The Good, The Bad, The Chronic

Here at Real Change, we’ve told everyone for years that homeless people don’t all fit the stereotypes. Now it’s the government line. The stereotype is officially referred to as The chronically homeless, and the whole point of the government line is that The chronically homeless isn’t typical. So we have made progress.

Speaking of what’s typical, did I mention that I am a mathematician? We mathematicians love that people use “typical” and “average” interchangeably. We would like you all to also use the words “typical” and “median” interchangeably, the words “typical” and “mode” interchangeably, and the words “typical” and “kangaroo or, alternately, [insert optional crude expression]” interchangeably, so we can hear you call everything a kangaroo or, alternately, [optional crude expression.] Just for the fun of it.

Also I like to hear the word The whenever possible, even if it doesn’t belong somewhere, and even if its use is deceitful, misleading, or shovels policy goals under the rug. Because the word just makes everything it touches sound so Special.

In this case we are speaking of The chronically homeless as opposed to speaking of some people being more chronically homeless than others, or so-and-so is 7.5 chronic while his brother is only 3.8 chronic, etc.

It’s like talking about The up. Once you’ve decided that there is a The up, you don’t have to say how up is this or that up. Some up isn’t more up than other up. Everything is either up or not-up. The fact that all up is the same simplifies thinking about it, which is useful for people who don’t like thinking or don’t know how. “Which way to the ceiling?” “Up.” “How high is the moon?” “Up.” “How screwed are we?” “Up.”

In reality, though, there IS such a thing as how chronic is chronic, but it’s buried in policy papers if it’s been decided at all. The distinction between being chronic enough to be called chronically homeless, and not chronic enough, is not however made by looking at the homeless people themselves. It’s made by looking at budgets and figuring out how much money is available to house and serve people.

In other words, the distinction between the chronically homeless and the non-chronically homeless isn’t a discernible fissure running across the landscape. The chronically homeless don’t have “tells,” like nervous ticks or unusual fashion choices that give them away. They’re separated from the crowd by the fact that they have a history of costing more, by an amount to be determined.

It’s that “to be determined” that makes the use of the word The a lie. There should be a different class of chronically homeless for every different budget. But the policy makers want to shovel that part of the discussion under the rug. First you have to agree with everything they say about The chronically homeless. Then when the budget numbers are crunched they’ll tell exactly you who they’ve been making you talk about. Or they make an arbitrary definition of chronically homeless up front and don’t tell you that the definition was selected with an eye on future available funds.

The biggest problem politicians seem to have is figuring out that everything they have government do to fix a problem changes the problem.

If you spend all the money you have housing and serving The chronically homeless, denying funds to short-term fixes already in place, like shelters and public free meals, then the whole system will turn into an engine that creates more chronically homeless people by whatever definition you end up choosing.

Meanwhile, in real estate news, the word is that prices for homes will be heading up for the foreseeable future. This is called good news by our major local daily newspapers, as if there were an absolute or objective good in inflation, so long as it enriches the right people.

And politicians read about it in the Sunday paper, and think all is going well.

Every Cloud Is Lined

Have you ever wondered how often Albert Einstein thought, “Gee, who am I kidding? I’m no Einstein.” Or how often any of his kids thought it? I wonder about things like that all the time.

The other day I saw a report that said, according to a study commissioned by some charity in England, the life expectancy of homeless people in London is lower than for people in the Victorian era.

Now, Einstein was born in the Victorian era, and he truly was an Einstein, so I’ll bet he would have known what all that meant right away, but I had to look it up.

One of the things I found out was that the life expectancy of a British guy during the “Victorian era” (a British way of saying “the years 1837 to 1901”) was around 50. Whereas the average age of homeless Londoners at death these days is around 42.

Such factoids present interesting possibilities for political interpretation, or spin, or whatever you choose to call it. A former acquaintance once told me that she hated living in the present and wished she could travel back to simpler times, when scientists weren’t screwing life up. She said she thought that the 14th century would be “idyllic.” I think she picked the 14th century because the number 14 is big in the Kabala. It couldn’t be because of the actual 14th century, what with the Black Death and the Hundred Years War lowering life expectancy to 25 or less (in all the countries where she could speak the language.)

Here’s one way we could spin the news: Homelessness isn’t so bad. No, really. It’s better to be homeless than to live through the Black Death and the Hundred Years War. It’s almost as good as living during such an enlightened time as had telegraphs and trains and Florence Nightingale.

Now that every community in the land has to have a Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness (Philip Mangano, Bush administration “Homelessness Czar,” isn’t into the Kabala, he’s into the number of fingers on his hands) I look forward to the new creative ways that people will assess progress on this front when the homelessness that was supposed to have ended hasn’t. “Being homeless was always better than living in the 14th century, but worse than living during the Victorian era. But it’s now as good as life under Edward VII. Give us another ten years and being homeless could get as good as living through the Great Depression.”

Unfortunately, it turns out that being homeless is a lot worse than that British news report would indicate. There’s a problem with the conclusion of the study it mentions, having to do with averages.

Recently I said I love averages. This is one of those times when the appearance of averages makes me all tingly and excited.

It turns out that when folks work out the life expectancy of people in the Victorian era, or the 14th century, or any other period in history, the number they crank out refers to the life expectancy of anyone born. That means high rates of childhood deaths drive the average life expectancy way down.

It turns out that if you survived childhood during the Victorian era you could actually expect to live well past 60. In fact, even during the dreaded 14th century, if you were a member of the British aristocracy and you made it to 21 by around 1340 you could expect to live an additional 24 years to age 45, beating out our present day London homeless by 3 years, in spite of the Black Death!

“So what are you trying to say, Wes?” What I’m trying to say is, looking at things on the bright side gets harder every day. What I’m trying to say is, maybe the Black Death wasn’t so bad.

What I’m trying to say is, when you see everything in perspective, you really begin to appreciate modern anesthetics.