homeless in Fitzroy
A recent survey conducted by the city of Melbourne reported in the Age found that over 100 homeless people were sleeping on the streets of the CBD area (including Fitzroy) on a winter night, and that a quarter of those were sleeping in Fitzroy. Only 3% slept in Carlton and Parkville.
This is no commentary on the comparative quality of the food in restaurant bins in Carlton and Fitzroy. It has far more to do with the history of Fitzroy and its background as an area that drew in many poor families in the nineteenth century, establishing it as an area with significant low income public housing tenants throughout the twentieth century.
Many social service providers have been located in Fitzroy since the nineteenth century because it is where the clients are. In recent years clients have continued to be drawn to the area to access the services even though they may not have a prior attachment to the area.
For a tertiary educated, professionally employed homeowner like myself, the prevalence of homelessness is something of a mystery. As with many social problems, its existence seems unnecessary given the wealth of our country. The messy reality of human nature cannot however be neatly managed and optimised with economic rationalist models.
HREOC states that some of the causes of homelessness are poverty, unemployment, debt and housing market pressures, such as rising rental and house prices and the lack of public housing.
The Council to Homeless Persons (Victoria) similarly lists these structural inequalities but also mentions social issues like family instability and breakdown, health problems, substance abuse and mental illness (it mentions one report that suggests that between 19% and 26% of a homeless crisis centre’s clients have psychiatric problems).
An ABC report adds gambling to the list. Wikipedia adds natural disaster (not really applicable to Fitzroy, where most disasters are fashion related), the mass deinstitutionalisation of the mentally ill in previous decades and people released from prison.
Where these supposed causes (and the organisations that define them) fail to tell the whole story is in the nature and ability of people. We may strive to build a society based on the principle of equality of opportunity with the goal of delivering equity to every person, but this will never happen because we are not born equal. Intelligence varies significantly between individuals. Combinations of genetic and social factors result in significant differences in emotional intelligence, literary, numeracy, social skills, behaviour, motivation and creativity by the time we become adults.
Our society mostly ignores and refuses to acknowledge these differences, and our adherence to this irrational view fundamentally undermines attempts to solve social problems. Governments will never fix or effectively minimise social problems like homelessness as long as they abide by politically correct values that insist that all people are equal, or at least that all people are born with equal abilities and potentials.
Structural inequalities are real and can be addressed. Low cost housing, employment opportunities and health and social support services are unevenly distributed. Depending on where you live, it can be more or less difficult to sustain a household and a stable life with the income that can be earned in that area. Delivering a more equitable distribution of these services could reduce homelessness, but solving structural inequalities alone is inadequate.
Regular readers will probably have noted that I get rather pedantic about discussions of cause and effect. In my opinion, many of the supposed causes of homelessness are actually consequences or effects, alongside homelessness, of the primary causes of social disability. The primary causes are low intelligence and mental illness.
I’ve previously argued that it is pointless trying to educate and retrain unemployed low intelligence men because they simply do not have the capacity to participate in today’s more complex world. The low skilled manual labour jobs that occupied low intelligence and low capacity workers in previous generations no longer exist. These people are unemployed because they are unemployable.
Debt and poverty are often caused by gambling and other irrational behaviour. The root of this behaviour is the inability to make rational financial decisions. This inability stems partially from a lack of education, but more significantly from a lack of innate ability (a lack of intelligence) and because of mental illness.
Many mental and physical health problems, such as substance abuse that leads to psychosis, are preventable problems caused by self neglect or an inevitable lack of resilience in coping with the demands of a world that is too complex for some people to comprehend.
State and federal governments have all failed to provide the community with adequate mental health services. Deinstitutionalisation did not work, and a new strategy for managing mental health is needed. If we accept the figures quoted above that approximately one quarter of homeless people are so because of mental illness, how many could be saved if all their mental health problems could be effectively managed, if not completely cured?
Of the remaining three quarters, how many are homeless due to low intelligence? In other words, how many people must be managed indefinitely without any expectation that they will ever be able to effectively manage themselves or cease relying on welfare?
It is naive and irrational on the part of public health experts to expect that members of the underclass, white trash with inadequate mental capacity, will ever be capable of functioning as rational agents in the information economy. Low intelligence is a permanent intellectual disability that fundamentally limits social inclusion, yet no one seems to want to acknowledge its existence.
Solutions to this problem may need to be as radical as the intervention in Aboriginal communities started by the Howard Liberal government in 2007. The costs to taxpayers in terms of welfare payments, services and losses due to crimes caused by the homeless or mentally ill are significant.
I believe that the cost of not addressing these issues will be even more significant as the underclass continues to grow. If we hard working taxpayers fail to act we face suffering a lower quality of life as we struggle to avoid more problems and violence on the streets and rising taxes to pay for welfare services and police.
We should not blame the homeless for their predicament; most are not lazy as some people suggest. Society has evolved faster they they have, and they cannot cope. We that can cope must forget the politically correct theory and address the politically incorrect reality in order to best manage the situation.
I have illustrated this article with images from an art project called Contested Space that seems concerned with the subject of homelessness. The small images are on the wall in Kindness Lane and the large one is on corner of St David and Napier St.
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Other posts you may find relevant and interesting
- managing the underclass, 26 July 2008
- Fitzroy history – unemployment in 1892, 23 October 2009
- if only Melbourne was more like San Francisco (or Sydney), 21 August 2009
- men, employment and education, 29 January 2007
- Fitzroy histroy – demolishing the slums in the 1950s and 1960s, 20 April 2009
December 28th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Everyone is only 3 steps away from being homeless.
If one was to lose their job (as many people now are due to the economy) then have difficulty in obtaining another that will cover the bills it will often lead to losing their home (when the loan they have is of a greater value then that of the house). When that’s happened you can kiss your family goodbye because you’re not much good to them anymore (especially when all you have left is stress, financial hardship and a whole heap of arguments as a result)… that’s all it takes. Then you hit the bottle to numb the pain and get stuck in a rutt…
It has nothing to do with “lack of intelligence” being “of the underclass, white trash with inadequate mental capacity”,or “Low intelligence” or a “permanent intellectual disability”.
Many homeless people have had; a job, a family and a home. &
Many homeless people will have; a job, a family and a home.
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January 1st, 2009 at 12:09 am
Mental illness seems to be one of the major causes of homelessness and you don’t refute that one. Maybe we can agree on something! I think the funding for mental health services is inadequate and more attention to this could eliminate a lot of other social problems.
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