Kevin Kim on homelessness

I wrote the following comment over at Instapundit in response to a post about homelessness, and I'm reprinting it here for my own readers. The post quotes from another article about empty beds in Los Angeles: "How could 6,000 shelter beds be unoccupied in Los Angeles County? It’s a number, reported in LAist in July, that makes no sense given the miles of homeless encampments that occupy area streets and sidewalks." My response:

I've heard this for years. As a bleeding-heart high-schooler, I worked with the homeless in the DC-Metro area, especially along the Route 1 corridor. The homeless are a litany of drugs, mental illness, criminality, etc. Sure, some among them are just fooking lazy. But to think the answer is something like Just give these people homes! is to miss the fact that most of these people, if given homes, won't take care of them and/or will simply end up right back on the street because that's the most comfortable mean to which they return. It's a life they know and can navigate.* If conservatives prize individualism—and I'm right there with them in that—it should be recognized that "solving" homelessness can only happen on a case-by-case basis. It won't be solved by a cookie-cutter government program or by brick-and-mortar institutions (which the homeless hate anyway—hence the empty beds—because of all the thefts and assaults). The harsh truth is that each homeless person must be dealt with as an individual, and that takes an enormous amount of time, energy, and—yes—faith.

__________

*I should elaborate on this point. It's not simply a matter of comfort—it's more fundamentally a matter of feeling power and control. Going back to a familiar lifestyle, one that makes sense, is important for homeless people who've gotten used to living a certain way. Homeless folks thrust into a new living situation are prone to freaking out and returning to their old ways. People who get used to living in tents and shitting in streets don't know how to handle the responsibility of maintaining a modest apartment—showering regularly, making one's bed, taking out the garbage, cooking one's own meals or ordering out, etc. 

We can expand this notion to include far more than just the homeless. Think about first-generation foreigners coming to America. What's the first thing they do? They build a microcosm of the country they just left. While this makes one wonder why they ever bothered to leave, the psychological answer should be obvious: home is what they're familiar with; it's a place they instinctively know how to navigate; they're equipped to enjoy an environment that feels like home. Maybe immigrants leave the homeland because of specific social pressures, but this doesn't mean they want to start completely over. They can't. So when they establish their new community on American soil, they do so in the only mode and idiom they know—in a way that makes sense to them. Thus do they recreate the homeland.

And sense diminishes the feeling of powerlessness. For the chronically homeless, being out on the street makes sense, and it's where they feel empowered. They've learned the laws of survival in such an environment, and placing them into a standard domestic situation—thanks to a misplaced sense of "compassion"—leaves them confused, disempowered, and lost.