When the Homeless Don't Want Help

"No thanks." No one has firm numbers, but it's a generally accepted truth that that's sometimes what outreach workers and other homeless advocates are told by people they're trying to help. What to do then? Reason with the person, who might be saner than you or who might be suffering from a debilitating mental illness? Call the police? Try again later? Just walk away?

San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius tackled the question in his column last weekend. (People might remember Nevius's name from the spring, when he was one of the main rabble rousers in support of an ordinance to ban sitting on city sidewalks that thankfully didn't pass the Board of Supervisors but will be on the ballot this fall.)

In the paper, Nevius described a man named Ricky Tomavich who is homeless, sleeps on the sidewalk, asks passersby for money for vodka, has AIDS and is covered in human waste. But Tomavich said he doesn't need any help.

When a concerned neighbor called homeless services to come meet with Tomavich, the homeless man cursed them out and gave them a lecture on the Constitution. So they left. A homeless woman in her 50s who saw what was happening gave her answer to the situation: "All we can do is pray for him."

Tomavich clearly has problems. But he also has a point. He told outreach workers that he didn't like staying in shelters, and for some of the same reasons that our blogger SlumJack articulated in his first post on this site, "Why I Choose Streets Over Shelter." People who've never been in shelters are often surprised to learn that many of them impose strict curfews that require people to be indoors from the early evening on but kick them out very early in the morning. Most shelters also don't offer "guests" a way to store or lock up their belongings, so bicycles and suitcases are at-risk. Many people also choose to stay outdoors to be with their pets, who aren't allowed in most shelters. And so on.

Eventually homeless services was called about Tomavich again, so workers came and got him (he was unable to stand on his own) and were able to involuntarily confine him — for 72 hours tops initially. After that, like other people who are involuntarily detained, if he was not a threat to himself or others, he would end up back on the streets, a controversial policy. In an update yesterday, Nevius reported that Tomavich will stay in the hospital at least through the end of the week and says he's ready to quit drinking.

Not so long ago blogger Steven Samra chronicled a homeless man he knows in Nashville named JJ, better off than Tomavich but also refusing most services. "Like so many others who work with folks experiencing homelessness, I thought I knew what was best for JJ," Samra wrote. But something clicked when JJ told him, "I know everyone wants me to get housing and my health may be so bad now that I'll have to actually find some soon. But dammit, I don't need four walls to make me feel I'm 'home.' I am home when I am surrounded by people I like in a place I feel safe at and I've been in plenty of places people call home and everything about it was bad." In the end, Samra concluded, "It's not that some people 'choose to be homeless.' Rather, it's that the right circumstances and/or conditions for being housed have not been presented to the person in question."

Is that the case with "Heavy," the last remaining homeless holdout in squeaky-clean present day Times Square? He's been living in the center of the universe for decades and has refused housing assistance even as dozens of his homeless neighbors accepted the outreach. How do you solve a problem like Heavy? Reason with him? Call the police? Try again later? Just walk away?

Photo credit: SLR Jester