A Journey from Homelessness to a Room of One's Own

[justaprogressive]

Jessica moved into 90 Sands Street, a vast new supportive-housing facility in Brooklyn, on February 15th: a bleak, cloudy morning. The move came not a moment too soon; there had been much upheaval in her life in the previous few weeks, including an assault by her ex-boyfriend and two of his friends that had left her with facial bruises, and an overdose caused by the presence of the animal tranquillizer xylazine in her heroin—an honest error, it seemed, on the part of her trusted dealer—for which the forty-two-year-old was rushed to Mount Sinai from the transitional-housing facility where she’d been living for nine months. “I was dead,” she told me with characteristic flair, in her strong Southern accent. “When I left in the ambulance, I was dead. They gave me CPR, they took me to the best hospital in Manhattan, and they shocked me in the hospital six times.”

Her hospital discharge paper flapped in the breeze on top of one of the many plastic tubs that Jessica, her friend Bill, and her case manager, Carley Medley, hauled from Jessica’s transitional-housing room to the van that Medley was driving. (Jessica’s name and those of her friends and family have been changed.) Given that Jessica had spent most of the previous seven years living outdoors (with two interludes in jail for probation violations on old drug-related charges), she had amassed a remarkable number of possessions: Barbies and LOL Surprise! Balls, craft kits, scented candles, and an array of cosmetics. Jessica is savvy and resourceful, which is partly how she managed to survive, alone, on New York’s streets. In addition to panhandling, which usually brought in a hundred dollars a day, she ran an online business with a friend, selling merchandise they’d bought at a discount from “boosters,” who often had stolen it from large stores. Hence the random assortment of brand-new items in her bins.

Medley and Jessica met in 2019, when Medley, who is now twenty-nine, moved to New York with the goal of working in homeless outreach, an interest that was sparked by research on unhoused mothers that she did as a student at Ohio State. She got a job with the nonprofit Breaking Ground, working on a team that seeks out homeless people in and around Macy’s flagship Thirty-fourth Street store. Breaking Ground’s goal is to coax these clients, as they are known, into transitional and ultimately permanent housing without requiring that they first accept treatment for the drug, alcohol, and mental-health issues that are widespread among New Yorkers who live outdoors. This strategy, known as “housing first,” was pioneered in New York, in the early nineteen-nineties, by Sam Tsemberis, a psychologist whose organization, Pathways to Housing, began renting apartments for homeless people with mental-health diagnoses and delivering medical and psychiatric services to them at their new residences—debunking the prevailing belief that people could not remain stably housed without having first undergone treatment. Study after study showed Tsemberis’s approach to be far more successful than requiring treatment in advance. Housing first became a federal policy in the United States with passage of the Hearth Act, in 2009, though advocates say that its implementation is spotty.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/18/a-journey-from-homelessness-to-a-room-of-ones-own

[2naSalit]

1. Why are all the homeless stories...

Either about people who are mentally ill, addicted to drugs or disabled vets? Indeed, they make up a lot of the homeless population but so do regular people with families, single people who can't earn enough to exist even with three jobs.

I rarely see news attention to these people. And when they do, it's a single mom getting off drugs.

The homeless population is a massive problem in this country and you can't just focus on the usual suspects because that is just continuing the myth that they are the problem when it's actually society that created these conditions.

[Aristus]

2. It can be hard to tell apart the sensationalized stories and the stories that emphasize the

realities of homeless life. Not everyone who becomes homeless got that way because of drug abuse. But drug use, ironically, can be a way to survive on the streets. I have homeless women among my patient population who take meth at night to stay alert so they don't get raped. Housed sober people rarely think about something like that (and I don't mean you, 2naSalit. )

Long after opioids have lost their power to get a user high, patients take them so they don't get dopesick while trying to survive on the streets, look for, or keep, a job, etc.

Then of course, it becomes a vicious cycle.

[2naSalit]

3. That is also true.

The cycle often begins as you say, and you would know having clients who have these experiences. And I understand it, staying awake for safety, been there done that but not in the same way. I was not using even grass when I was in my vehicle, as a female you have to be on total alert 24/7. I'm thankful I am allergic to opioids or I would have been there.

Those factors rarely come out in the stories either, the danger of abuse and rape and those are two of the most common dangers one has to navigate at all times. It's mind bending and easy to withdraw or cope with drugs which make you vulnerable. Yup.

Glad you are there as a care provider who gets it.