co-op members pay the co-op for the rent and our share of the utilities (in my house divided by five-the number of bedrooms and men in the house), then the co-op pays these bills with that money. If someone moves or is not a fit for the arrangement (as room-mate situations do not suit everyone, nor does sharing a bathroom or kitchen), then they go to a different house and the co-op covers their rent until that room is filled again. We are protected from room-mates who refuse to pay rent or who disrupt the house in some unacceptable way.
Wheeler Mission, the last mission in Indianapolis for men who are not in a drug treatment program, does not house people. They do have case-managers who help connect one to the available resources. These are usually either the Horizon House or HIP (Homeless Initiative Project). Both of these organizations, which I have issues with for lack of properly doing their jobs, have programs of paying apartment rent down payments if one is working, and job training programs, and other support services to get housed. They both receive federal and state funding(from your tax dollars!) and yet between them house no more than 10 people a year. The usual process being when one has completed all the requirements of the program for housing they are in, they get housed with this grant money for one, three, or six months. Now when the grant money runs out, the person becomes homeless again.
There are also group homes, usually charging a rent, for homeless men. Some are run by churches, some by private people; few by public agencies. It can be hard to find out about them as they rarely advertise. I was surprised when I was looking at a map of known group homes, co-ops, shelters, and the like on the wall in the CHIP office at 3737 North Meridian. I had never heard of most of them.
Back to the question of my paper, “Why are there still homeless people in Indianapolis?” I think it is a good question since I know about the federal and state programs to house people, the millions of dollars being poured into this city for the homeless, the group homes, shelters, co-ops, and abandoned houses, all more than sufficient to house 6000 homeless. I haven’t even discussed the local neighborhood organizations almost all of which by up properties in their areas and fix them up to rent or preferably sell to low income families. Habitat for Humanity is also active in this city, although they will not sell to homeless in the street or in shelters because ‘the homeless are not trustworthy” and don’t pay bills. (Bill Schwartzkopf, personal interview 2009) Bill Schwartzkopf is also the one who found that the Horizon House throws away the listing of available housing which the City of Indianapolis sends every month to the Horizon House. One of my complaints with said organization is that I know more about housing in this city than my housing case-manager. There is nothing to house people for free. The planned Dinaris House would do that, run by the fraternal organization called the Kingpire of Dinaris, but the funding may never come.
People seem to have the idea that with the coming of the Super Bowl to this city that the city is housing homeless or will send them somewhere else for two weeks. I could barely believe my ears when I heard a woman on the bus say that this city was housing the homeless, and the bus driver saying they would send the homeless somewhere else for a couple weeks—that the homeless will be banned from the city or rounded up and sent elsewhere. When I stated the city is not housing the homeless, everyone got quiet and no one mentioned the homeless again while I was on the bus. As strange as it may seem to the housed, the idea of rounding up the homeless and shipping them off to another city has been and is being considered by your legally elected representatives to the State Legislature as if this were Communist Russia or Nazi Germany!
As I remind people including police officers, when did I lose my civic rights? I lost them when I became homeless? Ridiculous, at least for me personally it is. I engage in my civic responsibilities of paying taxes, voting, reporting crimes, cleaning up after myself, etc. I go to church, hold a job at times, own a car, own my own business, serve as a volunteer at the State Museum for the Watanabe Garden, and am a political activist online for Save Darfur, Tobacco Free Children, and homeless and poor person’s causes. I sit on or have sat on three corporate boards, I count lawyers, doctors, real estate agents, clergy and ministers, and state representatives as friends. I am a distant cousin of President Barack Obama and Senator Evan Bayh and more closely related to Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, all through our descent from King Edward I. (President Obama’s ancestry is online at http://www.wargs.com/political/obama.html).
In conclusion, this paper is not about defining homelessness, although a working definition is necessary. Here, a homeless person is anyone who does not have a safe and proper shelter or place to sleep, store their belongings, and be out of the elements in a shelter normal for human occupation. Living in abandoned buildings and cars fulfills the “out of the elements” and maybe even safe requirements, but is not adequate or normal housing. It can also include doubling up with another family in a house meant for one family. This paper is also not about what made me homeless, which is the topic of a different paper written for English class. But a brief description of what made me homeless was useful as this is the outline scenario of the majority of homeless people in the city of Indianapolis.
Which paradigm of sociology is this? In dealing with homelessness we use all four paradigms, but for different uses. To define and study homelessness we use the fundamentalist approach of looking at all the pieces. To decide how to help and what things need to be done requires the conflict approach as people always want to “do something about it” but NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) then kicks in. No one seems to want an apartment complex turned into a low income housing building that might house some of “those people” (homeless in this case). The feminist view is also important here though not considered nearly as much as it should be as most of the homeless families who actually live in the street for a time are headed by women, either single or divorced. The interactionist view is what actually houses people and helps them stay housed with the support services of job placement and preparedness classes, medical treatment, parenting, anger management, and drug addiction therapy and classes. Home ownership classes and information on mortgages and banking information is also useful.
For me personally, I am now in the interactional viewpoint as I now try to help others leave their homelessness behind them. Others helped me, now I want to help others. I just want this city to stop being so homeless hateful and start accepting housing of the homeless, even if “in their backyard”. We need free temporary housing to get most people off the street and more low income houses and apartments to get our families out of shelters and doubling-up situations and into their own houses again.
Potsie the Squirrel wishes me to post this on behalf of the Squirrels of Military Park, Indianapolis, Indiana: [written by Michael Schwing 1 May 2014]
Writings of Michael Vincent Schwing (Tyrrannis I Saurranno) of Indianapolis, Indiana, USA 