The Post I've Been Avoiding: Homeless With a Credit Card and a College Degree.

On February 11, 2008, the Christian Science Monitor published a piece called Homeless: Can You Build a Life from $25? about a guy named Adam Shepard, a middle class, college educated white guy with no discernible mental or physical disabilities, a solid foundation in a non-chaotic, educationally enriched, non-toxic environment, and a credit card in his back pocket. Presumably, he also either has no genetic predisposition to addiction, or he is early enough in the addiction process that he is not significantly impaired yet.

Read the article, then read the rant.

Ready? Okay, I haven't written this because I'm so pissed I don't know where to start. Or maybe I do. Where does this pompous ass get off thinking he has ANY idea what's it's like to be really homeless. Not "if I lose my credit card I'll have to call my dad" homeless, but "if I get robbed of my ID it'll take three months to get it back thanks to the new "security" measures of the RealID Act as enacted by many states" homeless. Yes, I know that states aren't required to comply yet. I also know that many of them proactively have changed their ID guidelines to be closer to the RealID guidelines.

Not only that, but this dude was sleeping in a bed, wearing clothes, using laundry soap, soap, towels, shampoo, detergent, etc. that were intended to go to someone who had an actual need for them. Almost certainly he used the resources of several agencies, public and private, with limited resources, whose services are intended for the use of the homeless and nearly homeless. He certainly received food stamps, which was not quite fraudulent, but walked the line.

His goal was to "prove" that "anyone" can have the American dream -- but he forgot one thing. He's not "anyone". The vast majority of white guys in their twenties with no mental illness or major addictions, and no physical or mental disabilities can get decent jobs doing unskilled or skilled labor, so long as they don't have any felonies. Most of those guys, even with those advantages, have never been taught how to manage money, and so are shiny targets for predatory lenders. If they come from poverty, the idea of "living the good life" is so exciting, that many quickly over estimate their ability to pay for things in their new shiny life. And those are the lucky ones.

Black men without felonies spend longer on job hunts than white men with felonies. And white men without felonies, healthy and young, with all their teeth and speaking Standard English, can land jobs literally within hours or days, most often.

This is certainly not true for women, and especially women of color. If women do get jobs quickly, they are generally paid at a much lower scale than even the bottom rung of unskilled labor. They are usually relegated to service jobs at or slightly above minimum wage. Further, women have the added burden of being the ones most affected by unplanned pregnancies. Whether they are trying to not have sex, to have protected sex, to have a baby, or to have an abortion, significant barriers lie in the way of women in their twenties who have no money or family to fall back on.

Shepard is not a mental health professional, and his observation of the power of "attitude" probably reflects a middle class bias toward the Nike "Just Do It" school of positive thinking. He reflects on meeting a man in a wheelchair determined to get out, and a man who was "just kind of bumming around, begging on the street corner".

I can make educated guesses about the two men he contrasted. The first, the one in the wheelchair, had just had an accident, as reported by Shepard, and was still in shock. His positive attitude reflected one of two things. Either he had lived a fairly stable, employed life up until his accident and had plenty of emotional reserves and mental resources to find a new way to live his life, or it really hadn't sunk in how seriously his life had changed (if in fact the disability was permanent, which was doubtful given only a three day stay in the hospital).

The second man almost certainly had a mental illness. What looks like "bumming around" to a layperson is often major depression. Most of the homeless men I know who get through their thirties into their forties develop major depression or dysthymia (a chronic, low grade depression) at some point, and stay there. I would also pay better than even odds that the second man had lived in poverty and chaos his entire life, left high school early either because he had long since been unable to keep up or because his income was needed to help support his family, and was a person of color, probably a dark skinned black man (and if you don't think colorism is a part of racism, you have another think coming).

Shepard claimed that he didn't use his college degree or his middle class upbringing, but the bottom line is that he couldn't help using either, as both are integral parts of his personality. He knew how to talk to prospective employers confidently without being cocky, using standard English and words that are uncommon among the homeless. He knew his situation was temporary and not any more life threatening than the life of the workers in the shelter (okay, so my job is actually pretty life threatening. Get over it. I have.)

He knew how to search for information with a phone book, how to ask for things he wants in such a way that people are more often willing to help him, and how to defer gratification knowing that there would be gratification eventually. Let me emphasize the second half of that last sentence: knowing that there would be gratification eventually. It is not trivial that most people raised in poverty have no expectation of finding any permanent financial security through their own efforts. This is not an irrational belief, for as they look around themselves they see people like themselves try again and again to lift themselves out of poverty without success.

The skills that Shepard shrugs off in his CSM interview as trivial are anything but trivial. They are, on the contrary skills not particularly useful to people living from childhood in poverty. On the street, the white guy who doesn't speak standard English, whose clothes are stained and ill-fit, the black guy who wears nice clothes but sleeps on a mattress on a floor, they both know that when they ask for help, those who "offer" it generally don't see them as people, let alone people with potential. They know they are seen as problems. They learn to form ever shifting alliances to gain temporary advantage, to manipulate and bully and pester, and sometimes to rob from each other when authority figures aren't around to stop it. They learn that "being straight" with employers about their backgrounds is rarely rewarded, that a GED isn't worth the paper it's printed on, and that talking big isn't enough if you don't walk big too.

Shepard came to homelessness from a unique perspective, but made the catastrophic mistake of generalizing from his homeless experience to the experiences of those who didn't have a credit card in their back pockets. He completely failed to understand the nature of systematic, systemic, and interlocking issues that work together to put people in poverty, keep them in poverty, and pull them back into poverty when they've gotten out.

Here's a list of some of the homeless experiences he probably didn't experience:

• He didn't have family members worse off than he was that he felt morally obligated to share windfalls with.
• He didn't have chronic health conditions (the article mentions he was a college athlete) that were caused by the conditions of urban or rural poverty.
• He didn't face the indignity of being rejected again and again for jobs he was perfectly qualified to do, because of the prejudices (against "poor whites", blacks, "Mexicans", or felons) of employers.
• He didn't spend hours trying to read the rental agreement for the apartment he rented, trying to figure out what it said.
• He didn't have thousands of dollars of unpaid hospital bills keeping him from developing credit for a car.
• He didn't have children, nieces, nephews, or grandchildren that needed him to be a primary caretaker because there was no one else.
• He didn't worry that if he didn't get a job by X date, he'd lose everything (remember, this was an experiment -- he could quit any time).

No, Shepard's experiment didn't demonstrate that "anyone" can get out of poverty. He didn't even demonstrate that anyone "not mentally ill, not addicted, and not a felon" can get out of poverty. He only demonstrated that a healthy college-educated white guy with good health and the knowledge that he go back to a comfortable lifestyle whenever he wants can get out of poverty in a year. Maybe. If nothing horrible goes wrong.