This is part 3 of an ongoing series that will drop sporadically rather than consecutively. These tips are things that I’ve learned from other amazing writers and advocates, and from failing spectacularly myself.
Previous entries:
How we write about homelessness matters—and more than ever we need writers getting it right.
Rule #3: Homelessness does not happen by accident, and the causal forces should always be identified and confronted
In the first post in this series, our rules statedL “Unhoused people are the hero of their own story… not you!” This rule builds on that, but from the opposite direction. Not only do we very often misidentify the hero of the story, but so often the villain goes unnamed, or needlessly obfuscated.
This isn’t to say that there is always a singular person who we should direct rage toward. But there are active forces at work on multiple levels that contribute to individuals and groups becoming homeless. When we write about homelessness, we too often leave these forces anonymous and open to interpretation rather than naming them directly. And because myths around homelessness are most predominantly about how one becomes homeless, it’s crucial that we counteract this. Do people “fall” into homelessness (a phrase I see constantly and have often used myself), or are they pushed? If so, by whom?
Knowing and naming these forces also points us toward solutions that prevent homelessness rather than just responding to it, as we’ll see in the following exercise:
Four ways of saying the same thing
A helpful exercise in this series has been to see a typical sentence from a story about homelessness written in four different ways to highlight the impact of word choice. Consider the following sentence:
David lost his housing and wound up living on the streets of Washington, D.C.
David could no longer afford his apartment, and thus found himself living on the streets of Washington, D.C.
After his landlord raised the rent, David could no longer afford to live there, and instead had to live on the streets of Washington, D.C.
After his landlord raised the rent—an all too common reality in Washington D.C.—David could not afford to live there or anywhere else, save for the streets.
A lot of things are at play here, so let’s break them down.
Notice how in (1) everything feels passive, happenstance, or even inevitable. David “lost” his housing like someone might lose a set of keys. If you’re looking to read blame into that phrasing, you’ll find no-one but David. David then “wound up” experiencing homelessness—it summarizes but doesn’t create a linear or cause-and-effect relationship.
In (2) we have more detail showing that David didn’t randomly “lose” his housing but that the causative factor was affordability. This begins to point at mechanisms beyond David’s control, even though it still fails to identify them. The word “thus” in the second clause helps to show the cause and effect missing from (1).
In (3) we have the crucial detail that a rent increase led to David’s affordability crisis. We have begun to identify the “villain” of the story. Again, this is not to say that readers should be directed at the landlord for retribution, but that the forces at work are properly identified. Readers now recognize that what happened to David could happen to anyone who has a landlord, if they have the ability to raise rent on their tenants beyond their ability to pay. We’re pointing toward solutions now, without having to pontificate about them. The strong language in the second clause, that David thus “had to” live on the streets emphasizes the cause and effect and also the ways that power minimized David’s choices.
But I like (4) the best because it briefly, but effectively, points outside the story itself to a larger problem. By simply adding “an all too common reality”, the story points outside itself to (a) a predatory practice, (b) perpetrated by opportunists, who are (c) allowed by a system. Without becoming a think-piece about landlording, rent control, or housing affordability (which we do need more of, certainly), this longer version of the sentence sows seeds of solutions by properly locating the forces bearing down on David and who participates in them.
But perhaps David’s landlord didn’t raise the rent… maybe he lost his job or got into medical debt. In each story, though, there is an opportunity to avoid passive language (where invisible things happen to someone) and speak about the kind of world that’s possible and that we deserve. “After his accident/job loss, there was no safety net for David to prevent his unavoidable circumstances from leading to life on the streets.” In this version, the “villain” of this story is the mechanisms that allow unavoidable circumstances to snowball catastrophically.
Sometimes the villain isn’t a thing, but the lack of a thing that should exist—leading us to wonder why it doesn’t, and who or what stands in the way.
Real world examples:
Both examples come from bestselling books on homelessness in recent years.
The first, an example that misses the mark, comes from Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder. I had many problems with this book, most of them having to do with Kidder’s dismissive attitude toward proven solutions and his affinity for Dr. Jim and other “helpers” as saviors. All of that is present here, in this passage about how “recovery” from chronic homelessness is possible:
“A decade ago, this man, Joe Meuse, had set a city record for being carted into emergency rooms dead drunk—216 visits on a gurney in the space of eighteen months. Now he had an apartment, a driver’s license, and a job…
You could also cite the four members of the Program’s board who had once been homeless. There was Larry Adams, whose rescue had begun decades back, when Barbara McGinnis stopped him from committing suicide in the Chinatown subway station.
There was Sara Reid, who was born a boy but know she was female from the age of five— ‘And I knew I wouldn’t make it to six if I told my dad.’ After long trevails, which included homelessness, she had found harbor at the Program.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but I want to focus on the two big rules it’s breaking: our first rule in this series was that unhoused people are the heroes of their own stories. In each of these, the clients that Kidder writes about are essentially sad sacks until they are saved—for Larry, the term used is literally “rescue”—by who Kidder frames as the heroes.
But to our point today, notice the lack of a “villain” in these stories. For Joe and Larry, we meet them only at their crisis points, asked to gawk at their acute symptoms with no interest in the underlying cause. For Sara, we are treated to a little more: Sara is trans, and was afraid to tell her father. But the story then leaps ahead— “after long trevails, which included homelessness”—failing to bridge the connection. The language is sequential, but weak: she was trans, and then her long journey included homelessness. Any cause-and-effect has to be inferred, and could easily be misinterpreted. One reader could attribute her homelessness to the transphobia she endured, but another could infer that her being trans was a defect that precipitated many more. Ultimately, Kidder is interested in how the Program “saves” Sara, but is squeamish to indict the reason she needed it in the first place.
For a positive example, we turn to a book I’ve only just started, There is No Place For Us by Brian Goldstone. The first sentences of the first page of the introduction already provide a masterclass in this rule:
By the time I met Cokethia Goodman and her children, they had been homeless for three months. Their ordeal began on an afternoon in August 2018, when Cokethia discovered a terse letter from her landlord in the mailbox. The home she had been renting over the past year was in a quiet Atlanta neighborhood, within walking distance of a playground and her kids’ schools. But the area was gentrifying, and their landlord had decided it was time to cash out on her investment. The property would be sold; the family’s lease would not be renewed. Unable to find another affordable apartment nearby, they relocated to a dilapidated rental in Forest Park, on the city’s outer periphery. The rent was $50 more per month. After just two weeks in the home, Cokethia heard a scream from the kitchen: her twelve-year-old son had been washing dishes when, reaching his hand into the soapy water, he got a painful electric shock. Code enforcement arrived and, discovering exposed wiring in the basement, immediately condemned the home. The family moved to a squalid extended-stay hotel, until the weekly rent proved too expensive. There was nowhere left to go.
In this opening paragraph, Goldstone centers Cokethia and her kids as the active characters in the story, even as everything goes wrong around them. Notice how all the forces at work are keenly described without being exagerrated: an opportunistic landlord cashing out and not renewing a lease; gentrification and its impact on rents in the area where Cokethia works and her kids attend school; a price point of $50 more for a worse home on the outskirts of town; code enforcement that serves to condemn a home but takes no interest in the victims of the negligence. Throughout, Goldstone traces the progression, naming and inciting our frustration without grandstanding about everything that went wrong on the way to the Goodman family’s homelessness.
You might suggest that Kidder and Goldstone’s books have different aims, and that’s true. Not every book or article or blog post has to be about how systems work and/or fail and cause homelessness. Goldstone’s book will go on to do that, where Kidder’s wouldn’t, and there’s room for both. But if Kidder’s descriptions of the individuals had the causal clarity that Goldstone has, the reader would continue the story more informed about the malevolent forces at work, even if the rest of the book wasn’t focused on them.
If we allow the “villains” to be invisible, they will continue to operate uncontested in not only the real world but in the arena of our collective imaginations, which will ultimately limit our ability to conjure ideas for a better world. As writers about homelessness, it’s our responsibility to paint an accurate picture of the problem whenever possible and point toward larger solutions, even when it doesn’t suit the immediate needs of the piece.
I recently finished The Message by Ta Nehisi Coates, who says this profoundly:
“Words are powerful, but more so when organized to tell stories. And stories, because of their power, demanded rigorous reading, interpretation, and investigation.”
Later, Coates talks of the connection between writing/storytelling and system change.
“[P]olicy change is an end point, not an origin. The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas. … we have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible.”
As writers about homelessness, let’s ensure that stories are told in ways that transform imagination and point to the world we long for, deserve, and that is within reach.
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I remember reading a book review of Rough Sleepers, although I never read the book, and thought it seemed cool. But after your blog here I am grateful to upgrade my views. Thanks for your important directives and insights.