By TANYA EISERER / Abilene Reporter-NewsHomelessness is complex issue with no easy answers
By TANYA EISERER / Abilene Reporter-News
Photo by Gerald Ewing
Once described as "having it all," he was a football star who dreamed of playing professionally.
Then an injury ended the dream.
People who know him say he never recovered. He's now an untreated schizophrenic roaming Abilene's streets.
"All his life, all he ever wanted to do was play ball. When that was taken from him, he snapped," said one long-time friend.
"He's very nice-looking. He's very smart. He writes well, but he can't hold down a job," the friend said. "He needs help before he does something really bad. He needs medicine. He needs to be taken care of."
Belinda Cook, executive director of Hope Haven, said, "All of us have experiences where things we hoped for didn't happen, but we don't fall apart. He did."
His temper also has led to several run-ins with local law enforcement, including allegedly assaulting a police officer.
"He has an arrest record that's 50 pages long," said Abilene police Sgt. Jimmy DeFoor, head of the community services division. "He's very dangerous."
Mental illness put him on the edge of society.
For other people, the reasons are different: substance abuse, physical disabilities, lack of housing or unemployment.
"Homelessness is a complex problem in Abilene. You can't point to one cause," Cook said.
The components
In late 1995, students from Hardin-Simmons University's social work department interviewed 87 people at Hope Haven and the Salvation Army to find how and why they became homeless.
The class went into the project with the supposition that homelessness was a problem stemming from poverty and "not having a taste of success," said Brenda Hendrix, an associate professor of social work at HSU who led the project.
Their findings astounded them and shattered their assumptions.
"The class ended up deciding the homeless were much more like them than they'd like to admit," Hendrix said.
Often, highly educated individuals have landed on the street after some trauma in their lives such as a death in the family, which sent them into a tailspin, she said.
There are variables in life "that could happen to any of us. In each of us, there is only a thin line between our sanity and our craziness," Hendrix said. "What would happen if I lost my husband and son? Would I end up homeless?"
Nationally, mental illness accounts for 20 to 25 percent of the single adult homeless population, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.
Mental illness prevents people from carrying out essential aspects of daily care, such as self-care, household management and interpersonal relationships, according to the coalition.
These people also tend to remain homeless for long periods of time and have less contact with family and friends, the coalition stated.
Robbye Plummer, spokeswoman for Abilene Mental Health/Mental Retardation, said the government can't just institutionalize mentally ill individuals nor can it force them to take medication.
"It's not illegal to be mentally ill," Plummer said. "All we can do is offer our services. It is a choice they make about whether or not to take their medication."
Some mentally ill individuals will take their medication at first, but they stop when they start to feel better, she said.
"Most people think of medication as a temporary thing," Plummer said. "But it's not so with mental illness."
Mental illness and substance abuse are the leading factors in homelessness, local drug and alcohol treatment providers said.
"In this part of the country, mental illness and substance abuse are the combined components for homelessness," said Dick Spalding, director of Serenity House, a local drug treatment facility. "I see homelessness as a symptom. When you see a symptom of a disease, you try to find out what the disease is and treat it.
"If you're putting it up your nose or in alcohol and spending your money on the things that go with drugs and alcohol, you are or will become homeless," Spalding said.
Sick and tired of the substance abuse, family members often throw the person out on the street, he said.
"Often, those people would not consider themselves homeless," said Cindy Wier, vice president of Serenity House. "But they are."
Substance abuse is often an attempt to cope with some traumatic experience in their lives, Hope Haven's Cook said.
"It's a form of medicating. You're usually medicating the pain. If you stay drunk, you don't have to deal with reality. It's easier to just exist," Cook said.
The vast majority of people who end up on the streets were either sexually, mentally or physically abused as a child, she said.
In its study, however, Hendrix's class came to the conclusion that substance abuse does not necessarily cause homelessness.
"We saw it more as an outcome of the mental illness or other factors," she said.
Domestic violence
On a national level, a 1990 Ford Foundation study found 50 percent of homeless women and children were fleeing abuse, the national coalition said.
"Statistically, every time a woman leaves her situation, she's homeless," said Susan Keeling, executive director of the Noah Project, a local battered women's shelter.
"Very often, people can't understand why she doesn't leave," Keeling said. "And the biggest reason is that she is financially dependent."
Sherry Parker, 36, who has lived on the streets of Abilene, New Braunfels, San Antonio, Dallas and other places, came from a middle-class background.
She attended Alvin Community College and the University of Houston, studied electronics and nearly earned her bachelor's degree from UH. Then she went to work for Texas Instruments.
But Parker joined the ranks of the homeless in the late 1980s while trying to escape an abusive spouse.
"My ex-husband was an addict, and he beat me up a lot," she said. "I decided I was better off without him. I chose (homelessness) because of the abuse, but I didn't think it would continue (for nearly a decade)."
Like many women who have been abused, Parker became involved in two more abusive relationships.
"Women tend to hook up with men they think will give them protection. Instead, they're their destroyers," she said.
"I've picked some real losers. (Abusive men) gravitate to me. They know I've got a heart, and they see a sucker. Never believe a man when he says he won't hit you."
Lack of housing
For Billy Horn, homelessness is certainly a housing issue, because the wood-frame duplex he and his family were living in burned down in early April.
They lost everything in a blaze ignited by an electric space heater.
"We never thought something like that would happen," Horn said. "What hurts is when you don't have insurance."
Horn's family is currently living with his common-law wife's daughter in a crowded apartment, but they can't stay forever.
The national homeless coalition views homelessness more in terms of the inability of poverty-stricken individuals to afford housing.
"Homelessness and poverty are inextricably linked. Poor people are frequently unable to pay for housing, food, child care, health care and education," according to a coalition document. "Often it is housing, which absorbs a high proportion of income, that must be dropped. Being poor means being an illness, an accident or a paycheck away from living on the streets."
Hendrix said the HSU students found those who had been on the streets for a short length of time desperately wanted housing and shelter.
"They saw homelessness as about having a house," Hendrix explained.
Though Spalding concedes housing is a factor, he doesn't see it as the main factor.
"That is a position taken by well-intentioned people who think there is a solution through government," he said. "You would never convince any substance abuse counselor in the state of Texas" that housing is the main reason people are homeless, Spalding said.
A choice?
The reasons why someone ends up on the street tend not to matter after the person has been homeless for a long time, Hendrix said.
"At some point, they accept homelessness as the way it's going to be. After a while, they don't really care about having a house," she said. "It doesn't seem real. Why want it if you can't have it?"
As outcasts from conventional society, some homeless people seek to disassociate themselves.
"Some of the people that's on the streets, they don't want to be
helped. They prefer to stay out there," said Ray "Pops" Crabtree,
an admitted alcoholic who lived on Abilene's streets for years. "They'd
prefer that somebody gave them something. They don't try to help themselves.
They don't want to get off the streets."