A Roof Over My Head, Second Edition: Homeless Women and the Shelter Industry
352
A Roof Over My Head, Second Edition: Homeless Women and the Shelter Industry
352Overview
Based upon extensive ethnographic data, “A Roof Over My Head” examines the lives of homeless women who cope with domestic violence, low-income housing shortages, and poverty. The author draws upon interviews with homeless women, interviews with housed people, and, finally, evaluations of shelter services, philosophies, and policies to get at the causes and social constructions of homelessness. “A Roof Over My Head” is a groundbreaking study that unveils the centrality of abuse and poverty in homeless women’s lives and outlines ways in which societal responses can and should be more effective.
The second edition explores recent attempts to integrate homeless and battered women’s shelters and recent research on domestic violence as a cause of homelessness. It contains a new introduction that analyzes the most recent homeless policy developments and paints a picture of the homeless population today. With updated statistics and policy information throughout, the second edition of “A Roof Over My Head” illustrates why ending homelessness in the United States continues to present a thorny and complex challenge.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607326151 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press of Colorado |
| Publication date: | 10/07/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
"A Roof over My Head"
Homeless Women and the Shelter Industry
By Jean Calterone Williams
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2016 University Press of ColoradoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-615-1
CHAPTER 1
Causes of Homelessness
Homeless Women Speak
Women enter homeless and battered women's shelters for a variety of reasons. The process of becoming homeless is often a long one; the causes of a woman's homelessness may have been building for a significant period before she actually has to enter a shelter. Moreover, multiple factors intersect to affect a woman's housing stability, such that it is impossible to find one reason to explain each woman's homelessness. At the same time, women's stories reveal striking similarities in their experiences, most notably in terms of persistent poverty, gendered violence and abuse, and low-income housing shortages. In this chapter each woman's narrative appears in a separate section on, for example, single parenthood, drugs, or housing. But because the women's stories so strongly suggest that reasons for homelessness are multiple and interdependent, such categories are rudimentary and imperfect, used more for organizational purposes than to label the women. Indeed, each woman's words weave a complex, multifaceted portrait of poverty and homelessness.
Notwithstanding the complex story each woman tells when asked what events led her to seek shelter, the data indicate a clear pattern: most women were poor prior to becoming homeless. Poverty often combined with domestic violence and affordable housing shortages to create a crisis situation. Women and their families managed to survive for some time barely getting by and precariously housed. When financial difficulties occurred — problems like a car breakdown that would not cripple a middle-income family — no surplus money was available to meet unexpected needs. Many of the women's parents and current circle of friends were low-income as well but had not experienced homelessness. These friends and family members lacked the resources needed to assist their homeless relatives with substantial amounts of money or long-term housing.
Homelessness is linked to poverty in both complex and straightforward ways and has much to do with the differential educational, occupational, and housing options and opportunities available to the rich and the poor. Women's poverty additionally is associated with their traditional responsibility for the care of children, lower wages, and separation from family support systems as a result of past or present violence. Because of the growth in women's poverty in the past twenty years, it has become increasingly important for studies to focus on the unique sets of issues and problems women's homelessness presents: "Single women and women heading families are burgeoning among the homeless as a result of government cuts in disability benefits, rising housing costs, an increase in divorce rates, domestic violence, teenage pregnancies, and increasing poverty caused by unemployment, low-paying jobs, and wage discrimination." Women interviewed emphasized these family disruptions, financial responsibilities, and economic difficulties on their paths to homelessness.
Even given the difficulty many two-parent families have staying out of poverty, single-parent families headed by women are much worse off than married couples. In 2014, the poverty rate for families with a female head of household was 30.6 percent compared to 6.2 percent for married couple families. For related children in families with a female householder, 46.5 percent were in poverty, compared to 10.6 percent of related children in married-couple families. African American and Latina families have higher rates of poverty than white families: whereas 32.0 percent of all white, single-parent, female-headed households with children were poor in 2014, 45.6 percent of African American and 46.3 percent of Latina female-headed families were below the poverty line.
Just as women who head families are more likely than men to be poor, so homeless families are more likely to be headed by a single woman than by a single man or by two parents. The National Center on Family Homelessness reports that 71 percent of homeless families are single-parent families headed by women. An early study by the Institute for Children and Poverty found that 95 percent of homeless families are headed by women, based on aggregate data across ten cities. Other studies demonstrate that as a proportion of the homeless population, families grew from 27 percent in 1985 to 36 percent in 2015. Since most family homelessness is more precisely single-parent, female-headed family homelessness, it is clear that women and children increasingly fill the ranks of the homeless.
Domestic Violence
Women's stories underscore the importance of a focus on abuse from spouses, boyfriends, parents, and other relatives to understand and interpret the reasons for women's homelessness. Particularly for women who apply to emergency shelters, battering is intertwined with poverty and homelessness. Yet some homelessness studies fail to address seriously the role of domestic violence in women's homelessness. Likewise, battering is often decontextualized from an examination of women's social locations and the economic systems in which they participate. Homelessness and battering continue to be viewed as separate issues.
In the face of this tendency to distinguish between battered and homeless women, the interviews in this study suggest that homelessness, poverty, and violence are woven together; so dense and intricate is the pattern that it becomes difficult to discuss one — homelessness — without accounting for the others — domestic violence and poverty. In other words, domestic violence is not a direct or single "cause" of women's homelessness but helps to create the circumstances that make low-income women more susceptible to homelessness. Because of the extensive resources a woman who leaves a battering relationship needs to support herself and her children, the shelter presents one of the few choices available to low-income women. A significant amount of money is needed to avail oneself of other options, such as staying in a hotel, renting an apartment alone, or moving to another city.
The vast majority of women who enter domestic violence shelters in Phoenix are poor, as are those in homeless shelters. They have few personal resources such as savings, significant education and job training, or family or friends who can take them in for any period of time. Whereas women at homeless shelters decry the lack of attention to domestic violence, those in battered women's shelters have critical housing and job needs that are overlooked. Rather, the domestic violence shelter is designed principally to shield women from danger and to offer counseling and emotional healing in hopes that women will not return to their relationships. Although many shelters assume that women leaving an abusive relationship need psychological counseling or are in serious physical danger, low-income women primarily look to shelters to provide housing and support in their quest for economic stability. Tensions result when women's needs collide with shelter objectives.
Kimberlé Crenshaw maintains that these tensions particularly impact low-income women of color. In her study of battered women's shelters in Los Angeles, Crenshaw reveals the dynamics of "structural intersectionality" as they play out in the lives of low-income African American, Latina, and Asian American battered women — arguing that women of color suffer multilayered subordination based on race, gender, and class. Crenshaw suggests that persistent poverty and its attendant issues of housing shortages and underemployment are particularly important in considering the experiences of battered women of color:
Economic considerations — access to employment, housing, and wealth — confirm that class structures play an important part in defining the experience of women of color vis-à-vis battering. ... Shelter policies are often shaped by an image that locates women's subordination primarily in the psychological effects of male domination, and thus overlooks the socioeconomic factors that often disempower women of color. Because the disempowerment of many battered women of color is arguably less a function of what is in their minds and more a reflection of the obstacles that exist in their lives, these interventions are likely to reproduce rather than effectively challenge their domination.
Just as Crenshaw argues, African American, Latina, and Native American women interviewed in the Phoenix shelters face significant financial obstacles in leaving abusive relationships, contending with racial discrimination in the past and present that makes their journeys to stable housing more difficult. Although the dynamics certainly differ for women of color — who are disproportionately low-income — my interviews revealed that Crenshaw's reasoning provides a way to understand the situations of most women in the shelters, regardless of race or ethnicity. The economic factors Crenshaw noted — "employment, housing, and wealth" — are paramount in explaining why the vast majority of women seek shelter.
Betsy, a thirty-one-year-old white woman with three children, describes the part domestic violence played in her past. Abuse was partly responsible for her need to stay in the homeless shelter where she currently resides. Betsy begins the story of how she became homeless when she ran away from home at fifteen, saying, "I guess I've been homeless from fifteen to twenty-one, but I didn't think of myself that way then." For those six years Betsy supported herself through sex work and as a relief driver for truckers, riding back and forth across the country with truckers who paid her a penny a mile to drive while they slept. She had to sleep on the streets only twice during those years, but supporting herself through sex work was difficult; her voice lowers to a whisper and she cries when she talks about it.
For a few years in her twenties, Betsy worked alternately as a live-in housekeeper and as a cashier in a retail store. She then met her husband, Ron, and had her first child, who was four years old at the time of the interview. Because the couple had difficulty living on the money Ron made at his appliance repair business, they were evicted repeatedly when they were short on rent. In the four years prior to Betsy's arrival at the shelter, they had moved twenty-two times. During the past year, cocaine played an increasing role in their marriage, and Ron became increasingly violent. As the couple became more involved in using drugs, Ron's violence escalated, and he grew less interested in and committed to working. Betsy blames Ron for their homelessness, arguing that "the main reason I'm homeless is that Ron didn't want to work." Because Ron did not want Betsy to work and three births in four years kept her at home for some months with each baby, the family's financial problems intensified. The last time they were evicted, the landlord would not return what was left of their security deposit for fourteen days, and the family had no money to pay for a motel or another apartment.
Betsy had tried to leave her husband some months earlier, after his drug use and the violence had spiraled "out of control." She asserts, however, "The only place I had to go was my father's house. I was trying to quit using drugs, but he's an addict too, and they would knock on my bedroom door at night saying, 'Betsy, do you want to get high with us?' I knew if I didn't get out of there I wouldn't be able to quit using." With three children in tow, her friends were not willing to take her in or were unable to spare the room or the funds to feed and house her and the children, so Betsy returned to her husband. She tried for the next two weeks to get into Rose's House, a battered women's shelter, but either the shelter was full or the staff did not think Betsy's "problem was domestic violence because I wasn't defining it that way. I didn't understand that was the issue." It is unclear why the staff initially refused to admit Betsy, but battered women's shelters make much of a perceived distinction between battered women and those whose primary issue is homelessness. Eventually, Betsy went to an organization called Community Resources, which assists with rent and utility payments to try to prevent people from becoming homeless and directs those who have become homeless to area shelters. Community Resources helped Betsy get into Rose's House the following day by emphasizing her battering relationship. She stayed there for the next six weeks, then went to the Family Shelter, a homeless shelter.
It is difficult to point to the one reason Betsy became homeless. Even before she and Ron began using cocaine, neither had the education or skills that translated to jobs that paid enough to adequately support their children and themselves. The couple faced great difficulty finding low-income housing. Their repeated evictions meant yet another obstacle to stable employment, as they were constantly moving from one apartment to another — sometimes a fair distance from their former residence and jobs. Nor did they own a car to facilitate travel to work. Ron tried to start his own appliance repair business, working out of their apartment, but continual moves made it difficult for customers to locate him. Both Betsy and Ron had cultural expectations that a husband would take care of "his" family, expectations that made Betsy reluctant to work full-time and Ron less likely to encourage her to do so. Thus they had to forego a badly needed second income. On the other hand, with three children the cost of child care during work hours would have demanded a large portion of their second income. Ron's violence created even less stability in their household, and Betsy's inability to rely on a family she had fled at age fifteen created few options for her when she attempted to leave him.
Latanya's story contains many of the same elements as Betsy's. A twenty-six-year-old African American woman, Latanya grew up in a family with eight children, with a father who was an alcoholic and abusive to both her mother and the children. Like Latanya, most of her sisters also have had violent relationships, and she remains close to only one sister who also lives in Phoenix. Latanya had her first child at age seventeen, dropped out of high school, and lived with her son's father for five years. When she left him, Latanya moved with her son to an apartment subsidized by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). With subsidized housing, jobs in a fast-food restaurant and cleaning houses, and some help from her sister, she managed to support herself and her child.
Two years later Latanya met her current boyfriend, Emil. After two years together the couple had a son, and she gave up her subsidized housing a year later to move into his home. Over the past year Latanya left Emil several times and stayed with her sister when he became violent toward her. Finally, she said she decided to leave him "for good" and called the shelter: "My sister wanted me to stay with her, but I wanted counseling, so I went to Rose's House." Although she claims she is not "really" homeless because she has the option of living with her sister, Latanya's sister's husband already works three jobs to support the family, and three more people would strain their resources. Latanya has applied for subsidized housing again, but she faces a long delay in obtaining such housing because of a two-year waiting list.
Since public housing assistance and private low-income housing are so difficult to secure, women often apply to longer-term transitional housing programs that also offer other kinds of services and support. The differences in Ella's current situation, compared with Latanya's or Betsy's, indicate the benefits for women involved in such programs. But much of her story closely resembles Latanya's and Betsy's. A forty-three-year-old white woman with three children, Ella left her husband five years ago. By the time she left, the violence in their eighteen-year marriage had escalated to the point that her husband, Jim, routinely threatened her with knives and guns. She believes that if she had stayed longer he eventually would have killed her, and as a result Jim still does not know where she lives. During their marriage the couple was homeless off and on, at one time sleeping for four months in the woods and for two years in their camper, getting most of their food from dumpsters. Ella worked sporadically as a waitress and her husband in construction, but they primarily lived isolated lives in rural areas. Ella notes that the poverty and violence escalated simultaneously over time, to the point that in the last year and a half of their marriage they rarely bought groceries: "One time, we lived off canisters of candy thrown away by the supermarket for one month. We lived off chicken thrown away from the supermarket deli. I would have to pick off the dirt and mop strings before serving it."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from "A Roof over My Head" by Jean Calterone Williams. Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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