Homelessness as a Lifestyle³

3 Drawn from fieldnotes taken during a 3-year, participant observation study in New York’s Bowery, from Fall 1976 to Fall 1979. Along with Benedict Giamo, my fieldwork partner from the start, I had spent several hours weekly in conversation with one or another Bowery resident, individually or in groups. This quote was from a man named Sugar Hart who had been bragging that he had traveled all over the country, and he could pick up and go anytime he pleased. Mter he said this, our notes of November 6, 1977 read, “He stood silent as if to stand apart from his words. He leaned forward towards us with eagerness and intensity. ’Now wait a minute, wait a minute. If I go to a psychiatrist maybe he tells me I got a problem, but if I do have a problem I don’t know nothin’ about it.’“

Abstract

For those homeless people who are rejecting traditional social selVices, one may have to be able to treat their symptoms as secondary while looking beyond them for primary social patterns. This reveals a lifestyle devastated by disaffiliation and social distance. People who have been homeless for a long time can be shown to be suffering from a lifestyle of homelessness or from “homelessness-as-a-lifestyle.” This is a condition, the components of which often include early life transiency, impulsiveness, clusters of unsolved problems, as well as a lack of social and other supports. These lifestyle elements interact with one another in perpetuating fashion, dragging the person along in an undertow, one result of which is downward mobility. Four case studies demonstrate examples of this social condition.

Keywords::

• Homelessness
• Lifestyle
• Sociology of homelessness
• Case studies of homelessness
• Disaffiliation

Notes

3 Drawn from fieldnotes taken during a 3-year, participant observation study in New York’s Bowery, from Fall 1976 to Fall 1979. Along with Benedict Giamo, my fieldwork partner from the start, I had spent several hours weekly in conversation with one or another Bowery resident, individually or in groups. This quote was from a man named Sugar Hart who had been bragging that he had traveled all over the country, and he could pick up and go anytime he pleased. Mter he said this, our notes of November 6, 1977 read, “He stood silent as if to stand apart from his words. He leaned forward towards us with eagerness and intensity. ’Now wait a minute, wait a minute. If I go to a psychiatrist maybe he tells me I got a problem, but if I do have a problem I don’t know nothin’ about it.’“