Better Times Than This: Youth Homelessness in Britain
160
Better Times Than This: Youth Homelessness in Britain
160Paperback
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Overview
'Tom Hall combines street-level research with academic study to reveal the true scale and nature of the problem of hidden homelessness in contemporary Britain.' Nick Davies, author of Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth about Hidden Britain
'Tom Hall writes with deep insight and a spare elegance. In the best realist tradition, he shows us the lives of homeless young people in an entirely fresh way. The reader, having been drawn into the creativity and despair of those lives, is left wondering if their problems are just those of a transitional phase, ‘youth’, or rather mark them for futures of permanent social exclusion.' Keith Hart, University of Aberdeen
If the supposedly disaffected young provide the sub-text to so many of our social anxieties, then the young homeless loom larger here than most: our most vivid reminder of social exclusion, and exemplars too of what the tabloid press like to describe as the feckless, wilful poor.
This book explores what life is really like for Britain’s young homeless: estranged from their families, out of work and making do on the fringes of social security. The result is a vivid portrait of a pressing social problem. Based on extended fieldwork study – the author spent twelve months in the company of young people moving between hostel accommodation, rented bed-sit tenancies and episodes of rooflessness – Better Times Than This is Britain’s first full ethnographic study of youth homelessness.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745316239 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 05/20/2003 |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Tom Hall is a lecturer at Cardiff University's School of Social Sciences, where he teaches sociology, urban theory and ethnography. He has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Cambridge and is the author of Better Times Than This, an ethnography of youth homelessness (Pluto, 2003).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Leaving central London by train, a journey of a little over half an hour brings you to the town of Southerton. From the train station in Southerton it is no more than a couple of minutes' walk to Lime Street, and halfway down Lime Street is a hostel providing emergency accommodation to the young homeless. I made this journey in 1993, having spent several weeks in the capital city's resettlement units. However, very few of the young homeless who come to stay at the Lime Street hostel arrive, by train or otherwise, from central London. Nor do many travel in the opposite direction, leaving Southerton and making for the hostels, night shelters and streets of the capital (although some do). Youth homelessness in Southerton is a local problem; those using the emergency accommodation that the Lime Street hostel offers are, by and large, local young people – they are homeless at home, in their home town.
Southerton has a population of just under 50,000 people; the town is part of a larger and expanding conurbation lying outside the M25. It is a busily provincial place. The town centre is smallish: a pedestrian high street walled by banks, building societies, department and chain stores and fast-food franchises; and, adjacent to this, an indoor shopping centre with the usual combination of concourse, escalators and balconies. A multistorey car park, various commercial offices and public buildings – magistrates courts, housing and social services departments and a municipal park with bright flowers arranged in orderly beds: these complete the picture. Leaving the town centre on foot, shopfronts soon give way to houses and gardens; ten minutes' walk brings you to residential streets, corner shops and muddy playing fields.
The Lime Street hostel, a large, converted, terraced house, stands at just that point where the commercial streets end and the residential ones begin. The properties to either side of the hostel and across the road, like most this close to the noise and traffic of the town centre, are houses of multiple occupancy. There are properties like this in every town and city in Britain, divided into as many single bedsitter rooms as is practicable, each room let out separately to tenants at the bottom end of the private housing market. The houses on Lime Street are typical, if a little shabby-looking, some of them. Ill-fitting curtains are pulled across grimy windows; doorbells with obsolete or indecipherable name tags give little or no clue as to who is in residence. As elsewhere throughout Britain, young people make up a significant number of the total occupancy of these rooms. Many of those who come to stay at the Lime Street hostel are already familiar with rented bedsit accommodation, and the majority of residents eventually move on from the hostel to bedsit rooms nearby, sometimes on Lime Street itself. There is rarely any alternative. A number of these properties must count among the worst maintained in the local private rented sector; the turnover of tenants is high, as invariably evidenced by the piles of 'undelivered' mail in manila envelopes stacked by the skirting boards inside the front doors.
The Young Homeless
When I first arrived in Southerton, Britain was in the grip of a considerable anxiety about its young people. The rise in the incidence of youth homelessness was a particular cause for concern. For those ready to entertain the idea that Britain was host to a burgeoning underclass, the presence of teenagers begging a living and sleeping rough on city-centre streets seemed persuasive evidence – a sign of the times. And as the decade progressed it became apparent that the young homeless numbered many more than those to be seen on the streets of London and a handful of other cities; that, in a less stark and spectacular form perhaps, youth homelessness went much wider and deeper than this; that an unofficial or 'hidden' homeless population numbered
not only the 2,000 or 3,000 who sleep rough on the streets of London, nor even the 5,000 others who join them on most nights on the pavements of Exeter, Oxford, Brighton, Leicester and almost any other provincial city ... [but] also the 50,000 mostly young people who are living in squats; the 11,000 in bed-and-breakfast rooms; the 10,000 in hostels for the homeless; the hundreds of thousands cramped on sitting-room sofas and on the floors of friends. (Davies, 1998: 239)
The count dips and spirals. Pat Carlen opens her account of youth homelessness with the assertion that there are over 150,000 young, single adults homeless in Britain (1996: 1); the National Inquiry into Preventing Youth Homelessness puts the figure at 246,000, about one in every thirty young people in the UK between the ages of 16 and 25 (see Evans, 1996: 24). Policy Action Team 12 of the Social Exclusion Unit prefers to cite a source from 1993, which puts the figures at 32,000 homeless 16-21-year-olds in Britain (see Social Exclusion Unit, 2000). Whatever the headline figure, no one doubts that there is a problem, that the numbers are large – alarmingly so – and that youth homelessness in Britain has increased substantially since the 1970s. The background reasons why are well-established. Young people's position in the British housing market, never a particularly strong one, has further weakened as competition for rented accommodation has intensified over the last twenty-five years or so. A general erosion of young people's economic position over much the same period of time, and the contraction of benefit support for the young unemployed, has made things harder still; and for some more than others. Those worst affected by the economic and occupational restructuring, and successive recessions, of the 1980s and 1990s were those poorly qualified school-leavers who could previously have been expected to move directly from school into unskilled, manual work, switching between a succession of such jobs if they so desired, the compensation for lack of long-term prospects being good money at a young age (Roberts, 1993: 239). Without either prospects or 'good money', some of these young home-leavers have since found themselves struggling to gain any first foothold in the housing market.
Why leave home at all under such unfavourable conditions; why not wait? Why not go back home, if and when (and as soon as) things don't work out? This has been the preference of successive governments; that young people not in work or education, and unable to support themselves financially, be warehoused on training schemes and kept at home – anywhere but on the streets.
Doubtless many young people have done just that; delayed, marked time at home. But leaving home is not something that they can be expected to set aside indefinitely. Patterns of leaving home in Britain have varied over time and according to social background and gender, but doing so – leaving home – has consistently featured as a central element of most young people's move into adulthood, and as such it has a head of normative steam behind it (see Morrow and Richards, 1996: 56). And almost any young person can leave home, even if, and sometimes because, they can do little else; they know where the door is. Added to which 'there are clearly situations where young people leave home because they have to rather than because they want to' (Jones and Wallace, 1992: 108).
Leaving home has become a difficult move, then. Not difficult to do, but difficult to do right; difficult because of the conditions young people face when they leave, and especially difficult for those leaving in a hurry, at a bad time and without much of an option of going back or asking for help.
Us and Them
Homelessness is nothing new of course. There has always been a substantial minority of the population that has struggled to compete effectively in the housing market (Greve, 1991: 4). And young people have always been among these, and have as such figured consistently, perhaps disproportionately, in public anxieties about indigence and the urban poor. Consider, for example, the prominence of children and adolescents – 'street urchins' or the young homeless – in the written and photographic records of nineteenth-century urban destitution (see Hebdige, 1988: 20). Which is not to say that homelessness today is the same as it was a hundred or so years ago. The young people coming to stay at the Lime Street hostel in Southerton are not the 'street-arabs' of Victorian London, in jeans and trainers. But there are continuities. Certainly so in the ways in which (youth) homelessness, now as then, has been woven into wider public anxieties about the 'undeserving' poor.
Under the Poor Law Acts, passed through the 19th century, paupers or the unsettled poor were put to work in the workhouses. Most were seen as responsible for their position in so far as their poverty was seen to arise from their idleness and fecklessness ... In the 1990s, homelessness is not associated with the housing needs of the majority but with a minority who are still seen as idle and feckless. Public attitudes towards these people today echo earlier sentiments. (Hutson, 1999: 2)
Moral judgement as to the (bad) character of those at the bottom of the social pile has always informed public debate about poverty and the poor; it does so at the present time, just as it did in the Victorian era. The most recent succès de scandale in this longstanding debate has been that enjoyed by the American social scientist Charles Murray, whose essays on the emerging British underclass (see Murray 1990; 1994) provoked some comment throughout the 1990s, generating considerable heat if rather less light. In the first of these essays, Murray makes it clear from the outset that he is writing about a poverty that has less to do with low incomes than it has to do with behaviour. His position is unequivocal: 'the "underclass" does not refer to degree of poverty, but to a type of poverty' (1990: 1); its members choose to live as they do, either this or they know no better. If it is the supposedly disaffected young who have provided the subtext to much of the British underclass debate over the last decade (see MacDonald, 1997: 18), then the young homeless have loomed larger here than most: our most vivid reminder of social exclusion, and exemplars too of the feckless, wilful poor – idle, irresponsible and up to no good; at home (comfortable, that is) at the margins.
Consider Yourself: At Home
This book, an account of youth homelessness, is a work of ethnography; a product of fieldwork. As it happens, I set about fieldwork as a student in a department of social anthropology. It may be that fieldwork and ethnography – as process and product (see Agar, 1996: 53) – are constitutive of anthropology in a way that is not as true for other disciplines (see Wade, 1997: 10), but I do not intend to be jealous about this. I am writing and teaching now as a sociology lecturer in a school of social sciences, and I am happy to have this study fall anywhere within, or outside of, the academic division of labour.
As it happened, I was the only one in my cohort of students not to get on a plane in order to do fieldwork, and in this sense I did my anthropology, my ethnography, at home. Yet fieldwork begins (ought to, ordinarily) with the unfamiliar. The ethnographer, away from home, tries to work through and past this unfamiliarity towards an eventual understanding; towards a point at which he or she is 'at home' in a given research setting perhaps. What then for the ethnographer who has not left home to begin with? The answer, of course, is that there are more ways than one to leave home, and one does not have to pack a passport to do so. Ethnographic exploration on the social margins – the other side of the tracks, not the other side of the world – has a history as long as that of anthropological fieldwork, and the two projects share some of the same strengths and frailties. Each has been informed by a powerful democratic impulse: to take seriously the lives of others. Each has struggled with the tensions and awkwardness, the implicit hierarchies, that come with representation.
The golden age of social exploration – ethnography at home was the nineteenth century. But, as a mode of inquiry and a genre of writing – with its own distinctive metaphors and concerns – it is very much alive today. Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth about Hidden Britain is a work of contemporary social exploration, published in the late 1990s by Nick Davies, a journalist for the Guardian newspaper; the book reports on an extended foray into what Davies calls the hidden country of the poor. Borrowing freely from the literary strategies of nineteenth-century social explorers, Davies begins the book with a geographical conceit, as follows.
I set out to explore this place, pursuing rumours and news reports, and being passed from one contact to another, looking for patterns and themes, trying to record everything I saw like some Victorian explorer penetrating a distant jungle. (Davies, 1998: viii)
The reader is supposed to sit up and take notice. We are about to enter foreign territory, a far away and primitive world that Davies describes as 'utterly different in its way of life' (1998: viii). Dark Heart is a sensational and a harrowing book, and Davies is a campaigning journalist concerned that his readers should understand how extraordinarily bad things have got for the poorest of Britain's poor; but these are chancy turns of phrase – a hidden country, a distant jungle, a people whose way of life lies beyond easy comprehension and sets them apart from us.
In reality (and this is the point, after all) Davies has not had to travel much more than a couple of hours by train to reach any of the places he is writing about. Nevertheless, he insists, these remain hidden territories to the extent that well-meaning people have, for too long, masked the truth about what is happening there; have not faced up to the uncomfortable fact that, in various pockets around Britain, poverty has inflicted a deep social damage, which, at its extreme,
involves the mushrooming of what academics like to call subcultures ... little colonies, looking inwards at their own values and rituals, their own ways of surviving. (Davies, 1998: 236)
This is the nub of Davies' argument, and it brings us back to Charles Murray and the dark heart of contemporary underclass fears: the possibility that there are those among the poor who have taken a turn for the worse and can't find their way back, or no longer want to. Murray too insists that this uncomfortable truth has been ducked for too long, if not by well-meaning people then by 'intellectuals'.
Murray and Davies are an unlikely pair; hardly a pair at all. In the final pages of his book Davies dismisses Murray's line of argument as obviously flawed, confusing cause and effect and blaming the poor, where the real culprit is poverty. But Davies has already used this language himself, describing a situation in which 'cause and effect become hopelessly embroiled' (1998: 237). Both writers, either for effect or as part of a wider allegation, portray an exotic world, set apart yet too close to home, where life has settled into some reprehensible, regrettable pattern that will not easily unravel. The implications are far-reaching.
In contrast, the focus of this book is narrow: a few score young people growing up in the same town, most of whom were homeless when I first met them, and many of whom remained intermittently homeless throughout the twelve months that I was in contact with them, moving between episodes of rooflessness, temporary stays in emergency accommodation and serial residency in a succession of (at best shabby) local bedsit rooms. Nonetheless, the book takes its shape against Davies' scenario – little colonies, turned inwards; and it does so questioningly. What is the shape and pattern of life for these young people, homeless off and on and in a host of other difficulties some of them; how are they living, and what, if anything, does this have to do with why they are homeless? These are the questions I hope to answer.
In the Field
What does an ethnographer, a participant observer, do all day? Those engaged in ethnographic research can employ a number of strategies and techniques; for my part I was neither innovative nor exhaustive in my approach. I determined, simply enough, to spend as much time as I could in the company of, and in conversation with, those young people I first met at the Lime Street hostel, keeping a daily written record of things said and done. On arrival in Southerton I rented a small bedsit room five minutes' walk from Lime Street and spent the best part of most days and every evening visiting the hostel. Over time, I was introduced to a wider ambit of young people, and my itinerary expanded to include the high street and shopping centre, the Department of Social Security (DSS) office and the bedsits of those who had moved on from the hostel. Eventually my own room became a venue for residents and ex-residents alike, some of whom even stayed there overnight when they had nowhere else to go.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Better Times Than This"
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Copyright © 2003 Tom Hall.
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