4. Behavior Is the Best Predictor of Behavior

Scientists conducting research often make discoveries that they did not anticipate. In this investigation, I expected to be learning a lot about chronic homelessness in a small city. However, I was also gaining considerable insight into the behavior of the community’s residents and its leaders that was unforeseen. As an example, the city’s response to my group’s request to use a recently vacated fire station building as a “Safe Haven” for chronically homeless people was especially revealing.

At this point in time, only two months into a six months long investigation, we’d already experienced a homeless man’s death and a police raid.  I was beginning to realize that Auburn, New York was a microcosm of much larger cities with respect to homelessness.

Certain kinds of events – especially the death of a study participant – often motivate researchers to revise the initial direction of an investigation.  Instead of continuing to study chronic homelessness in an academic manner, I became far more proactive. I began to look for a safe site or an empty building where I could get the rest of my contacts off the street as soon as possible.

Sometimes the best option may be to do the job yourself.

Two social workers were already helping me and I was confident that I could bring in interns as well as additional professionals who had retired early from human services positions with advanced degrees and lengthy experience.

We began by investigating two options:

1.  Putting up tents and lean-tos on private land:

A local corporation was willing to provide land and a contractor had offered to construct tent platforms and lean-tos on the site as well as to supply all materials and labor. After discussing sanitary requirements with a Red Cross disaster worker, however, it became clear that the cost of providing water and sewer connections to the site for toilets, showers and laundry facilities would be prohibitive.

2.  Acquiring a vacant former convent located in downtown Auburn:

This idea initially made sense given that the location had been utilized as a residential facility for a religious order. However, when I discussed the option with two development corporation executives and with the city code enforcement officer, I learned that the building was now owned by a private seller and the price was steep. In addition, it would require time consuming and costly renovations to bring it up to code.

Then, when the local newspaper reported that the Frederick Street Fire Station had just been vacated and that the city was seeking new uses for the building, we were definitely interested. Several people suggested that it could work well as a shelter or group home given that fire stations generally have a kitchen, bathrooms and sleeping areas.

We visited the building a couple of times, looked in the windows and noted that it appeared clean and empty except for a few rolled up fire hoses lying on the floor in the garage area. The structure looked to be in good shape and it was close to downtown.

I anticipated that the company which had previously offered to assist us in the creation of tent and lean-to shelters would similarly be willing to help us with this site.  In addition, individuals who had been skilled workers before becoming homeless wanted to help with basic carpentry and painting; others offered to help by taking care of the building and grounds maintenance.

Although the building had a kitchen, obtaining a food service permit in advance would not need to be a first priority. As my homeless contacts reminded me, disadvantaged people can eat very well for free every day in Auburn. In fact, I ate lunch often at an area soup kitchen. Local restaurants and grocery stores donated high quality food that was served there.

Housing Auburn’s multiply disabled, chronically homeless population in the vacant fire station sounded like a Win-Win-Win proposition for a number of reasons:

• Most chronically homeless people in Auburn have a history of disabling conditions, especially head injuries, which can make it difficult for untrained case workers to help them. These also put homeless people at very high risk of death on the street

• Auburn social services agency personnel seemed to work well with most homeless people in the area but some seemed to lack skills required to work effectively with multiply and/ or severely disabled individuals. I have those skills and so did the two social workers as well as the other human services personnel I expected to involve

• People in the chronically homeless community wanted to locate there. They would be safe and cared for by skilled professionals, some of whom they already knew

• This municipally-owned building would have a meaningful new use and the city would be receiving substantial assistance with its chronically homeless population.

On the other hand:

It is a well known axiom in the field of psychology that “Behavior is the best predictor of behavior.” Just as the weather this July is an excellent predictor of the weather next July, past human behavior is an excellent predictor of future behavior. In other words:  the city was not likely to change its behavior. To date, housing its chronically homeless people had not seemed to be a priority, particularly in residential areas like the one in which this fire station was located.

After the City Council meeting that we attended together, The Citizen newspaper reported on my group’s public request to use the fire station as a “Safe Haven.”  The article included a quote from the City Attorney, who was also the interim City Manager:

“After the meeting, interim City Manager John Rossi said McLaughlin had not made a formal proposal to the city as of Thursday. But he did say it would be a “novel approach” to utilizing the Frederick Street building.

‘We’d be glad to sit down and talk to her about it,’ Rossi said.”

Bringing this issue to a public forum had made it unlikely that city officials could ignore our request but we were all very encouraged by this seemingly sincere public expression of interest. First, we needed to gain access to the interior of the building; we needed to know how many bathrooms there were and to learn what revisions might be required – if any – as well as other relevant information like the costs of heat, water, sewer and power.

I decided to attend the next City Council meeting and request access to the building.

In preparation, I spent some time talking with an attorney who advises us pro bono:

• Under terms of the New York State Constitution, Article 17, municipalities may have an obligation to provide for the “aid, care and support” of needy people. Certain federal laws may also apply, for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act and the Fair Housing Act

• I also wanted to estimate the city’s possible degree of responsibility for the care of its disabled, chronically homeless people in order to propose reasonable, viable and acceptable financial arrangements with respect to utilizing the fire station.

Because another winter was fast approaching, time was of the essence. Winters in Central New York can be particularly harsh. Moreover, the death rate for chronically homeless people is four times that of housed people; brain injuries are a leading cause of death and one of our contacts had recently been found dead. I didn’t believe that it would be responsive to spend the usual couple of years on design and analysis issues; one doesn’t leave people at risk of death on the street, as an example, while talking about building a hospital.

In my opinion, getting these chronically homeless people into safe housing as quickly as possible was a most urgent priority. I hoped that all of my contacts would be safely indoors before Christmas, which was five months away.

The basics of our plan were: we hoped to lease the building for a nominal annual fee, we wanted to negotiate a cost sharing plan for expenses with the city and we wanted to make co-services provision arrangements with area social services agencies.

Our plan was never intended to be perfect or even permanent; it would be improved upon over time. I was convinced that whatever arrangements we could make quickly would certainly be better than leaving these chronically homeless, disabled people outdoors.

I made my second public statement on this matter to City Council members on July 21, 2011. In the video below, Auburn’s interim City Manager/ City Attorney John Rossi is seated to the left of the mayor wearing a light colored suit. My statement begins immediately after the meeting’s introductory formalities and it runs for three minutes.

A week later, I received a letter from Mr. Rossi which stated:

“Currently the facility is being used by the Auburn Fire Department in connection with the City’s frequency rebanding program. There is no definitive date as to when this use is going (to) discontinue and there are studies being conducted by the City as to the most efficient use of that property.

“The City is not in a position to discuss use of the Frederick Street fire house for the homeless housing needs which you have brought to the attention of the community.”

In closing, he commented:

“If the City may be of some assistance in reference to this matter, please let me know and we will provide whatever resources we may have currently to assist you for this purpose.”

Two months later, I tried once again to speak with interim City Manager/ City Attorney Rossi. I emailed him and requested a meeting to discuss whatever resources he’d mentioned in his letter that he might be able to offer.

Sadly – but not unexpectedly – he never even replied.

Last month the head of the combined Auburn and Cayuga County, New York, Homeless Task force released the results of its 2011 homeless count to the public. An overall total of 475 people in the area were found to be homeless. Of that total, 10% were estimated to be chronically homeless.

Given that the death rate for chronically homeless people has been found to be four times that of housed people, what this means is that between 47 and 48 human beings in the county  were at high risk of death at the time that my group was attempting to utilize the Frederick Street Fire Station for a “Safe Haven” program.

The City of Auburn, New York is the county seat of Cayuga County and it is its largest community.

One of my contacts and I visited the fire station again this week. At 2:00 PM on a Monday afternoon, there were no cars in the parking lot; there was no flag on the flagpole in front of the building;  all doors were locked; when we rang the doorbell, a very loud sound could be heard but nobody answered the door. The only difference we noted was that there appeared to be a trailer stored in the garage area.

This is the fourth post in my series on chronic homelessness in Auburn, New York. You are invited to return and read more as it becomes available.

© 2012 Mary M. McLaughlin, PhD. All rights reserved.

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3. Finding Phil

Auburn, New York, population 27,000, is a small city in Central New York State located midway between Syracuse and Rochester. Its estimated median household income is $37,000 and 88% of its residents are white. In 2010, Auburn was rated the best small city in which to raise a family in the Northeast and No. 18 in the nation by Forbes.com.

When I first moved to this city in November of 2004, I bought coffee each morning at the Hess Gas Station downtown. It carried newspapers along with various food items and there were several tables available where one could sit, eat and peruse the newspaper.

Each morning I noticed a small group of disoriented looking men sitting there. Given my background in psychiatric rehabilitation, one of them especially caught my attention because he would talk loudly to himself while tearing through a copy of the newspaper.

One day I asked a food server who these people were and he told me that some of them lived under a bridge about a block away and that others slept at a nearby shelter or group home but were required to leave each morning at 7:00 AM to go out and look for work.

Given how disheveled most of these men appeared, the idea that any of them could find a job in their condition seemed unrealistic to me.  Moreover, allowing quite obviously disadvantaged people to live under a bridge or turning them out during the day into the brutal cold of a Northeast winter struck me as exceptionally cruel. I felt grateful that the gas station personnel showed these people so much kindness.

I wanted to help them somehow and a short while later, I joined Auburn’s Homeless Task Force. Data were being collected in support of a grant application and volunteers were being recruited to help count the area’s homeless people.

The wind chill factor was well below zero on the cold and snowy January day scheduled for the count and I asked the team leader what we should do if we found any homeless people. She replied that we could give each one of them a clean but skimpy and threadbare blanket from a small pile that she had available. When I expressed concern, she said that I could give each person two blankets.

I continued attending task force meetings until I realized that approximately 90% of the grant money would be used to keep the agency employees and the office overhead costs paid.  There would be hardly any money left over that year to help homeless people; everyone would need to be kept employed until the following year in order that the agency could apply for another grant at that time to help the homeless people themselves.

I was very disillusioned and quit the task force in the spring. I‘d never before seen such open and blatant homelessness anywhere outside of a major city but I didn’t make any critical comments at the time as I assumed that there must be something I didn’t fully understand.  A year later,  however, a homeless man was found dead inside a car that had been left for service at a nearby auto repair business.

Six years later, in July of 2011, I found myself sitting right back there again at that very same Hess Gas Station. Homeless people were still living under the bridges downtown; in fact, one of the men I’d met recently had been living outdoors for ten years.

It was the morning after police had raided “the pit,” as Auburn’s disadvantaged community called its home base area under the nearby railroad bridge. A colleague had called to tell me that she’d just spoken with Bruce, one of my contacts on the street, and he’d told her that everything under the bridge had been ordered cleared out by police the night before and that everyone there had been ordered to leave under threat of arrest.

I left to join them immediately. I could hardly believe this bad news but when I arrived and saw Bruce, I had no doubt at all that it was true. He looked like he was still in shock; he was holding his head in his hands, staring straight ahead and saying very little.

My colleague and I sat with him at the picnic table under the big, shady tree outside the gas station, all three of us in stunned contemplation. Where was everyone, we wondered? Where had all “the fellas” gone? What could we do now to help them?

Where had all the grant money gone for the past six years, I wondered?  The industry that employs the highest percentage of women in Auburn (27%) is “Health Care and Social Assistance.” Was keeping social assistance workers employed more important to this community than spending its grant money housing its chronically homeless people?

I had rejoined Auburn’s Homeless Task Force after a couple of years away from it. However, my “raising awareness” comments seemed to be generally resented. Task force members would insist that they “really care” but I’d felt increasingly unwelcome at meetings.

During the preceding winter, I’d been especially concerned about a homeless man named Phil. The last time I’d seen him was a week before Christmas and that winter had been one of the coldest and snowiest ever in our harsh, northeast climate. Whenever it snowed or the temperature dropped, I’d thought of him and wondered how he could possibly survive living outdoors through yet another winter.

I hadn’t seen Phil out and about during the spring either and I finally decided to go and look for him. I’d also decided to study chronic homelessness in the area more closely. My hope was that this would help people interested in homelessness, including me, to understand this issue more clearly and possibly also help the task force member agencies to gain additional grant funding for housing.

A young woman who was preparing to enter a PhD program in social psychology wanted to assist me with the research so the time seemed right and I designed a six months long project entitled “Finding Phil.” Now, less than two months into it, a homeless man we’d met on our very first day out “in the field” had been found dead and there had just been a police raid on the site where we three graduate level human services professionals were providing supplies and supportive services to some of the area’s other homeless people.

Late that afternoon, after we’d taken Bruce to lunch at McDonald’s and he’d left on his bicycle, I went back to “the pit” alone. In order to avoid any possibility of arrest, I did not go into the area itself but stood at the entrance to it and looked inside.

I could still see the lovely, soft pastel colored chalk graffiti script on the stone wall which had recently been drawn in commemoration of the upcoming one month anniversary of Steve’s death.

That site, coupled with the complete absence of people and the stark barrenness of “the pit” started to overwhelm me emotionally and I went back to my car, sat down and cried.

It was clear to me that nearly everything I’d done so far, from helping with the “homeless count” over six years earlier to writing articles about homelessness, participating in all those Homeless Task Force meetings, providing information to city officials and initiating the ongoing research project, all of those efforts had produced few to no results.

I’d invited nationally known homeless advocate Mark Horvath of invisiblepeople.tv to Auburn and organized a reception for him.  I’d also invited Shay Kelley of Project 50/50 to visit and I had long been trying to get a housing development built for homeless and low to very low income people in Auburn called “Eagles Landing.“

Trying to be a good “team player” regarding chronic homelessness in Auburn was definitely not working.

It was time to rethink and to regroup.

I decided to continue with the research project but I also decided that it was time to “Go Public” with my concerns for these homeless people.

Auburn City Council meetings are open to the public, shown on television and posted on the Internet. Six days later, I brought some homeless people and other advocates with me; we all went to City Hall and attended the very next City Council meeting together.

I read a prepared statement in the “Public to be Heard” portion of the meeting and asked city officials to turn over an abandoned fire station to my group to be run as homeless housing. After that, some of the others in our group spoke in favor of the suggestion, including Phil. We’d finally found him and when we did, I hadn’t even recognized him, the past winter had taken such a terrible toll on him.

Speakers are required to state their address for the record. I advised the homeless people who’d accompanied me to state their address simply as “downtown Auburn.”

Auburn’s newspaper The Citizen has generously provided me with a link to the meeting from its video archives.

About one minute into it, you can see all of us arriving in a group of eight people.  My statement in the “Public to Be Heard” section begins about minute 4.  Shortly after that, three more people from our group spoke up, including Phil.

I was so proud of everyone.  It took a lot of courage for each of them to show up and to speak up in such a public forum.

This is my third installment in this series.  I invite you to return to read more as it’s posted.

© 2012 Mary M. McLaughlin, PhD. All rights reserved.

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1. It was a gorgeous summer day…

It was a gorgeous summer day when I learned that Steve Shields had just been found dead, face down in a stream in Auburn, New York.

Some of his friends sat with me that day at the soup kitchen where I often have lunch and told me that Steve had left their group the preceding Friday evening to return to his regular sleeping spot under a bridge along the Owasco River in the downtown area.

When he didn’t rejoin them on Saturday, friends went to look for him. They didn’t find him in any of his usual places and assumed he’d gone to stay for a couple of days at an area relative’s house, something he was known to do from time to time.

Sadly, Steve’s body was spotted by a passerby traveling over the bridge four days later.

A man who was with him that fateful night reported that Steve had fallen and hit his head on a rock. Assuming that he’d just “sleep it off,” the man hadn’t contacted authorities for help.

Some people feared foul play because the man who was with him had been seen the next day wearing Steve’s cherished baseball cap but others wondered whether he might have experienced a seizure and fallen. He had previously suffered a head injury, they told me, and often forgot to take his medication.

Steve was a sweet, kind, upbeat and charming man whom I’d met about a month earlier. He was 48 years old, disabled, and he had a history of homelessness.

Across our country, premature deaths of homeless people may not be investigated very thoroughly or even recorded accurately. In San Francisco, as an example, a city official reported in 2011 that 28 deaths of homeless people had been recorded that year.

The Coalition on Homelessness, however, collected the names of 60 homeless people who had died in San Francisco in 2011; names added to the list by contacts of the deceased brought the total close to 100, about the same number as in 2010.

To their credit, Auburn detectives initiated an “unattended death” investigation immediately and we read in the newspaper later that his body had been sent to the medical examiner for autopsy.

A report was released to his family but it was not made public.  We never learned Steve’s official cause or manner of death although, early in the investigation, a police spokesperson had told a reporter for the local newspaper that nothing as of that time indicated that it was a homicide.

People at lunch that day were distraught but one man seemed much quieter than usual. He was not one of Steve’s closest friends but he helped out at the soup kitchen every day.  He would generally come up to my car as soon as I arrived and walk with me to the entrance door of the church, chatting continuously about ways to obtain help for some of the other people who congregated there each weekday.

He had never requested anything for himself but when I talked with him that day, he mentioned that he’d like to visit the area downtown where Steve had lived and died.

Steve’s body had been found in an area fronted by a big, ongoing, hotel construction project. That site and the areas beyond it were rigidly cordoned off by a chain link fence.

We walked all around the outer perimeter of the site for a couple of hours and over the bridge on both sides of the street, anticipating that we would spot bright yellow police tape at the scene of Steve’s death but the foliage in the area was so dense, we couldn’t figure out precisely where his body had been found.

We did notice an area by the far back corner of the construction site fence where there was a narrow, muddy opening and we wondered if that were the route by which Steve got into the area that was his sleeping spot at night and back out again in the morning.

We learned later that Steve’s funeral services would be private so, in a very sad way, this walk turned out to be our own “wake” for him. It had given us an opportunity to grieve together while immersed in Steve’s own home area.

Jim O’Connell, MD, founder of Boston Health Care for the Homeless, is the leading researcher in the United States on the death rates of homeless people. He commented to a reporter for The Dartmouth in 2010, “People who live on the streets of cities in America have the highest mortality rate of any subgroup, bar none.”

I already knew that the average age at time of death for a chronically homeless person is 46 while the life expectancy of a housed American is 77 but the isolation and desolation of Steve’s premature and tragic death at age 48 in this sunny, lively downtown environment personalized that abstract academic data in a manner that stunned me.

Tragically, Steve’s death was not the first death of a homeless person in the downtown area of this small city that I’d heard about in recent years; another man had been found dead in the back of a car in 2006.

I’d been involved in homelessness awareness activities for some time but on the day of this walk, I made up my mind to shed an even brighter light on this harsh, degrading and truly deadly social and cultural phenomenon that I’d been studying for nearly ten years.

I also resolved to take action myself and to do whatever I could to help bring an end to the ongoing national violation of our most basic human rights to housing, to clean water and to safe sanitation and I decided then and there to use my teaching, counseling and advocacy skills to help get those homeless people at highest risk of death off the streets.

Finally, I resolved to write a series of articles about chronic homelessness. For whatever our reasons, we seem to treat homeless animals with much greater care and concern in our country than we do homeless human beings – but people are  entitled to shelter and ethical treatment too.

This is the first installment in my series. I invite you to return to this site to read more as it’s posted.

© 2012 Mary M. McLaughlin, PhD. All rights reserved.

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Spare Change News: my letter re: alleged “serial killer.”

Boston’s Spare Change News also published my letter to DA re: alleged “serial killer” of homeless men.

http://sparechangenews.net/news/vulnerable-homeless-targets-highlight-pervasive-issues

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Re: Alleged Serial Killer of Homeless Men

Poverty Insights posted my letter to the Orange County, California District Attorney:

http://www.povertyinsights.org/2012/01/25/letter-to-the-orange-county-district-attorney-regarding-the-arrest-of-the-suspected-homeless-serial-killer/#more-3957

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Holiday Message 2011

Holiday Wishes 2011

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Poverty Insights Posted My Holiday Message for 2011

I wrote a new holiday message for this year that’s quite different from my earlier ones.  It reflects a  very different perspective, one that I gained over the past year conducting research among chronically homeless people.

Holiday Wishes of a Homeless Advocate

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My latest article for Spare Change News

Brenda Rosen is the Acting Executive Director of Common Ground in New York City.

I recently interviewed her for this article.

Expanding Supportive Housing in New York

***JUST ANNOUNCED: Brenda Rosen new Executive Director of Common Ground.***

She has been Common Ground’s Acting Executive Director since January, 2011.

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***Community Solutions, a new non-profit, launched today.***

Incubated at Common Ground, it will focus on national housing initiatives.

Roseanne Haggerty will head the new organization.

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My Memorial Day Tribute: Homeless Veterans

Veterans comprise the highest percentage of chronically homeless people in our country. In “… the land of the free and the home of the brave,” the brave should never be without a home.

My article was published on Memorial Day weekend.

Nation Must Address Needs of Most Vulnerable Citizens

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