
          On Homelessness 
          By Kozol, JonathanJonathan Kozol
          Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, p. 17
          
          I met a homeless man in San Antonio who could stand in for many. He
fits none of the stereotypes. Wasn't crazy. He wasn't lazy, he wasn't
a drug user, or an alcoholic. He was a former auto worker. He'd lost
his job at Chrysler in Detroit when the auto industry turned
down. Lost his job, then his benefits, then his health insurance, then
his home, and then his wife. Family split up; that happens often under
the stress of homelessness. Came to San Antonio, looking for a job and
lower rent, found neither. At the time I met him he was selling his
blood twice a week to buy his children food. There are plasma centers
now in almost every American city. Used to be, maybe twenty years ago,
you'd see one place like that in a run-down neighborhood where the
traditional homeless, the old alcoholic, would go to sell blood, but
now you see those places all over the country. In some cities there'll
be two or three of them. Where the poor who have little enough to
spare sell their blood to buy their children food. It's just terrible
to see that in America.
          What's gone wrong in this good country? What's happened? We've
always had poor_people, but never in my lifetime have we had homeless
people on this scale and never, not even in the Great Depression, so
many homeless children. What's happened?
          Three significant changes since 1980. Rents, first of all, have
doubled, in some cases tripled, in major cities across America. In my
hometown, Boston, rents have virtually tripled in just eight
years. The same years have seen the transformation of the labor
market. Two million jobs that paid good wages, high wages, in the auto
industry, in steel, textiles, oil, manufacturing industries; two
million of those jobs have disappeared every year since 1980. And
those were jobs that paid often as much as $14 or $15 an hour. Half of
all the jobs created since pay poverty wages. And of course, those are
jobs that don't bring health insurance. With rents up and wages down,
the federal_government picked this decade to cut AFDC benefits. Aid to
Families with Dependent Children, the major form of welfare in
America, is down 35 percent in real dollars since 1970. Restricted
food stamps. Tightened eligibility for Medicaid. Cut back on WIC, one
of the most precious programs in America, another program which dates
back to the Johnson years--Women, Infants, and Children, emergency
nutrition, one of the last weapons in the fight against premature
birth, and brain damage. WIC was cut $5 billion by the White
House. And, most important in the current context, slashed funding for
low-income housing by $25 billion. Low-income housing subsidies
dropped from $32 billion down to $7 billion and this year dropped
another billion.
          Nobody in the United_States can claim to be deceived--President
Reagan was very honest about his intentions. Though I disagree with
him on many issues, I have to concede, he was honest.
          
            Courtesy of the Texas Observer, from a
speech Kozol made February 2 at the LBJ Library in Austin. Kozol is
the author of Rachel and Her Children, a study of
homelessness published last year by Crown.
          
        
