Hey y’all,
(If y'all want to skip to the poem, it’s at its usual home below the line.)
Did you know that every year, at the end of January, the United States engages in a nationwide count to determine how many people at that very moment are experiencing homelessness?*
It’s called the Point In Time count, and it is the best tool we have to gauge the extent of homelessness in our country. At the same time, the count is deeply, profoundly methodologically flawed. Some of those reasons are bound to the act of doing the count itself. It’s just simply hard to canvass certain areas where people avoid being found for the sake of their own safety and security. Some jurisdictions do parts of their count every other year rather than every year. Cities may have a great deal of volunteers, while rural areas may have very few. The weather causes issues, too: it may be unseasonably mild or absolutely brutal. Even if you get a count for your area that seems consistent enough, it still takes the better part of the year to get complete national figures.
Some issues run deeper. For example, what does it mean to experience homelessness? Even different departments of the federal government have varying definitions. We often hold a very narrow idea of what homelessness is—that it encompasses no more than the people we encounter on street corners. While ignoring them, we then also ignore the massive number of people who have no stable, fixed, adequate place to live: the broader and truer sense of homelessness. Among countless scenarios, this includes families living out of motels for lack of any other option, or queer youths who couch surf among friends because it is safer than staying with family or going to a shelter.
Rather than a spectrum of housing instability, one that shows how capitalism puts many of us in dire straights, we limit our view. And then—then!—we refuse to effectively help people in those most extreme cases because we’d rather double rents with techbro infiltrations, instead enacting sadistic and fascistic city ordinances because business owners and tourists want to imagine cities are just places to spend discrete magic money.
Even by the most reliable conservative estimate—ironically, the Point in Time Count itself—well over a half million people experienced homelessness in the U.S. at that particular moment in 2019. The actual number of people experiencing homelessness throughout the year, and the actual number left uncounted by the PIT, is much larger.
Imagine if we actually addressed what people experiencing homelessness need first. That is housing. Full stop. If you want to end homelessness, you don’t make people run through a million hurdles to prove themselves ~worthy~ of housing. You give them fucking stable shelter and then address their other interwoven needs. Job-first approaches are absurd when you realize there’s no place in this country someone could put in a full 40 at a min-wage job and be able to afford rent.
What I mean to say is that American housing policy is a joke, you should give people money if you have it and they’re asking for it, and it doesn’t matter what the fuck they’re using it for because have you ever been without a home, Debra?
(You can listen to my friend David Parsons talk about many of these issues with Rick Paulas in the most recent episode of The Nostalgia Trap, one of the best podcasts out there right now.)
*One thing I learned from many patient people during my time in AmeriCorps** is that “people experiencing homelessness” is often a more useful term than “homeless people.” Yes, it’s person-first language, which comes with many debates depending on the community. But the term “people experiencing homelessness” makes clear that homelessness can be a temporary and brief scenario—if resources are actually used to get people housed quickly and permanently.
**Long story.
Anyway, poem below the line. It’s based on a conversation I had with a dude last week. Just like last time, I’m including photos of the poem because Substack sucks with spacing and it’s actually really really important to this poem! I think the next message or two may be drawn rather than typed.
Cheers,
KJ
[image text]
men look me up and down
i take a detour because some guy wouldn’t let
me pass, on the street same move as the gym.
i walk down sixth avenue at my standard pace,
buttoned up from the wind, thick thighs poured
into jeans. my hips keep time with the music
in my ears, betray my face. i am a cat bored
with the mashed lizard begging for a final
pounce, a gnaw. i loop around
an old dude with a cane
and an empty wrinkled mcdonald’s bag.
he yells over my headphones:
“hey man—you know you have a swagger in
your walk?”
“haha yeah.”
he takes off his
sunglasses as i look back: “you know what
that means,
right?”
i walk back, real slow, and he
moves close, too.
“yeah, man.”
my legs are covered
in faggoty things—
pinups of beefy
men, a squirrel with a rainbow tattoo, cookie
mueller, “hooray for you”—things on display
when i saunter through the gym, when i strip
down to shower, when very strong men are
very, very close to my very naked body, when
i am nothing but steam and prayer
he puts his hand on my shoulder,
teardrop tattoo, big blue rings around his
cavern brown eyes.
“i had an identical,
i-dent-ical, twin who was just like you.
we never paid no mind, either.”
(Did you like this poem? The entire newsletter? Then tell it to my heart. Tell me I’m the only one. Or just share this shit. It would mean a lot to me. Thanks. -KJ)