Chicago Homeless Blog

Though many people are against providing free services to the homeless because they see them as an undeserved and unearned handout, the problems of the homeless don’t only effect the homeless. When a homeless person has to use the emergency room for medical care the cost of their visit is passed on to tax payers. The dangers of living on the streets with inadequate food and in all types of weather also mean that homeless people frequently visit the emergency room. They also show up with severs problems because they rarely get preventative care. Not helping the homeless actually can financially hurt a community.

A new post by the From Poverty To Opportunity Campaign outlines the findings from a new study by the Aids Foundation of Chicago that shows, again, that providing housing and intensive case management to the homeless drastically reduces their use of emergency rooms and therefore their financial cost to the community.

The Campaign quotes the study as saying:

Remarkably, homeless people who were housed were admitted to the hospital one-third fewer times than people in the control group. They also spent one-third fewer days in the hospital and went to the emergency room one-fourth fewer times.

For every 100 homeless adults offered the program intervention, there would be 49 fewer hospitalizations, 273 less days spent in the hospital, and 116 fewer emergency department visits.

Back in April I wrote about two similar studies from the Heartland Alliance Mid-America Institute on Poverty and the Journal of the American Medical Association that found the same community benefits to housing the homeless.

Every politician has spent the summer talking about the high costs of health care in America and there are many proposals to help lower those costs. One way is to reduce the number of emergency room visits by homeless people because those visits are paid for by those who have insurance. Multiple studies by different organizations all around the country have shown that providing housing and intensive case management can reduce the burden that the homeless impose on the health care system while drastically improving the health of the homeless.

I wrote about the history of Mark Horvath’s Invisible People.tv project and his visit to Chicago in my last post.

ChicagoNow blogger Megan Cottrell followed Horvath around while he was in Chicago and wrote a great account of what it was like to talk to people who are normally invisible.

I didn’t even see her, sitting on the West side of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, but Mark did.

She was young, small, sitting with her orange tabby cat next to one of the bridges tall sculpted posts. Hundreds of people walking by almost blocked out here small, cardboard sign.

We stopped, and Mark knelt beside her. “What’s your name?” he asked. “What’s your story?”

The story is a powerful first-person view of the feelings and thoughts that come up when you confront homelessness head on by hearing the stories of individual homeless people and not numbers about anonymous populations.

It’s hard to know what to do, we both thought. Do you help people individually? I wanted to get Sandra a ticket home, Reggie a warm place to stay and AnnMarie the help she wants and needs.

But helping one person doesn’t seem like enough.

I highly suggest you go read the rest of her story at her blog One Story Up.

Though this blog focuses on the effects of poverty in Chicago and the hardships of people who have been forced into homelessness because of poverty, in truth the problem of poverty and homelessness is far greater in other parts of the world. The poor in the poorest parts of the world have far fewer opportunities than the poor in Chicago.

A new documentary called The End of Poverty? looks at the policies of the U.S. government and U.S. business that have led to crushing poverty in places like sub-saharan Africa. The movie is narrated by Martin Sheen and is directed by Philippe Diaz, who has experience with making films about U.S. politics (Uncovered: The War in Iraq) and Africa (The Empire in Africa).

Watch the trailer below.

You can see more videos from the movie on their YouTube Channel. The film will be showing in NYC on November 13 and in LA on November 25.

The name came from the story of a homeless man living on Hollywood Blvd. One day, the man was shocked as as another man handed him a Christian pamphlet. He was shocked because so many thousands of people has passed him down the busy sidewalk without even a sideways glance that he was sure that he was invisible.

Mark Horvath has been documenting the stories of California’s homeless population for years on his blog InvisiblePeople.tv. This summer he took his project to make the invisible visible across and U.S., and he stopped in Chicago this weekend. Fourteen years ago, Horvath was among the homeless along Hollywood Blvd., but since then he has gotten his life back together and dedicated himself to telling their stories in short unedited videos filmed on the streets.

Horvath has been doing a national tour this summer sponsored by Ford, who provided a Ford Flex for the journey, among other sponsors. Horvath is a big proponent of social media for social service organizations and the homeless themselves, and that is how I found him and his videos. (Some of his selected highlights have been posted here on the blog.)

While in Chicago, Horvath met up with Annmarie (@PadsChicago), a homeless Chicago woman he met on Twitter. (Horvath tweets from his personal account @hardlynormal and his blog account @invisiblepeople.)

Annmarie is able to update her Twitter feed from her cell phone and her Facebook page by using the internet at the library. She uses Twitter to connect with other homeless people and advocates like Mark. Many people find the idea of a homeless person with a cell phone and a Twitter page discordant because the idea is that the homeless shouldn’t spend their money on anything but food and shelter. But for people like Annmarie, Twitter is an important outlet for her to deal with the stress and emotional hardships of being homeless, which can be as big of a barrier to housing and employment as some of the more concrete problems associated with homelessness.

The day Annemarie met Horvath at the Ogilvie Transportation Center she had slept the previous night in a grassy knoll with her sleeping bag. She planned to spend the rest of the day wandering around trying to find free things to do. Watch her interview with Horvath about homelessness and social media.

Horvath spent part of his time in Chicago wandering along the famous and opulent shopping corridor of Michigan Ave. Among the thousands of shoppers and dozens of stores he didn’t stop to photograph the Tribune Tower or the Old Water Tower, but instead stopped to talk to two young homeless women with cardboard signs and pet cats.

He also met Walter Thomas, who chooses to look at his Bible while sitting on the street to avoid the gaze of people who “pass me like so much driftwood.” Watch his whole story here.

Horvath’s road trip will take him to St. Paul, Minn. next and then back through the west to his home in California. And in each city he stops in it won’t be long until he invariably finds another person forced to spend their days outside but invisible.

You can follow Horvath’s trip on Whrll, YouTube, Ustream, Twitter, Posterous, and on his two blogs InvisiblePeople.tv and Hardly Normal.

It was announced Friday that the economy lost 345,000 jobs in May. That is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Minneapolis, Minn. becoming unemployed in a single month.

In these times, that is a is a good sign. In the first three months of 2009, the economy lost an average of 700,000 jobs each month, according to the New York Times. This has pushed the unemployment rate to 9.4 percent.

There are a lot of numbers that describe the economy. The Dow Jones average, the S&P average, the interbank lending rate, and the interest rate for treasury bonds. Some people like NYT columnist Bob Herbert have long been arguing that jobs are the only thing to care about in this economy.

In his May 8 column he said:

Don’t tell me about the stock market. Don’t tell me about the banks and their perpetual flimflammery. Tell me whether poor and middle-income families can find work. If they can’t, the country’s in trouble.

Herbert has been taking this same approach, that he doesn’t care about the troubles of banks and Wall Street and is more concerned with the troubles of the already troubled, for a while.

An April 27 column about the positive news on Wall Street pressed home the same point.

I’m sure everyone is thrilled to know that the high rollers on Wall Street are bouncing back. With profits on the rebound, the big shots at the biggest institutions are on track, as The Times reported Sunday, to make as much money this year as they were hauling in before the mega-recession began.

The growing legions of the unemployed can be forgiven for not shouting hallelujah. It’s a little like watching the drunken driver who plowed into your family car and caused untold havoc and heartache, suddenly pulling up one morning, no worse for the wear, in a sparkling new vehicle.

Later in the column, Herbert wrote:

Wall Street can swallow all the Champagne it wants, and the market fanatics can obsess until their brains lock over the daily gyrations of the Dow. The simple fact is that working men and women are being squeezed in the ever-tightening jaws of a catastrophe.

A lot of attention has been focused on the daily fluctuation of the Dow Jones as a way to interpret the health of the economy. Though some reporters like NPR’s Planet Money have pointed out the narrow nature of the Dow Jones, and they have pointed to a couple other numbers to track as more accurate indicators of the economy. But those indicators are still about the world of big business and giant financial institutions.

The emphasis on job loss, and therefore job creation, as the biggest factor for taking the vitals of the economy is an important one. Jobs are tangible and last longer than the daily fluctuations of any stock index. For those hurt most by the economy and for those that have long been on the bottom of the economic ladder, the homeless, job creation is almost all that matters. Transitional housing programs, social service funding and job training can all help the homeless, but without a way for them to make wages that can sustain them there is little chance they will be able to get off the street.

In normal economic times, the homeless face a wide range of boundaries to getting a job. The practical hurdle of finding clean clothes for interviews, getting a phone number and an address for job applications and the cost of transportation to a job are more than many people can overcome. On top of that many homeless don’t have adequate identification for jobs. That means complicated and time consuming requests for birth certificates, state ID cards and social security cards. And those are the difficulties that are easy to see. The prejudice against the homeless and the stigma against hiring the homeless are a frequent underlying barrier.

As the economy hemmorages jobs, the homeless slip further down the list of desirable employess and the frequent response to homelessness of “just get a job” becomes less and less tenable.