THE DISPOSSESSED
George Grant
Westchester, III.: Crossway Books, 1986
283 pp., $8.95
Conservative and liberals argued last year over whether the health and Human Services (HHS) or the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) figures on the extent of homelessness were accurate: HUD said there are 250,000 to 350,00 homeless in the country; HHS said there are two to three million. George Grant maintains that both studies are correct because they measure different types of homeless (chronic or temporary). "The HHS study tells us that thousands upon thousands of Americans briefly hit rock bottom every year. But the HUD study tells us that only 250,000 to 350,000 never recover from that calamity."
Grant found out for himself what the calamity feels like.
The city-contracted dormitories occupied two floors of the Palace. The rooms appeared to me to be a jumble of furniture: dilapidated beds, broken down metal lockers, torn mattresses, and a few bare-spring chairs. The smell was overwhelming, worse even than the East 3rd Street reception room. My head began to reel.
I could barely see--four dim light bulbs provided the only illumination in my room, perhaps 40 by 80 feet. But I could see enough to know that I would not care to spend the night here . . . Many of the beds had no mattresses, the naked metal rack covered only with a scrap of carpet or a piece of corrugated cardboard . . . There were no sheets or blankets or pillows in sight. But perhaps worst of all, the whole room was literally crawling with lice.
Thus he describes one night and one flophouse for the homeless in New York City. He was fortunate; he was able to check into the YMCA after checking out the Palace.
Grant's personal experience makes a gripping beginning to his book; the personal anecdotes sprinkled throughout remind us that this is a human problem we are dealing with, not just the statistical consequence of policy decisions. The Dispossessed is primarily an academic and political discussion of the problem and its causes, yet it is keenly aware of the human element.
Grant knows that 1987 has been declared by the United Nations the Year of the Homeless. Western Europe has perhaps 2 million homeless; the Third World has over 100 million souls with no housing whatsoever; political oppression has rendered at least 225,000 Nicaraguans homeless, and another 900,000 Ethiopian refugees seek shelter. In such a world, where has the UN decided to focus its scorn and aim its propaganda? At the United States, of course. Why us? Because, according to Leland Burns, an urban planning professor at UCLA, "Private institutions and governments of the Third Wold countries have made remarkable progress in attacking the problem. In that respect, they are far ahead of the U.S."
But which Third World models would the UN like us to emulate, asks Grant? The Nicaraguan model, according to which the Sandinistas imposed such drastic rent reductions that they ended up confiscating most rental properties in Managua, thus creating a housing
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