I had just finished delivering the keynote address at the Hesburgh Public Policy Colloquium on “Housing and Homelessness” at the University of Notre Dame, and the questioning had begun. After a number of questions of the kind that every audience asks—and rightfully so—about my experiences posing as a homeless man, someone asked the question. Now...
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The Speechless Sick
Two-Step is a tall, skinny black man who has lived at the Nashville Union Rescue Mission for seven years. In nice weather he can be seen standing beside the Mission holding his pajama bottom up with one hand and doing a slow, rhythmical shuffle, hour after hour. He has been doing this since he was...
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No Hope for the Homeless
This book is a 272-page inventory of Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. Almost without exception, the contributed articles treat the homeless as some vague, faceless group, far distant from the authors’ time and place. There is not even the degree of passion an astronomer brings to the study of Jupiter’s rings. You get the feeling that you...
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Hard Living on Easy Street
With the falling leaves and falling temperatures, hordes of newspeople looking for the hungry and homeless descended on the missions and the shelters. Now collectively called Street People, Streetniks (my term) became the “darlings of the press”; every day, in every paper, we are brought up to date about them. USA Today for example, recently...