No roof over my head: Silja J.A. Talvi explains how and why people of color now represent the majority of those living homeless in the United States. (Race and Recession).

When Mikala Berbery, an African American woman and single mother, went from earning $21,000 a year to losing her job, her life suddenly plunged into a dangerous abyss of homelessness.

Altogether, Berbery spent two and a half years of her life in the Boston area without a home to call her own, struggling to find shelter for herself and her young son. The seemingly insurmountable challenges she faced trying to climb out of the "hole" of homelessness, explains Berbery, often left her feeling hopeless and despondent over her future.

Yet Berbery was determined not to end up sleeping on the streets and to keep her son in school. She applied for subsidized transitional housing, but was promptly denied because she had found a lob working 20 hours a week, earning just $8 an hour, income considered high enough to warrant a rejection of her application. As a last resort, Berbery moved into a run-down, $65-perweek rooming house with her son. The battles continued every step of the way.

When Berbery took the next step and applied for federally subsidized Section 8 housing after losing her part-time job, she was told she wasn't eligible because she was considered "housed." But Berbery wouldn't rake the situation lying down, and fought for her right to be granted Section 8 housing. On appeal, she won.

"Five years later, I'm still digging out of the trench [of homelessness]," says Berbery, who now works as the coordinator of Boston-based organization Roofless Women, devoted to the issues of low-income and homeless women. "I worry about getting old and what's going to happen to me ... I don't have' bling-bling' champagne dreams; I'm just worried about having a place where I can go to the bathroom and brush my teeth."

Berbery's concerns about long-term housing prospects are shared by the estimated 31 million Americans who lived in an "official" state of poverty in 2000. According to the U.S. Census, a total of 49 million Americans, or roughly one in five people, lived in a household in 2000 that had difficulty meeting basic needs. Most disturbingly, at least three million American men, women and children fell so deeply into poverty--or other difficult life circumstances--that they ended up homeless at some point in the past year.

America's homeless population is anything but monolithic. Surveys of major urban centers reveal that roughly 20 percent of the homeless hold down regular jobs, and that 40 percent are families with children.

The demographics of homelessness have also taken on a significant dimension that is often omitted from the realm of public policy and media coverage: Put simply, people of color represent the majority of the homeless in the nation.

In a December 2001 report released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, data from 27 cities rallied the nation's homeless population at 50 percent African American, 12 percent Latino, 2 percent Native American and 1 percent Asian American.

"I think of homelessness as a game of musical chairs, where people are competing for scarce resources like affordable housing," says Timothy Harris, director of Seattle's Real Change Homeless Empowerment Project. "People who lose in that game are those who have the odds stacked against them ... and race is one of those variables."

No Job, No House, Facing Jail

Seven years ago before becoming homeless, Berbery recalls, she spent three weeks looking at 30 apartments. With her modest salary, Berbery found only one apartment complex she could afford, and where the managers were willing to let her and her son move in. The color of her skin, says Berbery, compounded the problem of trying to find housing in a largely white suburb of Boston. "You just know," she explains. "You know when that's the thing that's keeping you from getting an apartment.

But, as Berbery readily admits, housing discrimination is a hard thing to prove. In lending practices, for instance, the most recent Fannie Mae National Housing Survey showed that 39 percent of African Americans believe that they suffer from discrimination in obtaining mortgages "all or most of the time," but only a small fraction of these cases ever result in formal complaints.

In addition, low-income people are confronted with soaring housing costs and tight rental markets nationwide. A recent national survey from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) revealed that nowhere in the U.S. can a minimum wage worker afford fair market rental costs for a modest two-bedroom housing unit. In order to afford the median fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental unit, a worker would have to earn $13.87 per hour, or 269 percent of the federal minimum wage. (In 2000, roughly 2.7 million Americans earned minimum wage which, on a federal level, has remained at $5.15 since 1997.)

Simultaneously, the number of housing units affordable to low-income households has dropped, year by year. According to a 2001 HUD report, 1.14 million affordable housing units were lost between 1997 and 1999.

"The reality is that there's a persistent and extensive gap between earnings at the low end of the wage scale and basic housing costs," says Sheila Crowley, executive director of NLIHC. "And rental rates aren't going to go down in the near future because there's still a severe shortage of housing [along with] high demand for housing."

As of January 2002, the U.S. unemployment rate remained high at 5.6 percent, not including the ranks of the homeless or the incarcerated. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment continued to be most pronounced among African Americans (9.8 percent) and Latinos (8.1 percent).

Post-9/11, large-scale layoffs have been concentrated in retail, hotel, air transport and building services industries, where many low-income workers of color have traditionally found employment.

Indio, editor of the homeless newspaper Street News (and a Black Cherokee Seminole who goes by only one name), says that the fallout of these layoffs is already visible in terms of the number of homeless people trying to access shelter and transitional housing services in New York City. There are now roughly 30,000 homeless adults and children in local shelters--an all-time high for New York City. And to compound matters, both the Giuliani and Bloomberg city administrations have cracked down on so-called "quality of life" hazards, seizing copies of Street News and arresting people for trying to make a living selling their wares or busking in subway stations.

In January 2002, a report released by the National Homeless Civil Rights Organizing Project ranked New York, Atlanta and San Francisco as the worst cities as far as harassment and arrests of homeless persons are concerned. Across the nation, 80 percent of the rural and urban jurisdictions surveyed were, in effect, criminalizing homelessness by banning public sleeping or camping. And fully 100 percent lacked enough shelter beds to meet demand.

These findings come amidst the widespread agreement that homelessness in the U.S. is becoming more widespread. The Conference of Mayors reported in December that all cities expected both food assistance and shelter requests to increase in 2002 because of the post-9/l1 economy, the expiration of welfare and unemployment benefits, lack of affordable housing and the preponderance of low-paying jobs.

The Struggle Within

Most of the social service agencies that low-income people turn to are designed almost as a measure of last resort--places of intervention, refuge and even life-saving assistance.

But in general terms, says Larry Evans, a former gang-intervention specialist and case manager for homeless youth, "They've been designed to keep the power away from the community. [Most social service agencies] don't have enough interest in disrupting the class structure in America to put together programs that help people gain real education, training and self-understanding."

With a particular emphasis on the community that he knows personally as an African American man, Evans says, unequivocally, that a huge part of the problem is that denial about homelessness, drug use, and family dysfunction runs strong within communities of color. As "unpopular" an opinion as it is, says Evans, "one of the things that's really hurt black youth and black people in general regarding homelessness is that we haven't been addressing it ourselves. Just like other problems, we often run to others and demand that they do something about it."

African Americans who become homeless often feel invisible within their own communities. "For years, we've turned a blind eye to it," says Evans. "We act like we don't see it."

Intensifying the problem in the lives of homeless persons of color is the fact that this sense of invisibility and self-loathing can manifest in even more brutal ways. Back in New York City, for instance, Street News editor Indio recalls the hardship he faced as a light-skinned person of color trying to find a safe place to sleep in city shelters populated mainly by African Americans. "If you had light or 'high yella' skin, they would beat you up. You'd be afraid to go to sleep." Security personnel, adds Indio, often have little or no interest in controlling hostility or outright violence between the men staying in city shelters.

The problem is perhaps less overtly antagonistic between homeless women of color. But tensions may still take many forms, explains Berbery of Boston's Roofless Women, in the form of clashes between newly homeless and long-term homeless women. "There are newly homeless women out there who are looking down on other women. They separate themselves from other women saying things like, 'I never thought this would happen to me... I never thought I would live like this.'

"But there are a lot of smart people out here at the bottom, and we're watching how we're being played off each of other," Berbery adds thoughtfully. "When we look at it closely, we're kicking each other and someone else is getting over."

From Jail to the Streets

At a crowded, rundown, downtown Seattle intersection, Street Outreach Services outreach worker Darrell Green waves his hand in the direction of a group of hollow-eyed men and women whom he knows to be among his drug-addicted and homeless clients. "This is misery and pain, what you see here," Green says firmly. "They never learned any other way to deal with that pain."

A difficult divorce brought Green to these same streets just two years ago, where he ended up drug-addicted, strung out, slapped with a felony charge, and doing a stint in a local jail. Green's incarceration did nothing to help improve his prospects in the real world, he insists. Released from jail without access to drug treatment or counseling, Green readily admits that he went right back "to the life," dealing and using drugs as a way of coping with severe depression.

Nationwide, it's estimated that 22 percent of homeless men and women grapple with mental illness. Alcohol or chemical addiction is even more common, afflicting an estimated 34 percent of the homeless population. To compound the problem, waiting lists for publicly subsidized drug treatment can be as long as a year-and-a-half in major urban cities like Seattle, says Kris Nyrop, director of Street Outreach Services.

Because of widespread racial profiling and the uneven application of prison sentences, African Americans and Latinos now make up 62 percent of the incarcerated population, despite comprising only 25 percent of the overall population. Altogether, African American men are sent to state prisons on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men, and constitute between 80 percent and 90 percent of all people sent to prison on drug charges.

Even in recovery, the struggles continue. Among many immediate hurdles facing homeless men and women trying to get back on their feet after incarceration is the fact that most public housing is not available to those with felony drug convictions, and employers are less likely to hire those with jail or prison records, even for nonviolent offenses.

"When a white junkie stops being a junkie, they can go back to being white," adds Nyrop. "When a black junkie stops being a junkie, he goes back to being black. In a country where race is still critically important, that's a big distinction."

Does Culture Matter?

Experts acknowledge that there are a host of overarching issues that the social service network was never designed to address.

Real Change's director Harris makes the point that most programs available to homeless persons "do not focus on the cultural needs of minority groups." Says Harris, "In the overall mix of things, the need for social services is really desperate ... Mental health, drug treatment and housing. To a lot of service providers and funders, services that focus more on the cultural needs of homeless and low-income persons are not seen as being survival-oriented. They are lower on the totem pole [of social services]."

But a handful of public and private social organizations are trying to provide the kinds of programs that make a specific difference for people of color living in dire poverty and struggling with homelessness.

The Chief Seattle Club, a 31-year-old drop-in center in downtown Seattle, operates five days a week, offering breakfast, clothing, laundry service, showers and case management to the 60-125 men and women who come to the shelter each day.

"The crushing poverty among Natives is there," says Gary Graham, director of the Chief Seattle Club. "There are huge gaps in services to Native Americans ... and it is clear that some shelters and [agencies] seem to be more sensitive to the needs of Native Americans than others."

Graham and others who work at the agency place a priority on understanding the historical experiences and cultural etiquette of local Indian tribes, with an emphasis on one strong commonality. "Natives suffer from a kind of post-traumatic stress because of the selective holocaust that happened in this country," notes Graham, a psychologist whose passion for the welfare of Indian people stems from his own Okiahoma Cherokee heritage. "Those kinds of things have long-term effects on people."

In general, Graham says, homeless and impoverished Native Americans tend to be reticent to ask for help, so when people do reach out for housing assistance or health care, agencies would do well to learn to appreciate Indian sensibilities and cultural experiences. Among those sensibilities, says Graham, is the "tendency to go inward under times of stress.

"It's true of Native Americans and minority groups in general. If they don't trust you--and the distrust of the dominant culture is very great--they will not receive healing from you. Unfortunately, there are people who are culturally ignorant of many minority peoples, and they will inadvertently offend [them]." And when people feel condescended to, stresses Graham, there is a good chance that they will not return to seek assistance, even to the detriment of their own health or housing situation.

"We're dying like flies out there, and death is all around us," Graham remembers one young Native American man telling him at a memorial service for another urban Indian.

"We recognize that crushing poverty and homelessness are serious problems, but we also have to realize that emotional, identity and spiritual issues are also there," he adds. "These are all very powerful problems, and there's a lot yet left to be done."

Silja J.A. Talvi is a Seattle-based freelance journalist with credits in over 75 publications nationwide and in the UK, ranging from In These Times to the Christian Science Monitor.