6.4 Personal Problems — “Sin” or “Sickness”
Nora Karena
It is common for people concerned with problems of housing insecurity and houselessness to focus resources and programming on fixing the personal problems of people who are unhoused. Many shelter and housing programs offer social support, motivational coaching, counseling, and even “life skills” classes. When we consider that many people who are unhoused have experienced trauma, mental health crises, and substance use disorder before becoming homeless, this approach makes sense. It makes even more sense when we become aware of the trauma, alienation, mental health crises, and substance use patterns that can develop while people are unsheltered. Many people who are unhoused are often in need of robust social and therapeutic support as they make their way back to stability.
However, many housing advocates and unhoused people view the “what’s-wrong-with-the-homeless” perspective as deficit-based, focusing on the problems or limits of people who are houseless. They argue that this approach obscures the real reasons for our current housing crisis—not enough affordable housing. In this section, we will look at how social research has sometimes contributed to deficit-based perspectives, and we will look at ground-breaking research that illuminates how unhoused people sometimes internalize these perspectives.
Poverty, “Degeneracy” and Migrants
Questions about poverty and poor people have been popular topics of social sciences inquiry for as long as scientists and philosophers have tried to make sense of inequality. In the late 19th century, many social scientists were concerned with degeneracy. That is the idea that certain people were naturally predisposed by heredity to low intelligence, poor moral character, and mental instability. These “poor unfortunates” were destined to lives of poverty, moral failures, and crime.
The 1875 book by Robert Dugdale, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, was the first of many studies of so-called “degenerate families.” A group identified as the Juke family was a colorful collection of about 40 loosely related families. Some of these people were not actually related to each other. However, because of repeated imprisonment and institutionalization, they were reported as having cost the State of New York over a million dollars. This study selectively documented members of a “family” of uneducated rural folks. Contemporary readers would recognize the impacts of generational poverty, limited resources, and trauma in the case studies. However, this line of questionable research influenced social theory and popular opinion about poor people at the time. It was the first of several similar research projects that added fuel to an emerging eugenics movement.
Eugenics is a pseudo-scientific set of theories that tried to demonstrate that traits such as pauperism, mental disability, dwarfism, promiscuity, and criminality were inherited, and that a mor