The Invisibility of Small-Town Homeless People
It isn’t just a big-city problem anymore
My husband gets up at 4 a.m. every day to exercise at a local park while I’m still slumbering away. He has to walk quietly to avoid waking up the homeless people sleeping on the benches.
I had no idea this was going on here. We don’t live in a big city and we’ve never seen this before.
Homeless people are showing up even in smaller towns now, but you might not realize it’s happening.
Not all homeless people look homeless.
We probably walk by homeless people all the time and don’t even know it. Most of them can “pass.”
In my small town, you don’t see the kinds of sights people in large cities complain about. I think that’s starting to change.
Before my husband started his pre-dawn exercise routine, we were mostly unaware of the scope of the local problem. There’s a homeless camp in the woods near the Illinois River, and you will not see it if you don’t know where to look.
If you stumbled on it, you might not even realize it was a homeless camp. The one time I visited, it resembled a camping site where people with perfectly good houses might spend a night for fun.
It’s not.
Why are so many people homeless now?
You’ve heard the theories: Homeless people are mostly a bunch of drug addicts who made terrible choices in life. Some of them prefer to live on the street.
I’ve heard people with comfortable lives explain that homeless people are fundamentally different from the rest of us. They’ll just waste any money you give to them. They can’t be saved. There’s no point providing funding for homeless people if it’s just going to be wasted, right?
That makes you feel better about doing nothing to help, but it doesn’t ring true when so many homeless people hold down jobs but don’t make enough money to pay rent.
You can’t lump all homeless people into one group.
Some suffer from mental illness or substance abuse, but others just lack money. It would take tremendous resources to get some people back into stable housing situations; for others, it might only take a gift of a thousand dollars to cover rent and utility deposits.
In one study, 50 homeless Canadians received several thousand bucks each and — surprise! — they spent it getting back on their feet. They didn’t just blow it on drugs and alcohol, which is what better-off people often assume poor people do with all their money. The same good results came from another study, which gave money directly to poor people in Kenya.
Imagine: Giving money to people who didn’t have enough of it was helpful! Mind-boggling.
I know people who range from dirt poor to the top 1 percent. All of them sometimes waste money. But the poor waste less. It’s a dangerous myth that poor people will waste money and wealthy people will use it well. If anything, the reverse is more true.
I decided to get involved.
Not far from that park, an outreach center provides food, showers, laundry facilities and a place for people to charge their phones.
A friend who volunteers there regularly asked me to help. I braced myself for dealing with people in crisis, but as it turned out, they were just ordinary people.
The day I volunteered, the clothing and grooming of everyone we served was within normal, casual standards. Everyone spoke respectfully and politely. If you passed by any one of those people on the street, it would never occur to you that they were homeless.
Toward the end of the day, one of the men asked for access to cleaning supplies, and he cleaned the bathroom. Nobody asked him to — he took it upon himself to provide this service.
I know from talking to my friend that sometimes clients come in who are obviously under the influence of something, but I didn’t see anything like that.
A veteran volunteer at the outreach center mentioned that one of the regulars had just gotten a $15 per hour job at Caterpillar — after he gets a few paychecks, he’ll have enough to put down a deposit on an apartment. For now, he’s still living in his car.
I passed this piece of good news to my friend. I thought it was a sign that one less person here was going to be homeless. But it’s not that simple. She said that from time to time, one of the homeless people does get a job, and for a while all seems well, but some people have deeper problems that a lower-income job can’t fix.
A Caterpillar job isn’t what it used to be, of course. Neither is $15 per hour. With such a job, a person is still just one piece of bad luck away from being back on the street. If his car breaks down, that might be enough to start the dominoes falling.
But actually, that’s true for many of us.
Most of us are at risk of losing it all — it would just take us a little longer to reach the streets than someone in a more vulnerable position.
In the U.S., we decided it would be a good idea to set things up so that nearly everyone is vulnerable to financial disaster and homelessness. One bad medical diagnosis can wipe out the gains of decades of work.
It always amazes me how many well-off people truly believe there is a fundamental difference between the well-off and the poor; they seldom credit things like their luck in being born into a stable family. Instead, they think the poor are very unlike themselves.
Some homeless people do need intensive mental health care and rehab, and I want them to get it — let’s not give up on those people.
But there are such simple answers for many homeless people. I’ve never been homeless, but I’m no stranger to having to make extreme financial decisions to survive. Sometimes, a very small amount of money makes a very big difference — one way or another.
After my divorce, I had to sell my nicer house and move to a small place because I owed thousands to my divorce attorney and dentist. I had to pay each of them $100 per month, and I just didn’t have it. That nice house I used to own has appreciated in value so much, and I missed out on that windfall for the lack of an extra $50 per week.
I look back and wonder how much better off I would be today — and will be in my older age — if I could have gotten even a small raise back then. I understand that the same kind of math problem sends some people out of an apartment and onto the street. If you can’t imagine how a thousand bucks could change someone’s life, please appreciate how lucky you are.
In my area, that would be enough to put down a deposit on an apartment and the utilities. It’s far cheaper in the long run to keep a person housed than to pay for all the costs of a large homeless population. Can’t we at least reach for the low-hanging fruit?
I think our biggest hurdle is overcoming our prejudices against the poor.
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I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me on Medium or Substack, or help support my work!
Man I have so much to say in response to this. And yes, it's pretty much the same in Canada. I don't once in a small town but I do love in extreme suburbs (walkable to the city limits). Up until recently my neighborhood was mainly inaccessible without a car. But several years ago they put in the last stop on the train line a few blocks away and it didn't take long to start seeing little homeless clusters in treed areas off the walking paths. I suppose it's what you'd call "upper homeless." They have a view of the mountains out here lol.
We have a program called Inn From the Cold run by several city churches. Underemployed families can sleep over and shower in churches before heading out to work each day. It's sickening that fully employed people here can't afford a place to live.