Helping the homeless - 2 January 1998

The other evening we were having drinks with a couple of old friends who live in the most elegant apartment where the 18th-century walnut surfaces glitter, where the portrait of an early 19th-century uncle glares brilliantly from his restored surface, where, though there is an amiable loping dog somewhere on the premises, no sign, no whisker of the animal defiles the exquisite sheen of a vast blue and white carpet.

No sooner had the four of us raised our sparkling glasses and given the usual American toast, a merry Christmas (the huge Jewish population of the city wishes you happy holidays) when in padded two orphans of the storm. That's what they looked like. A girl, sorry, feminists, a young woman of about 19, hair down to her waist, wearing green and white, once green and white sneakers, an anorak.

She was the baby daughter of our hosts and with her was a young man they'd never seen before. If I'd been alone and drowsing, that's to say not alert to the huge social changes of the past 30 years, I should have sprung up and said, yes, can I help you? I should have assumed he was the house plumber arrived to mend a leaky tap or whatever. Padded, unzipped leather jacket over a T-shirt, fraying jeans, bulging cross-striped sneakers, shaggy hair, shortish, brownish beard and very large, very brown eyes, a gentle manner. He was not the plumber, he was the new boyfriend of the daughter.

And then I realised that today he might just as well have been a professor of economics at New York University, in which case perhaps his clothes could have been his cover, the cover of a cagey, wealthy man. On third thought, that was a contradiction in terms, for no one has ever explained to me why famous economists, even the Nobel Prize winners, are not multi-millionaires. Anyway, when I later enquired what he was in, he gave a simple, startling reply. I take care of the homeless, he said.

I prodded him about this and that because I don't often run into people actually in the caring business, although never a week goes by when we don't see, as a prominent feature on one network or another, an investigative piece about how badly or negligently some city or town is dealing with its homeless. And because showing you these things is more impressive than telling you, the picture expands and gets more depressing all the time, of the homeless as outcasts.

Americans, American journalists in any medium, seem so determined to ferret out not the truth so much as the scandal which they assume must lie hidden beneath every great event, every social problem. And it is to the great credit of the best of them that they do much good in exposing fraud and incompetence and do, indeed, fulfil the prescription which one old crusading editor set up almost as a mission for journalists, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

But the worst of so-called investigative reporters far outweigh the best, I suppose, in all countries and turn into nothing but smut hounds. I don't need to go on about that type because, for some reason no sociologist I know has ever explained, the English-speaking countries are as bad as any for breeding the tabloid private eye. Still, there is so much good and worrisome exposure of fraud and double-dealing and political chicanery in this country that it becomes natural to assume America has more of it than other countries and after all these years I find I can still fall victim to this preconception, which is very strong, by the way, in the English.

Foreigners tend to accept the result of some American survey without having the passing thought: I wonder what a similar survey would show here? I remember, years ago, Franklin Roosevelt's second inaugural address. None of the usual rhetoric, no familiar reassurance that this was a great country, if not the greatest, no claiming special American credit for ordinary and well-distributed human virtues, like courage, endurance, grit. He began "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished". I recall the shock wave that passed over the politicians, the press and indeed the public of Europe when the lead sentence of that speech was published. No comparable survey came out of the effect of the Depression on the poor of Europe, so far as I know, until a friend of mine in the BBC talked to a friend of his in Geneva, a man who subsequently was to be an architect of the Beveridge Plan and the welfare state. This man in Geneva persuaded the League of Nations to make its own comparative survey of poverty in the countries of Europe. It was, so far as I can remember, never published or if so, never seized on and publicised by the European papers. But when it was done with, the Geneva man who directed the survey, said dryly to my friend: if Roosevelt had been talking about the United Kingdom, he'd have been nearer the mark in saying, "I see one half of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished".

Similarly, I recall my shock only a year or two ago, when the newspaper – though it's a weekly, it insists on calling itself a newspaper – when the Economist alone among the British press, reported the shocking numbers, well into the thousands, of teenagers who slept in boxes or wrappers under the bridges of the London river. I mentioned this to an English doctor at the time, who immediately said, surely not, they must have got their facts wrong. In America, yes, but... Well, this mental safari is not a digression, it's what the young beard and I went through on the way to my finding out what he had to say about his job and what he thought it was to be. He chose it, it was quite clear, for idealistic reasons. On leaving college his immediate impulse was not to extend his bookish days by going into graduate studies or off to law school. He wanted to help the poor and he went off to small institutions he'd heard of and then to parents of friends, to give himself enough money to be able to visit alleyways and railroad stations and street corners where the homeless sleep, to talk to them, to try and connect them with shelters and, after a while, to get to know the workers in the city shelters and perhaps, in time, run one.

He admitted that the first problem was not with the homeless, but with most common attitudes of you and me about them. He found out something every good politician finds out once he gets into government, that most problems are actually hampered, not helped, by a party line or ideological approach.

He has found out that there are conservatives who think of the homeless as people who are bone idle or mischievous from birth, natural freeloaders (American term for spongers) who've brought it on themselves and opposite them – and my young friend was surprised to discover this – were self-declared liberals who could be just as useless as helpers, people who instinctively look on the homeless as sad, ill-used, good people whom the government, that has to mean the city in question, is not doing enough about. These two standard attitudes, my friend was to find out, are both enemies of a solution. Perhaps solution is the wrong word. Decent accommodation to the life around them, that's surely the best that can be done.

This young man rejected a party or an ideological view because he'd already learned how many human types and problems hide under the blanket term, "homeless". How many of the gentle, ill-used homeless are psychopaths, either released or never diagnosed. How many who will be, sooner or later, a physical danger to their neighbours. Then there are young people who've left a home they swear had abused them. On enquiry, either that's true or shockingly not true. And then the type of child who seems to be born a chronic liar flourishes among the homeless and they emerge in their late teens as people who are going to exploit the well-publicised epidemic of child abuse, by claiming to be a victim, by true or false memory. And then there are the hopeless alcoholics, especially among the old and the young, the junkies. On balance he was to discover there is no typical, no archetypal homeless.

I greatly admire the spirit of this young man in wanting to make a life of this complicated care. I congratulated him and then he said, I suppose, in your time, it was nothing like the problem it is today. I said, in my time we had no idea of the problem. The most knowledgeable, the most educated people couldn't possibly tell you how many or how few homeless there were, it never came up. He was even more amazed. Why? Because, I said, there was no television and there was no Gallup poll. On all such questions – poverty, illegitimacy, the incidence of chronic disease going around unnoticed – we believed what we wanted to believe. The only people who knew and deplored these dirty secrets were social workers, Catholics and Methodists mostly, who went out of their way to find the poor and homeless and then do something about them. I imagine that, for a story or whatever, every time I've looked into the available statistics of such horrors – teenage homelessness, boy prostitution on the streets of London, Manchester, Birmingham in the 19th Century for instance – the figures were devastating. Hundreds of thousands in all the big cities. Decent people kept away all their lives from districts that housed, or failed to house, the poor.

So what was the upshot, he wondered. The upshot was, I thought, that the general condition of the poor is far better than it was 50 years ago. There was no social security then, no welfare, heaven knows, no free medicine. But television brings it home to us every night and, at the very least, we feel guilty about it. At the best, we do something, either by joining a society or a city agency or by individual charity. This idea struck a chord with him. That's right, he said, I've noticed people will come through with help or money if you tap their guilt. He went off cheerily. The New Year, not a bad time to start tapping.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.