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HOMELESSNESS IN SACRAMENTO: SEARCHING FOR SAFE GROUND Stephen William Watters B.A., California State University, Sacramento, 1978 THESIS Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in ANTHROPOLOGY at CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO Spring 2012 © 2012 Stephen William Watters ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii HOMELESSNESS IN SACRAMENTO: SEARCHING FOR SAFE GROUND A Thesis by Stephen William Watters Approved by: __________________________________, Committee Chair Joyce M. Bishop, Ph.D. __________________________________, Second Reader Raghuraman Trichur, Ph.D. ____________________________ Date iii Student: Stephen William Watters I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis. __________________________, Graduate Coordinator ___________________ Michael Delacorte, Ph.D. Date Department of Anthropology iv Abstract of HOMELESSNESS IN SACRAMENTO, SEARCHING FOR SAFE GROUND by Stephen William Watters The homeless in Sacramento suffer a loss of basic rights, human and civil, and this loss of rights exacerbates the factors that contribute to, and are experienced, as a result of homelessness. Moreover, the emotional, medical, legal and economic problems of the homeless leads to their stigmatization by the general public, as well as by the social service providers and governmental agencies empowered to support them. Once branded as deviant or pathological members of society, the homeless find themselves being treated as second-class citizens. In response to this change of status and in an attempt to gain agency with which to defend themselves, homeless citizens form imagined communities such as my target subject group. Two years of fieldwork with Safe Ground Sacramento have demonstrated that the members of Safe Ground do, in fact, suffer a loss of basic rights and are treated as though they are broken individuals. This treatment often leads to the development of a low sense of self-worth, resulting in self-blame on the part of these individuals. Indeed, there are cases of mental illness, substance abuse and disability, but I argue that there are also systemic causes for homelessness within our political economy. Moreover, my research has led me to inquire into why the homeless v are misunderstood and treated in the above manner, an inquiry which has led me to an investigation of American worldview. Americans, with a strong emphasis on individualism, appear to lack the compassion to consider solutions for those citizens most in need, the homeless. The societal changes required to change American worldview towards a more collective position on the individual-collective continuum can appear daunting as do changes in our political economy, the most robust in the world. These changes require that we relook our current dominant theory of justice based on a contractual social justice model which stresses the struggle for perfect societal institutions and, look instead at comparative models that ask what could be if we remove particular injustices from society. In so doing, we must restate the meanings of key concepts such as freedom, equality and opportunity in a way that will move us towards a more collectively-minded political economy, theory of social justice and definition of ourselves as individuals. _______________________, Committee Chair Joyce M. Bishop, Ph.D. _______________________ Date vi Familiarity breeds affection when it does not breed contempt. We are well aware of how a person can become deeply attached to old slippers that look rather mouldy to an outsider. There are various reasons for this attachment. A man’s belongings are an extension of his personality; to be deprived of them is to diminish, in his own estimation, his worth as a human being. Clothing is the most personal of one’s belongings. It is a rare adult whose sense of self does not suffer in nakedness, or who does not feel a threat to his identity when he has to wear someone else’s clothes. Beyond clothing, a person in the process of time invests bits of his emotional life in his home, and beyond the home in his neighborhood. To be forcibly evicted from one’s home and neighborhood is to be stripped of a sheathing, which in it familiarity protects the human being from the bewilderments of the outside world. - Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia (1974:99) PREFACE As I drove through hectic morning rush hour traffic and across the 12th Street Bridge coming into downtown Sacramento that June morning in 2009, I noticed several people walking across the bridge towards downtown carrying bundles and backpacks. It reminded me that a migration occurred every morning from the homeless camps along the American River to Loaves & Fishes and other homeless services all bundled in close proximity, where hot coffee, showers and friends awaited those who made the daily pilgrimage. My renewed awareness of the daily homeless migration caused me to reflect back to a film project I conducted many years ago as an undergraduate student in the 1970s. During 1977, while attending California State University at Sacramento, another student and I had produced a film, Bum Rap, which consisted of unstructured interviews vii with homeless people living along the American River in Sacramento. At that time, we found distinct subcultures of homeless people living in the dense brush and forests along the American River, under bridges and in open fields just east of the 1930’s Jibboom Street Hooverville area toward what is now the Interstate 80 Bridge. As we young students learned about the nation’s forgotten people, those without an accepted identity or voice, we shamefully realized that more and more men and women, veterans, and even entire families were living under conditions of extreme poverty in the capital of the nation’s largest state. For me, being especially fond of this location along the American River, this experience had led to a long-term interest in the lives of the homeless. For years I had watched newspaper articles and media coverage of the issues and struggles of the Sacramento homeless community and now I was again entering their space, this time as a researcher and volunteer offering my services. Turning left off 12th at North B Street, I saw groups of homeless individuals exiting the Salvation Army shelter and moving along the same streets I was following to my destination. At Ahern and North C Street I found a parking lot for volunteers. A Loaves and Fishes “green-hat”1 approached me and I asked where the dining room was. As I walked nervously towards the dining room I realized that except for brief encounters on the streets in Sacramento and other metropolitan cities I had visited over the years - New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Washington DC, San Francisco and many others - across the country I had not spoken in depth with homeless individuals. Now I was in the midst of hundreds, substantially more people than I had encountered years ago. viii I entered and asked for the volunteer coordinator, whom I soon found, and was assigned to the serving line. As the lunch hour approached I could see a long line of anxious people waiting for the door to open and the serving to begin. My job that first day was scooping spaghetti sauce on each guest’s pasta and offering each a couple pieces of French bread. That made it necessary to ask each person a few questions, so I was instantly talking with many coming through the line. The service line is at the edge of the kitchen, where it gets very warm from the stoves and is crowded with volunteers. Things move fast and there is little time to do much more than offer eye contact and a smile while saying a few words to each guest, but it was a start on my graduate fieldwork experience among the homeless. If I was nervous when I walked in, my nervousness was gone almost immediately as I interacted with many smiling faces of the homeless guests. I was remembering many of the people I had met so long ago; the faces this day seemed familiar. Later, walking back to my car, I again realized that my experience that first day brought back many strong memories of the undergraduate project. I had forgotten the friendly smiles to be found on so many vulnerable faces and that a few words could start a dialog that might be continued each time that I saw them. Moreover, it was no longer an all-male crowd. I estimated that first day that at least 20% of the guests in line at Loaves & Fishes were women. A few children came through accompanied by an adult and it appeared that most knew each other well since there was a lot of talking and laughing. There were some people I might have identified as homeless by the soiled, ix tattered clothes and unshaven faces, but there were others who looked as if they had just stepped away from work for lunch and had decided to stop here. I wondered about their stories and felt overwhelmed by all I had to learn about the new realities of homelessness. A few of the homeless guests seemed unsettled. Some did not want to make any eye contact or exchange any words, but the majority smiled, glad to be there for a hot lunch and some friendly banter. I watched as group after group came through the line, the entire dining area population turning over four or five times as new waves of guests arrived. Within 90 minutes we had served lunch to over 600 hungry people, many of whom I would come to know well in the next few months as my volunteer work as a server turned into an internship with a new grassroots social justice group, SafeGround.

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