Deep in the ocean an orca pod is on the hunt these aren't your average orcas These guys are organized Marketing team did you get those social media posts scheduled for the seal migration? Hi, I captain We even have an automated notification for all pod managers when they go live They use Monday calm to keep their teamwork sharp their communication clear and their goals in sight Monday calm for whatever you run even orcas go to Monday calm to dive deeper Hello, everybody and welcome to new books in sociology. I'm your host this week arturo by Aki and in each episode We look at a new sociology book and talk with its author and this week We have Teresa Gowan author of hobo's hustlers and backsliders homeless in San Francisco published by University of Minnesota Press Dr. Gowan's book comes out of her multi-year ethnography in San Francisco where she was initially looking at homeless recyclers and the way that they negotiate the Informal recycling economy of the city but over time the project expanded more broadly to look at how these individuals negotiate other institutions such as those related to Corrections shelters and treatment centers and how they're exposed to different languages and understandings of what Homelessness is all about and what are the root causes of homelessness? And so dr. Gowan's book is kind of an empirical reporting of how individuals themselves who use these services Take up the language provided by these institutions to make sense of who they are and the daily struggles that they face Anyway, I hope you stick around to listen to this very interesting interview and without further ado. Here we go Alright, so today we have Teresa Gowan author of hobo's hustlers and the backsliders homelessness in San Francisco and Teresa the first thing I wanted to say just thank you for being on the podcast Thank you very much. It's a wonderful opportunity now to have full disclosure I have to say that Teresa is part of the U of M University of Minnesota Sociology faculty where I'm also a graduate student, so it is not just pure Luck that I ran into your book, but I I have to say I did enjoy reading it I was reading some chapters last night to prepare for the interview and I loved how you wrote the book I really like the style of the writing that you did and it seems like you weave in kind of policy analysis with your ethnography and and the story is kind of going in and out of the writing So I really enjoyed just the way you organized the book. Yeah, just to start out You know, how did you come to study homelessness and in San Francisco mean? Well, yeah, I You know, there was a lot of different things I could have been studying I started the project when I was you know, a relatively sort of junior graduate student and I was living in the Mission District in San Francisco and just off of 24th Street, which is a sort of major pedestrian, you know, and as well as transit corridor and you know very vital kind of street and There was all of these guys pushing these these carts loaded up with with bottles and cans on Past my door and I would I would hear them coming along They were partly, you know, looking for stuff to recycle in the public bins, but they were also just people who had been doing that Elsewhere and just coming along there on their way to to sell the stuff So what basically, you know, it's this time where there was a lot of talk as there has been since, you know The early 80s in San Francisco about, you know, the large homelessness problem and what should be done about it and who are these people and I was seeing these guys who were Incredibly hard workers and you know, the one thing that really struck me was like, well, these these guys are major manual workers and that's actually not what I'm hearing about homelessness. I mean I'm hearing about mental illness and you know drug addiction and You know criminality to some extent and I'm hearing about homeless families, but I'm not really hearing about this this kind of major workforce that seems to be, you know, involved in the informal recycling industry, so that would just kind of treat me and to be to be honest, I I kind of I Think I projected on to those guys a little bit before I even knew them because the older white guys who were, you know these sort of grizzled manual workers, they really reminded me of my uncle's back in the UK and You know, I sort of thinking like what would be happening to them right now if it wasn't for, you know The welfare state because you know, my uncle Jack for example, have been out of work for a long time So, you know, I would I sort of had this this this this sort of ready-made empathy. I guess going going into the project Which which got me kind of excited to go out there and talk to them. What was the goal of the project that you kind of eventually developed Book, I mean, what were you trying to find out exactly? Well, it started off a bit, you know, differently from how it finished like most projects So, you know I was initially I was really interested in the recyclers the homeless recycled and their role within the the waste management industry So I had more of a kind of I guess you'd call it an informal economy interest Basically seeing them as being the the return of say the figure of the rag picker from you know before the You know, the great changes of the New Deal where you know There were people who who lived on the bottom of society off of other people's discards, you know that this basically this was part of the return of a more Informal economy more more characteristic of the global South in the richest country in the world And there's a lot of you know, there's a lot of examples you can point to as indicators of that So I thought that that would be an interesting angle to deliberately treat these guys as workers You know who were homeless rather than look at them as you know, the these Multi-problem individuals that I was reading about in the in the literature, you know on on homelessness Which at that time, you know was completely dominated by by this kind of? Extremely individualized pathologizing view of what homeless people were right Yeah, I feel like the whole chapter the hobo chapter We seem to argue that recyclers are kind of the new archetype of or the hobo archetype of these self-reliant Individualistic Personas that are surviving by doing this informal Working in this informal economy is there almost is entrepreneurs Part of the waste management. Yeah, no, absolutely over. I mean, you know, whether they saw themselves as entrepreneurs Or workers or even hobos, you know, because I basically, you know It was them who came up with the idea that they were the new hobos and not not me You know that really depended on their existing politics and where they were coming from and I sort of I Found people claiming to be you know, like the hobos or new hobos in three different parts of the city And I was never clear if this was an idea which had been started by the one guy who I call Morris Who is really this wonderful sort of intellectual of the recycling? Homeless recycling crowd and did it spread from him or if it was something that people came up with separately in different places But so really going back to this lineage of, you know What the hobos did in the beginning of the century and it's somehow speaking to what they're doing Almost as an identity. I guess not like where they're Mm-hmm trying to find a place in between You know what you keep going back to the kind of pathology myths of the homeless and As being poor as being lazy, you know, like they're neither lazy nor sick. They're Hobos exactly near the lazy nor sick. Yeah, I mean this this one I could I could just give you a quick quote if you like. I mean, yeah, I mean from from this guy Morris that I was talking about He said, you know people think that the hobos were these free spirits, you know hopping trains Traveling the country. It's all got the Disney treatment now And I ain't saying that there wasn't good times But you've got to remember the freedom had another side Most of those guys worked very hard just like we do a man that would not work They would call him a tramp a yeg. He was no hobo hobos They were working men and people forget that and you know, what he's saying is we are the true hobo element We do this hard dirty work. We have nothing, but the good side is that we are free We don't have to take too much bullshit Now, I mean, of course he did have to take bullshit a lot and you know would get very angry about it But the bullshit he's talking about is is rather different You know from that of the the hobos of 1904, you know, like a lot of a lot of what would get him and his colleagues Most upset was being treated like idiots and you know sort of forced to articulate their lives in terms of, you know, that how their individual problems and weaknesses had led them into homelessness over and over again in order to get services and They found it extremely demeaning So actually a lot of these guys lived very independently of the services in San Francisco So even though as you say San Francisco is is raw is a center for homeless services A lot of these guys actually had very, you know, very little contact with the social service infrastructure there Because they they had unpleasant experiences with it. Reading your book you get the sense that these are really Resilient individuals who have to work to survive and yet to get supports they almost have to subscribe To what it sounds to them is kind of a demeaning identity of either being sick or being Lazy, but something definitely is wrong with them And that's why I enjoyed the book and how you kind of framed the three different ways that Homelessness is understood throughout the different public policies that have existed So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about these different types of talks That you mentioned early on the book and you kind of then used to kind of frame how these individuals themselves Understand and take up that language and sometimes resist that language. Yeah, and I definitely I can I mean, you know the the books got this the schema which is quite sort of simple and the idea is that there is these there's these three constructions of homelessness and and indeed of poverty that we That we've come to kind of get used to duking it out in the public sphere in in America So so basically I argue that there's sin talk and sick talk, you know The very pathologizing these poor people, you know, like they're they all have multiple problems of substance abuse mental illness Lack of social capital, etc. This this kind of talk which was which was predominant, you know among among the The social worker kind of kind of lair in the city although by no means like the only way that they thought And then there was this quite strong, but you know, but less than the other two Discourse of system talk which really did you know turned the gays away from the homeless person themselves and said look why are we generating so much homelessness here? You know and so this this would look on the local level. It's you know, like obviously the extremely high cost of living and lack of affordable housing But also, you know at the job structure why there was like so few jobs, you know entry level jobs in Construction for example, which was doing doing well, you know through through the mid-90s at least in in California When it had fallen apart in other places But somehow like these kinds of guys were just not getting into those jobs So people be looking at institutional racism At lack of affordable housing and then you know at the broader picture of the changes in the American economy To explain what was going on with homelessness and you know, obviously to the the the lessening safety net I mean so those who are doing the system talk which is you know, like You know pre-eminently the San Francisco Coalition on homelessness who are really just a fantastic organization always run Just by a handful of people but just very very committed to getting their message out there and just continuing to push a systemic discourse You know with it's something which was extremely valuable You know, not only just within within the political debate, you know from my perspective But you know also for people on the street who would actually read you know the street sheet their publication and and you know Feel that they could they could say the problem is not me perhaps. It's not me who's fucked up You know, it's just which was you know something which I heard all the time It's like why is it always about me and all of my issues, you know There's other stuff going on which is affecting affecting my life chances here Why is nobody talking about that and so the coalition echoed these feelings and Legitimated them for people in a really powerful way and you know that I think that's also something which is very unique about San Francisco How strong system talk, you know has remained in in that city despite? All of the defeats of the last 20 years. It's it's really extraordinary What I really liked about the project is it seemed like it developed from just looking at recycling was how How people themselves take up these discourses because I mean most people have heard these things right that Homelessness is a result of not working hard enough or the medicalization of homelessness Right that the closing down of hospitals has led to this wave of mentally ill people and while that's probably true to some So a certain extent that that's a definite campaign policy that the people are aware of and also this issue of affordable housing But what I what I really liked about the book was then Empirically, what does this mean on the ground like what how do homeless individuals come to understand their own? predicament, you know in the city where? Where these things seem to be going like it seems to be kind of a ground zero of homelessness advocacy in a way And so I was wondering if we can kind of talk a little bit about what you actually discovered. I mean, how do people? Do they adapt to these discourses? Do they reject them? Do they do they accept them? Well, right so, you know as as we were talking about before I started off with the recyclers Right and so they were very interesting discursively and in fact that's what pushed me in this direction of of looking at Cintalk and Cictalk and system talk and seeing how you know how people were negotiating those discourses and the institutions, you know Which were you know very materially shaping their lives through you know using those discourses? It was the recyclers who took me there because you know, they would just keep telling me, you know, I'm not a bomb I'm not criminal. I'm not sick and You know that they would you know for example, they didn't need to go down my street So if you remember at the beginning I was saying that you know, I like all of these homeless recyclers were always going past My street was actually quite a busy street and you know, I only realized after a while that a lot of them weren't even collecting anything They already had completely full carts, you know with like ten extra garbage bags Tied around the edge, you know, like perhaps 200 pounds of bottles that they were lugging along the street They actually would have been much better to take a quieter street like 23rd Street or 25th Street But they they wanted to display their hard work to the population and stay look, you know We're not that thing you think we are, you know And in fact, you know, obviously they succeeded with me because I got interested in them You know and wanted to kind of look at that further, but you know, they were so you're saying they make they're making a statement Yeah, absolutely Here loud you I'm slowing down traffic. You have to acknowledge me as Exactly, they would they would go right into the into the traffic sometimes and like they would use, you know various sort of hand signals to hold up the traffic when they were taking heavy loads across intersections for example and You know, it was extraordinary to me Especially as I was doing, you know some comparative research in St. Louis at the time and the the the homeless recyclers there They were they were like skulking around and always worried that someone that they knew would see them, you know And so so this is what really alerted me to how performative, you know, the recycling was it wasn't just about the money It was about honor, you know So so basically the recycling scene did it did become a kind of hotbed of a homeless version of the kind of system talk of the coalition even though there wasn't that much interaction between the two sort of the two bodies because these guys did not live in the tenderloin where the Coalition is housed, you know They basically avoided it because they saw it as a sort of center of sintalk and you know like this drug economy and a lot of sort of bad behavior and people people who are much more invested in being you know in The criminal economy and so they they just didn't like it there at all They didn't like the streets there and then they didn't like the institutions because it's also like a major institutional center for for homeless folks, right? so they didn't like having to be you know pathetic and sick inside of the shelters and they didn't they didn't like being ripped off and You know abused out on on the sidewalk and offered drugs if they were trying to stay off of them, right? so they hated the tenderloin, you know the TL in general and They didn't have that much contact with the coalition, but they did they did like the street sheet and you know This which is which is a newspaper. Yeah, what is that one of those? It's one of those sort of homeless newspapers that you know, basically they give they give them out to to homeless folks to Salant they can sell them for a dollar each and you know, this is a kind of program. They haven't a lot of cities, but You know my sense is that the street sheet is really one is is really one of the most excellent of these publications and it really avoids You know either sentimentalizing or or pathologizing You know that the homeless folks themselves and you know names names In a way, which is very dignifying, you know, so like if somebody's got a first person account It's it's you know that their name is right in there whereas, you know This the whole kind of medicalizing approach is that these vulnerable people need to be sort of you know Their identities need to be protected because it's so shameful and they need to be you know They can't be trusted to make any decisions for themselves. You know, so I think even just by the very character of the way it presents It's homeless writers and homeless Interviewees in the stories the street sheet sends a message like there's nothing shameful about this person It's what's happening to them that is shameful, you know, which is it's it's almost like a subliminal message behind the message Which I think I think the guys picked on up on very very strongly So it dignifies as this dignified version of homelessness resonates with the recyclers Absolutely, absolutely and some of them were more radical than others Like I said, you know, so there was people who were into being hunter gatherers there were people who were more had the entrepreneurial model as you were saying earlier and There was a lot of folks who you know sort of kind of blue-collar work and we're really recreating the sort of camaraderie and You know sort of sense of honor of being a blue-collar worker So in fact the competition, I mean, you know My sense was that I went in expecting to find a more entrepreneurial thing going on, but I found very little competition and in fact a sort of almost an ethic of subduing the competition as much as possible and So I actually felt that the kind of work between the recyclers you mean Yeah, weren't competing for you know, if there's a good place to get cans or get cardboard boxes. They would Exactly together exactly they worked together. They would tell each other about good places to go I mean, I was I was telling you being told good places to get stuff For example, when I you know when I started out because I was doing it myself and and you know, I'm at one point I said to this one guy here just told a guy called Dennis like his best place where he got stuff I was like, why do you tell him about that? You know, you fill up a whole load over there, you know You know, what why did you why do you tell him and he's like, oh, well, you know Well, you know that he's a good guy. He wouldn't go in and clean up, you know ahead of me He wouldn't he wouldn't do that You know that you wouldn't take everything he wouldn't take everything because he would know that be a mean thing to do You know, so there was just kind of giving each other the benefit of the doubt which you know included across race lines Which was actually quite inspiring I thought so it was it was less entrepreneurial in some ways and more of a sort of a Team of workers even though they were each working for themselves They actually broke down the structure which was encouraged by the the system Which is obviously that you just take your own stuff in they broke it down to some extent Some people worked together and a lot of people stockpiled together You know, so they would they would like, you know, collect a whole bunch and then take it in, you know as a group So it was there any kind of I don't remember in the book if you mentioned this if there's this feeling that they're Making use out of things that we throw away This kind of critique over over consumerist society and the how we just go through resources and here they are The supposedly, you know people who are pathological, but they're actually taking our trash and creating value out of it Was there any kind of critiques like that? Yeah, absolutely. It was quite broad I mean, you know, not everybody went far as the hunter-gatherer types You know had a very strong critique and you know really considered that in such an affluent city They could get absolutely everything they needed from the from the garbage So they were sort of like free guns right so but that was just one one little group that I knew I mean, I think in in general though There's something about spending your life jumping in and out of dumpsters Which makes you kind of have those ideas to some extent so even people who really did not have much kind of alternative Exposure to you know alternative ideas of you know, how people should live Actually became, you know, really avid dumpster divers and even though they were mostly looking for bottles and cans They would they would always be sort of saying God It's amazing what people throw away and they would bring me presents constantly out of the garbage You know, it's just yeah There's a steady stream of like, you know blenders and sweaters and just stereos You know that did you keep that stuff? Yeah, sure. I mean, I'm I have no problem with dumpster diving I did plenty of it myself So yeah, I mean, I think it there's something about living on the bottom Which makes you makes you notice what people throw away, right and it's kind of marvel at it Especially, you know those who had had you know, sort of like lower middle class say lives, you know And had taken this stuff for granted and suddenly they were like this is perfectly good. Why would you throw it away? So in some ways they became rather unmaterialistic from being homeless like, oh, you know over over a longer period So they for example, they didn't really care that much about what they ate anymore They did they didn't sort of see themselves as suffering from, you know, like bad food or anything You know the vast majority of people they were just like oh, there's enough food around and I can pick it up somewhere And you know, they'd go to one of the soup kitchens or you know, like they'd they had people working in the takarias For example in the mission who would just give them give them yesterday's beans or something and you know, they were just kind of like that's food You know, we're lucky so people in Africa are starving. They would say stuff like that So there was this weird sort of downshifting of expectations on the material level which you know Really, I guess I was really blown away by that I was I I thought there was something kind of wonderful about it that they you know if as long as these guys had you know Friends had people to watch their back, you know, had people who respected them They were they were even able to survive, you know, like all the stigma and deprivation of being homeless and not actually be like completely miserable now How do they understand I mean do they understand recycling as a way to eventually get out of homelessness or would they do they even see themselves in a precarious situation that they have to get out of homelessness and I guess like how does the How does that kind of contrast with maybe some of the other respondents that you interviewed in terms of their appreciation of this system analysis of Why they're they're homeless Okay, so getting out of homelessness yep, it's It's amazing how people kind of stop doing that after a while, you know I mean basically snow in Anderson, you know, who did a one of the first great sort of Studies of the return of mass homelessness in the US Down on their luck, you know that they talked about straddlers people in this in between limbo where they've become homeless But they they haven't accepted it yet You know and they're sort of trying to get back in now a lot of straddlers do get back in you know A lot of people who are homeless are only homeless for a short time But then you know if you stay homeless for you know more than a few months In order to survive Psychically, you can't carry on seeing it as the desperate dreadful thing that you have been seeing it or you'll go crazy you know and so basically people adapt to it and The interesting thing is that you know plans about not being homeless anymore tend to recede You know for for pretty well like most of the people I got to know and you know It wasn't something they talked about that much With recycling in some ways What they would dream about is not so much not being homeless, but being homeless in a much better way So they would they would dream about getting a pickup truck and being a bigger Recycler, you know, but still but still doing it because they actually kind of liked the work and by then rather expert At it, so you're like, yeah, I'm gonna get a van like some of those, you know some of those Latin guys And then I'll make a lot of money So, you know that that was the dream of like several of the recycling the long-term recycling folks that I knew Tell me that that's the first question. I mean in terms of like, you know comparing their perspective with that of homeless folks, you know who were more influenced by the cintalk and Cictalk it's a it's a complicated question. I mean it I mean one the first thing I'd like to say is you know, you can't define people by what discourse they into right? I mean, that's it's not the way things work Obviously some people are much more much more in one direction than another But all of these ways of seeing homelessness were kind of floating around, you know On the street in San Francisco and people could soon you know would switch quite You know dramatically between them on on occasion And obviously like those who did have serious problems with physical and mental health were much You know the talk spoke to them much more spoke to their realities, you know, and so They were more likely to to take it up Well, that's what I was gonna say it seemed when you're describing the recyclers and they seem more higher functioning and More resourceful than somebody who would be prescribing to Subscribing to a sick talk narrative, right? I mean, it doesn't see it just seemed like they were it took a lot of Resources mental resources to kind of figure out where you need to go and where can you set up camp? And I would just imagine that Type of person if if saying a type of person exists is would be more Open to a kind of a system analysis, but it's all I'm wondering like who was into the sick talk who was into the sin talk Yeah, no, that's that's a great way of putting it I mean this is this is where my comparative work in St. Louis is actually pretty useful because you know I got to hang out on the street scene there as well and sort of see how these ideas went down. I mean what I would say is that You know if this if basically sick talk is absolutely, you know dominant You know in the institutions that people are dealing with And it's their only way to get any kind of resources Then you know everybody's going to get pulled into it to some extent You know what you have so for example, I mean there's a study of a of a smaller town shelter By Vincent lion Callow where you know he talks about the medicalization of poverty So so basically the sick talk really wins and so people who in San Francisco Would have been these say higher functioning recycler types perhaps You know are just like very depressed sort of shelter users who are sort of like, you know gradually learning to You know express their narrative in terms of their depression, right? You know which which there's something, you know, of course some people might become homeless because they're depressed But it's it's surely far more likely that people will become depressed because they're homeless, right? You know, it's like there's something not working with your with your brain if you don't become, you know, somewhat, you know Worried and anxious and down if you know with this massive downward mobility and loss of of your life, right? Yeah, it's gearing the cause or the effect of one exactly so so, you know You know you get you get a lot of weird sort of distortions of that causal direction going on But I mean big cities that the sin talk tends to be much more powerful And and why well, you know these are these these are the people who are coming out of the mass incarceration experience, right? So, you know Of course in California, they hold on to some to some folks for life, you know But basically they're still churning on through I'm talking about the three strikes in your out policy You know, which is quite horrendous in terms of like some of the very mild offenses people are doing life Sentences for but it you know, there's still most people who are who are going down for or have gone down for you know Say like mine or you know Street drug dealing for example, you know, they come out with with no resources They're brutalized by the you know the terrible conditions in the California prison system And you know, they've they've lost touch with with their families often Or have very attenuated relationships with them and a lot of them just go straight on to the street, you know, like Some people go into halfway houses if you've been in jail, which is what what you'll do if you've done a shorter Sentence, you know, you're quite likely to get Tipped out of jail at 10 at night, you know with with with no with nothing But your clothes and not even your clothes if you know, there's been some problem I mean often I would meet people who'd come out of jail and they'd be wearing hospital clothes and like those Weird little slipper things. They wear it operating theaters and they'd be like we're like where you come from your hospital? No, like no, I came from the jail and this is all they would give me, you know So so these people are you know coming out in their thousands You know into the California cities with you know, nowhere to go and they're just joining the homeless population It did you know, they have been socialized often from a really young age to see themselves as bad guys, you know They've been you know expelled from school. They've been in problems with you know, say with the youth authority and You know it for them if they become homeless They just take those those same ideas that I'm a bad guy and that's okay because I'm a cool guy, right? you know and they take those ideas out onto the streets and they you know basically they you know, they'll see themselves as being of the street, but not on the street they'll construct the street as a positive thing and so so in some ways these are the group of homeless folks who who have the most The strongest idea of their own agency their own ability to shape their world because they've they've accepted Yes, they live on the you know on the outlaw sign of the side of the line But you know these my streets, you know, I guess it's it's saying that you know the system didn't screw me I'm I'm screwing the system in a way. I'm I'm I'm in charge. I'm it's a position of strength really and they'll actually look at the people who are homeless and call them, you know poor homeless motherfuckers, you know, just because they are You know, they look more stereotypically homeless like they have a shopping cart or something, you know, and that's not them It's not you know, yeah So so if they don't have a shopping cart and they they're like hanging out sort of, you know Doing petty sievery even if they're living in the shelters and often sleeping, you know being kicked out of the shelters not getting into the shelters You know, there's there's there's never been enough shelter beds in San Francisco But these folks will rarely see themselves as homeless, you know, and if they if they do construct themselves as homeless It will be as part of a sort of working the system Sort of discourse within, you know, some agency where they're trying to get some kind of resources But they won't take it it's a heart, you know, they'll see themselves as being these sort of cunning players I mean, I'd have people who would be like, yeah I managed to, you know, scam some clothing from this lady in this agency and then we're like, oh, but that's what she's there for Forgive clothing to people like you, did you really scam her? Or you know, but but this sort of I came to admire it, you know Initially, I was scared of these folks and sort of avoided them I then I realized if I'm gonna do this thing where I really look at the different ways of living homelessness I need to get to know them So, you know, I went and did all this field work with them And I came to admire this fierce life spirit, which says I'm not gonna I'm gonna take this position I'm in, which is absolutely at the bottom of the society Many of these guys are African Americans, it just been like demonized and, you know, despised all their lives And I'm gonna say that I'm in charge of my world and that I'm actually like, I'm somebody to be reckoned with in my world Which is the street And so I absolutely understand why people orient themselves in that direction And I think, you know, the mass incarceration is just creating this vast, criminalized You know, group of folks who are who really, you know, can cause a lot of instability in the society And partly, you know, this is why, you know, the homeless shelters and all of the other sort of helping industries They have a huge job on their hands to try to get people to see their lives in terms of sick talk When, you know, this is a vitality of this kind of sintalk model You know, some of the most incredibly, you know, like damaged people that I've known Absolutely refuse to have anything to do with the sick talk model You know, people who are HIV positive, they have tuberculosis They, you know, they have abscesses in their arms They're, you know, they're just suffering horribly And they just won't have anything to do with it But, I mean, how do they feel recyclers though? Because I, because I guess system talk does frame homelessness as victims themselves And sick talk is also, I guess, yeah, you're a victim of your own mental illness Yeah, so did people who embrace this sintalk, do they see these other homeless archetypes as more weaker individuals or people? Yeah, definitely Yeah, yeah, I mean, they, actually one of my favorite bits in the book is kind of like a hilarious passage Where, you know, I sort of have two guys talking about each other Who, you know, who really distrust each other Precisely across these kinds of lines and so, you know, one of them is, is a, you know, a drug dealer, extremely minor drug dealer in the 10 line And he's looking at, you know, another African-American guy who's a recycler pushing through with this huge load And, you know, basically, you know, he thinks that that guy is just like hilariously delusional Because he's like pretending that he's like a city worker You know, he's like, you know, what, where's he getting off on, you know, this is hilarious, you know, what an idiot He's doing all of this hard work, so basically, you know, he sort of, he sees this kind of pathetic attempt to look, look part of the mainstream of society when they can't possibly do it And that I should just recognize, he's like another despised, you know, black pracadic, basically And the other guy is, you know, you know, don't go anywhere near so-and-so He's, you know, he's not to be trusted, he's just a bad guy So, you know, an absolute gulf there, you know, in terms of, you know, their whole orientation to what homelessness is, who they are, you know, what they're doing there What, you know, what the role of the society is in it Yeah, I mean, it's funny, as you're saying that I'm having a flashback to my social work days where I used to be a case manager, and sometimes trying to help these homeless teens get jobs And remember one of my clients said, oh, I'm not going to be a sucker and work at McDonald's, you know, like, I can, I can make a lot more money Stealing from these suckers who work at McDonald's But I remember wanting him to make this switch of like, you know, stop embracing this whole Identity as this bad guy, um, but it really did give this person who had otherwise nothing a sense of power, you know, um, as pathetic as I wanted him to see that Exactly, exactly, the story you just gave about him, you know, scamming this woman that was getting him close, um, I mean, that's exactly what I would see all the time Like, these little scams that, from my perspective, seem really pathetic, you know, like, you're scamming the people who are trying to help you But it, it was consistent with the identity that they were cultivating for themselves Yeah, and you know, our popular culture totally encourages that, right? You know, I mean, there's been this, this sort of commodification of deviance Really, really since the counterculture in American society, which, you know, it's like these, these outlaw images, you know, like obviously, you know, gangster stuff to some extent Um, it basically glamorizes, you know, life on the other side of the line, so even like the most, you know, sad, kind of homeless, crack addict who does it like a little bit of, of crime can kind of see themselves as being a gangster figure I mean, there's nothing, of course, these, these archetypes are very old, you know, um, Jesse James or Staggaly or whatever, you know, it goes way back in American culture But I think it's been kind of turbocharged by the appetite of suburban kids for like these images Yeah, there's a way in which it really is emasculating for them to say, you know, let's talk about your, your problems Let's talk about how you have bipolar or you're depressed, um, and they have to make this switch, as I was saying, you know, they have to kind of be willing to be okay to talk about their emotions But it is a, it's a tricky transformation, I would say, um, but you know, in reading your book, if that's the only way you can get into a shelter, um, you know, if you have to take up this language Um, then maybe that's what you'll do, and maybe you'll do it for a little bit, and then you'll leave, and then you'll say that you were scamming, I mean, did you see some of that where people were kind of embracing sick talk for a little while? And then you'll leave and embrace kind of a sick talk? Absolutely, absolutely, you know, this is the most common phenomenon, and anyone who's like lived on the streets in San Francisco will tell you this, that the people who are, you know, often it's the people who are the most sort of like, um, avid system workers inside of the shelters Like those who will kind of talk the talk the most loudly and sort of, you know, fervently are the people who, you know, will sell you crack in the bathrooms, you know, this is the stereotype, and there's a lot of truth to it And it's probably because, you know, folks who are doing this kind of flip backwards and forwards, you know, they're not liars, they're tricksters, you know, they have a trickster identity, which is like, it's all a game for them It's not, you know, they don't see themselves as being liars at all, they're like, hey, you know, I can do this emotion work to get this thing, look at me, do it, I'm good at it, right? So yeah, I mean, whereas people who are actually more attracted to sick talk, you know, which is included quite a lot of the white guys that I worked with, I would say, you know, did feel that they had long-term issues with mental health, you know, and substance abuse But, you know, they found the whole process so demeaning, they couldn't reduce the complexity of their suffering as homeless people to those things, they knew it was much more complicated than that And so when you, you know, to go in, and I should make a differentiation here, you know, we're talking, of course, about, you know, single men, single men's experience here, so it's very, very different from other folks experiencing shelters because they have a different character But basically, there's a huge difference between the emergency shelter situation where it's just kind of like mats on the floor, not many questions asked, and the more guaranteed housing offered by these sort of transitional programs And it's really in the transitional programs where in order to sort of guarantee a bed for months or longer, you know, they would have to basically construct a biography which, you know, which explained their homelessness in terms of, you know, one or more major, you know, personal flaws And so, for a lot of the guys, it was substance abuse that they had to, you know, they had to put down, not necessarily because they were out of control users, but because it had to be one of these things, you know, so basically, in order to be working on their issues, they needed to have the right kinds of issues And so it was almost a default thing that anybody who didn't have physical, mental health problems which, you know, loomed larger would sort of fall into the substance abuse bracket and they would have to sort of sit around, you know, talking about their substance abuse issues and, you know, attend meetings And, you know, basically, if they wanted housing out of these transitional housing programs, the best road to getting it was to actually move into full-time rehab, right? So, you know, the guys that I worked with, the white guys who were most attracted to sick talk, they were interested in reassessing their lives in these ways to some extent, but they found it, you know, to reductionist, to authoritarian And they weren't able, they just weren't able to really pick up on it that well, they just found themselves getting so irritated by the rule systems by the fact that they were being kind of, there was all of these folks they saw as sort of lying system workers who were, you know, just bullshitting around them and Yeah, trying to sell them crack, you know, the whole scene was just too depressing to them, so that the only time they would really talk about this stuff, they wouldn't talk about it with each other, they would, you know, they'd really just like talk to me about it or talk to, like, a medical doctor about it So, ironically, it was medical doctors and nurses were like the only people that they were really talking about their issues with, even if those issues were mental health or substance issues Because they felt that that relationship was less to meaning, which I find very interesting, there's something about the one-size-fits-all experience of, you know, sort of mandatory type 12-step, you know, processes in these, you know, sort of degraded situations like, you know, public shelters, which is just extremely off-putting to people who are serious about their issues, I think I mean, it's almost like there's a pop psychology culture that you're describing within these shelters that kind of blend a little bit of syntax, sick talk together, it might be very different than what we think of kind of middle-class notions of one-on-one therapy where you have this kind of unconditional positive regard by your therapist, I mean, because that's what I conceive of as getting mental health services, right? But what you're describing sounds like group settings, where you're not forced, but you're kind of encouraged to, like you said, describe your biography in a way where mental health or substance abuse plays kind of the dominant role and why you're poor and why you're homeless and what's really preventing you, which is a different type of mental health experience and I think what most people would think of. You know, really the kind of sort of authoritarian pop psychology that you get, you know, in prisons and homeless shelters, you know, around issues of anger, substance abuse, you know, domestic violence to some extent, it's a completely different kind of model of the therapeutic and it's cheap. I mean, that's the first thing that, you know, maybe I'm just being some kind of Marxist, but, you know, ultimately, you know, I think that's the most notable thing about it. You know, this is this is like one relatively unskilled person who, you know, probably has an associate degree, you know, in addiction studies or something at the most, you know, running a group with like, you know, 15 to 30 people. You know, that's, that's, that's not like a highly trained, you know, mental health professional dealing with the intricacies of one person's problems. It's, you can't, you can't, you know, really look at the specificities when you're doing that. Basically, people have to start, you know, just in toning a homogenous biography where, you know, in the case of homeless folks that the street is, it's the zone of denial. That's what that's what homelessness is. It's, there's nothing about, it's nothing to do with homelessness, like being deprived of home is to do with being too oriented towards drug use. And, you know, with the street as the place where the drug use, you know, is where you buy it, where you use it, you know, and that basically, you know, you have to turn your back on the street in this sort of symbolic way, which is turning your back on substance abuse. And this, this picture is so ridiculously simplistic for people who've been struggling with long term, you know, houselessness and homelessness, you know, housing marginality, that it just infuriates them, you know. Right, right, well, because they have more immediate needs, you know, exactly, they have more immediate needs and they know that there's different out there's out there that in fact, you know, the out there of the street is divided, you know, into all of these little zones, you know, some of them are spaces of denial and out of control drug use. There's no doubt about it. And, you know, others are not. And, you know, it's, it's, there's a whole world out there. And to construct everything is just being like, you know, basically the entire sort of non domesticated zone, a place where a lot of people just feel dumped, you know, to construct it as a sort of glorified shooting gallery. It just doesn't make any sense to people who are homeless. Well, I mean, that's the thing I'm kind of curious about because I wouldn't medicalization kind of absolve some guilt. There is some, there's empathy offered. It would be ridiculous to say that there wasn't. But it's not a reprieve, you know, it's still basically a moralistic model, one that you can, you know, you can turn your life around. And there's, yeah, there's definitely a whole kind of culture of empathy within AA and NA, which can be really powerful for some people. But it's a total mistake to see this as a shift in register from moral to medical. I mean, as I said, it has very little to do with doctors. And indeed what doctors research or think about addiction, you know, which is shifted towards, you know, these neurochemical interpretations. Instead, it's very much kind of still with the AA model and the kind of institutionalized AA model of, you know, started by synon on the therapeutic community, which basically teaches you to be a new person by instilling a new morality through cognitive reorientation and new behaviors through behavior modification. And so basically, you know, if you take the road off the street, which is the only one really offered to you if you're an able-bodied single man and go for a lengthy rehab process, this is what you're expected to do is to basically have your identity claims, your whole personality just got stripped down to nothing and rebuilt as somebody who's got the will, the self-discipline, and the right kind of moral orientation to turn their back on the street as the street is the place of bad behavior and bad people and become this, you know, new, productive, domesticated person. It's understood by the people within it as, you know, basically a life transformation, which kind of, it changes your moral orientation and teaches you how to do normal, you know. So basically, I think they would say, they would say, "Hey, no, it's not superficial at all. Actually, this is the deepest kind of transformation possible that we're offering to people." You know, but it's an intervention, which is, you know, the vast majority of the intervention is in the person themselves to try to make them into a better and more functional person. And so, you know, the intervention is not on the conditions they're living in, right? And wow, that's a lot to ask of people, especially if they don't even map what's happened to them in that way at all, you know. It's really a very difficult journey. And I mean, of my, you know, 35 or so folks that I really managed to follow quite long term, is that like only one person sort of made it through that route. The guys themselves had a pretty good picture of this, at least some of the, some of the folks, the recycling folks did. So, for example, this one conversation that I actually recorded, Pipe, was talking to his friend Manny, and he sort of said, "If those politicians in City Hall really want to help us, why don't they just give us housing or at least let folks camp in peace without being kicked around by idiot cops? I'll tell you why, because all their friends running the shelters and all those other programs lose their jobs." "I mean, that's the truth," said Manny. So, but Manny actually took this line of thought further, kind of portraying the disease model of homelessness as a kind of social control, which would prevent any kind of collective action. And he said, "It's not just about the money, you know, those shelters will break you down. They want us all shelterized, you know, like depressed and sniffling around, snitching on each other." That's the idea. They don't want another tense city on Civic Center, for sure. And they reckon these new style shelters, that's the best way to do it. Then they don't even need the cops. Yeah, so I mean, this is a pretty radical argument. And, you know, quite honestly, when I first heard this kind of talk, I thought it was, you know, like, well, perhaps it's kind of conspiracy theory kind of reaction to it, which I later came to, you know, to reject. And I realized that, you know, they were right, that there was this close connection. As an example, I gave you about the clearance under the bridge, right? Right, where it gets kind of co-opted as a way of social control. I mean, he even says social control. And, you know, if the staff at the shelter are themselves ex-homeless people, it's really a type of self-control, where there's a system that's being set up where you, the homeless, control themselves and are out of sight and into shelters. Yeah, we're housed, basically. You know, you know, one of the arguments you probably remember from the book is that I make is when in the latter part of the book, I'm sort of talking more about the institutional level and like the politics of homelessness in San Francisco. I'm sort of arguing that the policing campaigns and the way that homelessness is constructed in the shelter really sort of start to work together in a way so that those kind of different ways of seeing homelessness aren't so separate. And so one of the examples that I picked up on early on, because it really struck me, was that a homeless clearance, which was happening, you know, from some folks living under a bridge, got basically discussed as sort of helping to save them from themselves in the press by both the police and by the guy who was running the local shelter, the idea that because they, you know, letting people live in an encampment is basically enabling them. So basically, what this does is it justifies any act of police clearance or like brutality, smashing up the more autonomous ways that people try to make these makeshift shanty towns, just like the poor people of the global south, right? I mean, this is what I would do if I were homeless. I would not be in a shelter from what I've seen. I mean, I just, unless it was a really nice one, you know, especially if I was a guy, which I'm not, you know, I would be out there trying to make my little my little shanty or whatever. But this kind of convergence of Cintour, Cintour, what it does is it justifies cleansing this incredibly valuable space in the case of San Francisco, this global city of all of this, you know, human trash under the guise of being kind to the human trash, you know, and saving them from themselves, right? You know, so we're not, we shouldn't be enabling these poor people need us. So Gavin Newsom, who's like, who is being like the absolute leader of this approach, you know, in San Francisco, the mayor there. You know, he came in to office with this very different discourse from the previous I'm cracking down on homelessness guy who was an ex-police chief, Frank Jordan in the early 90s. So Gavin Newsom comes in, you know, and it's all like, we have to help these people. And of course, everybody would agree with that, right? We have to help these people. But a lot of his having to help these people has been about, you know, making it just too hot, hot to handle to be out on the streets. The idea is, you know, we're going to have the programs in place and, you know, you're going to be part of those programs. And if you don't want to be part of those programs, you don't want to work on your issues. And therefore, we're going to make it impossible if you live outside, you know, you know, and then I only realized this, when I was sort of finishing the book, what I think a lot of what, you know, what you see in the street ethnography, which is like the whole sort of middle, large middle section of the book is, is like how important stable encampments are to people. That in fact, you know, all the people who have like a bearable life as homeless people are people who are not being disrupted every day or every three days. You know, by having this, you know, all of this stuff thrown in a garbage truck or, you know, like basically not being around the same people, right? It's people who actually manage to make these tiny little safe spaces for themselves, you know, who psychically survive far more than the people in the shelters, you know. And the homeless folks in San Francisco, whether they're inside the shelters or not, they have a strong critique of what it does to people. It's a bit like, you know, I feel reluctant to say this, perhaps, but you know, the idea of what happened to people in concentration camps, they become these sort of half people, but they talk about people being shelterized and like just these sort of shuffling passive people, you know, a bit like say, you know, Jack Nicholson in "One Flew Over the Cookers Nest" after he's had his lobotomy or something. I mean, this is how they construct the shelterized person who spent too long just like in the lines, just passively taking it and is checking out more and more, you know, psychically. So there's really not a person left. But I think in closing, I just want to say I enjoyed the book, I think just because you're honest about what you observed in the streets, and I think you also raise up, you know, these three conventional ways. You said simplistic, but I think it's their ways of the scheme helps you understand the ways that homelessness has been constructed, but then it helps you kind of challenge these ideas. So even as this kind of housing first advocate that I'm finding myself becoming, you have to still kind of, the book reminds you to even question that, because it seems like, especially when you're working with vulnerable populations that even the nicest discourses can be co-opted, you know, so our discussion for a while about the kind of pop medicalization, you know, yeah, mental health services for people who need it sounds like a great thing, but it could so easily be used as justification for, you know, tearing down encampments in the middle of downtown or whatever. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, thanks, and yeah, I hope people go out and buy the book and highly recommend it. Thanks so much, Arturo. You've been listening to an interview with Teresa Gallon, author of Hobo's Hustlers and Backsliders, Homeless in San Francisco, published by the University of Minnesota Press. I've been your host, Arturo Biaki, for the New Books and Sociology podcast, part of the New Books Network. Hopefully you enjoy the episode and the interview, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Why do people become homeless? Is it because some people have made bad decisions in their lives or can’t hold onto a stable job? Or is homelessness the result of a depilating mental illness or chemical addiction? From a different perspective, perhaps homelessness is less an “individual issue” but more a “systemic one.” As sociologists are apt to point out, maybe homelessness should be linked to broader issues like the lack affordable housing, or the short supply of well paying jobs, and even institutional racism.
In her new book Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Teresa Gowan explores how these different ways of thinking, and talking, about homelessness not only shape the public policy responses to it, but also affect how homeless individuals themselves come to see their identities, daily struggles, and challenges. Gowan initially set out to produce an ethnographical study of homeless recyclers in San Francisco. Over time, however, the project expanded to look at how these individuals navigate different narratives of homelessness, depending on their relationship to the informal recycling economy, the city’s shelters and treatment centers, and their time spent in correctional facilities. As you’ll hear in this interview, the different ways that we traditionally think about homelessness–what Gowan identifies as sin talk, sick talk, and system talk–converge in interesting ways when placed in the context of actual life on the streets.
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