The Solution to Homelessness: ‘Home’

On any given night, according to the City Union Mission, roughly 1,800 people are homeless in Kansas City. When progressive groups like KC Tenants “organize for safe, accessible, affordable housing,” they miss the more fundamental point: a house is not a home.

In their everyday ontological wisdom, songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David caught on to something that progressives miss: “A chair is still a chair / even when no one’s sitting there … but a house is not a home / when there’s no one there to hold you tight / and no one there you can kiss goodnight.”

Some years ago, I produced a promotional documentary for reStart Inc., a praiseworthy Kansas City homeless shelter. In that this was a pro bono exercise, management allowed me a free hand in shaping the message. What interested me most was the question of how ordinary people became homeless.

The dozen or so people I interviewed had unique individual experiences. That said, most fell into a pattern that I did not anticipate. After an initial setback—divorce, job loss, health problem—the individual would begin to spiral downward, but once in free fall, there was no one there to catch him or her.

This calls to mind a memorable observation from the poet Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” The people I interviewed had no such “home.” For them, reStart became the home, the home that took them in.

The folks at reStart acknowledged, however, that there were many homeless that were incapable of restarting. I asked to interview these people as well and was cautioned not to expect much. Their caution was well-advised. This second group of people were transparently psychotic and beyond earthly redemption. The reStart staff did their best to keep them alive and functioning.

With an office in Westport, I come into contact with homeless individuals every day. On occasion, I have the opportunity to get beyond simple human acknowledgment and inquire how, for example, the guy I found rummaging shirtless through our building’s dumpster came to be there. 

To the degree I get answers, those answers fit the pattern previously described—a downward plunge through one safety net after another. Far from being put off by my inquiry, most of the homeless seem to appreciate the fact that some-one would pay attention to them. Not to be cynical, but I suspect, too, that an anticipated payoff helps prompt cooperation.

Easily the best solution to homelessness, I have come to think, is the simplest: stop it before it starts. From my perch here in Westport, the great majority of homeless I see are male, many of them young. Being men, when they fall, they are harder to catch than females. The fall often begins in late adolescence. It usually involves drug use, often as a form of self-medication against the creeping anxieties of adulthood.

To arrest that fall requires a strong male presence, ideally the young man’s father. Stepfathers, boyfriends, uncles, coaches and the like are rarely up to a long-term challenge that may last years. The effort can involve late-night vigils, search-and-rescue missions, and physical confrontation. 

The temptation for male figures other than the father is to say, at some point, “No mas.” What helps, too, is if the father is married to the boy’s mother. It is the rare stepmother who has the grace to welcome a troubled young man into her home and the patience to endure his presence.

As the father of daughters, I have been spared this struggle. I have seen up close, however, fathers who have managed to pull their sons back from the brink. Theirs is the kind of heroism that goes unmentioned even among friends and family, but in his heart, each father knows he will have done nothing in his life more worthy.

Success on this front is quiet. Failure is not. From what I can see and what statistics confirm, homelessness is on the rise. My reflections on fatherhood may help explain why this is so. As late as 1960, the percentage of children who lived with their married birth parents was close to 90 percent. Today, it is closer to 60 percent. 

When pundits speak of a contracting safety net, they routinely ignore the strongest safety net of all: the parents of the troubled young person. When I Google “all families are …” the top two answers I get are “All families are alike” and “All families are special.” 

Google is deceiving us. Not all families are either special or alike. Some can save their children. Some cannot or will not. The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was close to the mark. Said he a century and a half ago, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Jordan Neely, the homeless subway psycho who ruined Marine vet Daniel Penny’s life, came from one of those unhappy families. “Mr. Neely,” The New York Times tells us, “was estranged from his family, including Mr. Zachery, during the latter years of his life.” 

Andre Zachery was Neely’s father. He has come back into his son’s life to sue Penny for “negligence, carelessness and recklessness.” In a more just world, Penny would be suing Zachery on those very same grounds.

In this unjust world, a world filled with neglected children, hope abounds nonetheless. As the staff at City Union Mission understand, there is a father to whom everyone can turn, a home to which everyone can go. The staff members there have built a 100-year legacy around this understanding.

Their patrons get it. “I was struggling to deal with a lot of painful things from my past, and I had drifted away from God,” says a grateful Stacey. “The Mission helped me find my way back to Christ. Everything changed.”

Yes, Virginia, you can go home again.