Is It a Choice?
by Isabella Zou
Age 17
Austin, TX
It’s September 2016, and I sit down with a homeless man for the first time.
“I’ve done nine and a half years in prison. Trying to catch up with the American Dream.”
Allen is a slim black man, so tall I crane my neck to look at him. His dull skin hangs on his cheeks, flaps over his eyes.
I ask him what homelessness is like. His nose twitches. “I’ve been in Austin almost 51 years. And believe it or not, I’m not homeless. I’m homeless by choice. My address is [].”
Well, shoot. The first person I talk to.
I adore my mother, but I’d been so sure she was so wrong. She’s simply bitter that she immigrated with a five-hundred-dollar debt, drudged away for twenty years to build an extraordinary life—and meanwhile, druggies are camped out, panhandling people like her, too lazy to work. Naw, I said—they’re humans, and they’ve all been forced into these terrible situations.
Allen continues: “The homeless people are addicts. They sleep, dream, and eat. They don’t want to take the time to fill out an application, apply to a job, wait two, three weeks for money: they want it now, so they can have their drugs. I’m one of those people.”
I can’t tell whether to laugh or grimace, so I do both.
“My home is leased out, to pay for my addiction and the lifestyle I like to do.”
And now?
“I’m happy.”
Others, too. Heavyset Wilbur flails his crutches, motioning me over to his red booth. He introduces me to JD, a quiet man, on leave from his construction company until he recovers from a heart attack. Old Wilbur with his shattered leg and JD with his crippled chest: they both refuse help from their families, but why—for their dignity? I don’t tell my mom.
Then I visit the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH) and meet its executive director: froggy, white-as-flour Mitchell Gibbs.
“Nobody who is homeless, chose specifically to be homeless.” Alright.
“I’ve never talked to somebody who said, yeah when I was five, I thought that looked really cool. I want to live on the street, eat out of garbage cans, not have a place to poop.” He pauses. “Never had anyone say they chose those experiences.”
I’m just starting this investigation, and all I want is to keep believing him. To justify my childhood conviction that everyone not only needs compassion, but also deserves it.
The next Sunday, I visit The Church Under the Bridge, and while I’m talking with Loco—pasty white man in his sixties, whiskey aficionado—another man approaches.
Nawin is a Nepali, lanky, probably in his forties: skin an ashen chestnut hue, hard, sheened with oil. Deep wrinkles around his eyes taper to his temples.
“I came here in 2011,” he rattles softly, a clipped, tonal accent.
“Go on.”
Nawin was born in Kathmandu, capital of Nepal. After fourteen years of education in neighboring India, he returned for college, married, then ran the family jewelry business for twenty-two years.
In 1998 when his wife suddenly wanted to move, alone, to America, he quietly let her. She thrived there, he says. There: “She got married to another man. She asked me for the divorce, and I gave it to her. And no one is helping me.” He pauses and bites his lip a little.
By some trick of the law, his business and his house were under her name, he says. Without his consent, she sold his business and shared the money with her new husband.
Nawin came to America off the last of his savings in 2011, seeking a fresh beginning. He worked in Maryland gas stations for four years, rooming with a friend.
In 2016, another friend called from Austin, describing incredible job opportunities. He arrived in September, staying at a Motel 6, and soon obtained a job interview at a Chinese buffet.
On his way, he was changing Metro buses. “I went to a store, like this”—he points to a Shell across the street—“and buy a soda. And I looked my wallet in the back. It’s gone.”
Everything was in it.
“I lost my green card, I lost my ID, I lost my social security, and I lost my money and I don’t have any single penny.”
He can’t access his bank account, he says, or replace his lost bank card; he needs his ID. He had been homeless for fifteen days before we met.
All he wants to do, he says, is reclaim his future.
“Start again my business. For jewelry again. Rings, bracelets, earrings, necklaces, all kind of different kind of jewelry.”
Before we part ways, he promises me a necklace, his eyes warm.
Is homelessness a choice?
In August 2016, we argued about it for the first time.
Mom: Every homeless person chooses it.
Me: Nobody chooses homelessness—it's forced on them.
I was born into privilege, complete with grand piano and personal computers, kings’ feasts and state-of-the-art education. And I’ve been lucky to have the means and permission to pursue some answers, speaking with dozens of the poorest in my community.
It is uncomfortable. I've been pushed to realize that I will, actually, be an adult someday, and will have to make choices to shape my future for good—and part of life is choosing incessantly how to live. As Michael, salt-bearded sinewy black man, said: "From the time we wake up, to the time we go to sleep—[life is] a series of choices. Some will be the right choices; some will be wrong." He made the choices that landed him in prison. "And when it [doesn’t] turn out to be the right choice, try to learn from it." He made the choices that brought him out in half-time with a Commercial Driving License, veterinary training, and all the education he could squeeze. One thing we all generally share with the homeless is an ability to choose—to make small, specific decisions. The difference for me is the breadth of my options: white or wheat, ballet or dinner with friends, AP Physics or AP Chem, in-state or out-of-state college, journalism or law? Power is the ability to make increasingly complicated choices.
My mistake in the first place, then, was ascribing to the homeless such clear-cut power. Do you choose homelessness? It's like asking if you choose wealth. There's an element of luck. There’s the fact that any situation is made up of a plurality of choices, not all by the person living it. For me: did I choose innate privilege? No: I'm lucky for my born-into advantage. But my born-into advantage was actually created by both the choices and the good luck of my parents. So when Allen claimed complete control: looking back, I wonder. Leasing his house to fund his drug habit: “I’m homeless by choice,” he’d said. And maybe that’s true, but maybe it’s a function of his drug addiction, a function of the prison time that left his eyes dead, a function of his environment and upbringing, a function of where and how he was born.
So it’s true that calling the homeless ‘underprivileged’ is an oversimplification—sometimes it is their own specific choices that help render them helpless. But study the background. Because otherwise—or at the same time—it really is due to bad luck, lack of silver-platter privilege. Then, it’s on the powerless to want to make the choices to better themselves. And many do want. They want so hard it hurts. Just one example: after every hospital visit, Alex ignores their directives and works anyway, slowly building savings. “You can do it, but you gotta want it. Nothing’s coming to you hands-free,” he said. Alex, Michael, Nawin, and the vast majority of those I’ve met—they want out.
But the homeless have little to begin with. When I work, I’ll be choosing to build from a base of privilege, whereas they, choose as hard as they might, build from comparatively nothing. This lack of a buffer makes living so volatile. You can choose to work for money but you can’t control it when you lose your ID and your job, or when your mother falls sick in Houston under your financial responsibility, or when your husband buys himself more whiskey with your coin—or even, to an extent, when drugs drench your mantra. It’s choice and it’s luck.
And it’s 2017, and I’m looking around at many of us, the more-lucky. We confine ourselves to our levels of power, gazing forward or up, never glancing down—recognizing our luck and relishing the fruits of our choices. Or even, we remember wrong, giving ourselves credit for our privilege, believing that our pure luck was created by our own sheer will. Then we’re smug. If you want money, you work for it, literally: Get a job, you bum. We nurse ambition as a sorry substitute for empathy—we Americans, including my mom, have notoriously believed in self-reliance. President Nixon described in his 1971 speech “Address to the Nation on Labor Day” that a “work ethic” is central to American character, explaining why “most of us consider it immoral to be lazy or slothful” (Nixon). But by legitimizing our “desire to get ahead,” Nixon simultaneously implies that people, even the homeless, generally want to help themselves—just as I’ve observed. In his article “A World Without Work,” The Atlantic senior editor Derek Thompson explains that relaxation can ultimately be dissatisfactory: “many people are happier complaining about jobs than they are luxuriating in too much leisure.” He would argue that the same drive for self-improvement that prompts some to shun the homeless implies that most, including the homeless, actually “want to work, and they are miserable when they cannot” (Thompson)—as I’ve observed. Thus, as 19th century steel mogul Andrew Carnegie stated in his “Gospel of Wealth” ideology, in helping others, “the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves”—to provide “part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so” (Carnegie). So ultimately, we owe the less-powerful the ability to choose upward.
How can we move towards providing this ability, the “part of the means?” First, this society needs an attitude shift. We foster a healthy empathy and look for ways to exercise choice toward a fairer hierarchy of power. Humble, we recognize our own luck in flux. We reach down to grasp hands—talking frankly, exposing roots. In order to inspire this mindset, we need more deep, investigative journalism on homelessness, since ‘the news’ sparks conversation and creates topical issues. Organizations need to bring individual stories of homeless people to the public eye and examine plausible solutions. Today, the only such large-scale project is The Guardian’s series “Outside in America”—alongside smaller personal projects such as nation video-interview project “Invisible People,” interview-tour “50 Sandwiches,” and my own Austin-area contribution, “Austin Street Humans” (“Outside; Horvath; Doering; Zou). Observing these smaller creative projects as inspiration, news organizations from The New York Times to local publications need to follow The Guardian’s lead, using their resources and especially their ready access to large audiences to increase public understanding. This will start a shift, that may eventually lead a chance passerby to resist the urge to avert his eyes—that may inspire informed donations to nonprofits, provoke direct aid to empower individuals to improve.
On the government side, homelessness is by definition the state of having no home: and the groundwork of a home is a house. According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty’s 2014 report to the UN, lack of affordable housing results in around 3.5 million people experiencing homelessness in America each year (Racial). Thus, another solution goal is improving housing itself.
Housing has trended toward a strengthening government-private sector partnership. In her journal article, Cornell MBA Anastasia Kalugina explains government incentives such as the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), which gives developers a “dollar-for-dollar reduction in tax liability” (Kalugina). This incentivizes organizations to develop affordable housing units and stimulates investors to fund them. The government should expand this program to ensure growing affordable housing, providing the homeless units to choose from in the first place.
Today, Section 8 and public housing are the main approaches to providing direct aid to the needy. Under Section 8, the government provides families vouchers usable toward any private-sector unit they find, whereas the government owns and operates public-housing complexes itself. Cost-wise, vouchers are cheapest for the government—a comprehensive report by the United States General Accounting Office states that LIHTC and the other HUD programs have all been at least 149% the cost of housing vouchers (Czerwinski). Also, unlike Section 8, public housing concentrates poverty and amplifies crime, according to research from the HUD (Utt; Sackett). In my own investigation, individuals such as Sabrina and ‘Boris’ have shunned dangerous public housing and were saved by Section 8—Sabrina explained that recently receiving her housing voucher, after years of wait, will allow her to regain custody of her daughter from Child Protective Services and begin anew. The issue with Section 8 is that the vouchers are currently available primarily to families (Lindblom). Because, according to the HUD’s 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, more than 60% of the homeless are single individuals, expanding Section 8 opportunities to single individuals would combat homelessness by providing safe, cost-effective choices (Henry).
Another increasingly-popular tactic is comprised of “tiny homes,” built for the homeless usually as temporary shelters. Tiny homes have the potential to be effective—for example, in Austin, Mobile Loaves and Fish’s Community First! Village provides not only small homes for reduced rent, but also services and job opportunities, creating a sustainable community (“Community”). ‘Dana’ and Ramero, when I met them, were both nearing move-in dates for Community First! homes, excited to begin rebuilding their lives like several of their friends had. In other cases, tiny-home communities have failed due to conflict with city authorities concerned with poverty-concentration and quick-fix ineffectiveness of ‘shantytowns’ (Lewis; Monticello). Tiny-home villages should be constructed with networks of services to maximize sustainability and provide valid housing choices.
Overall, by increasing journalism presence, and improving affordable housing through tax credits, expanding Section 8, and improving tiny-home communities, we can work to give the unlucky the ability to choose improvement. If I’ve learned anything about the homeless, they’re humans: just as any other people group, they are not all deplorables, deserving scorn—they are not all angels, deserving blind pity. Like you and I, they are not always kind, thoughtful, warm—they are not always deceitful, bitter, mean. They are people, no more, no less—they are people, and that should be enough to deserve opportunity. So we work to empower.
And when it’s beyond our control, when it’s more-or-less up to luck—we sit down with a homeless person for the first time. The least we can do is love. The least we can do is listen.
Works Cited
Age 17
Austin, TX
It’s September 2016, and I sit down with a homeless man for the first time.
“I’ve done nine and a half years in prison. Trying to catch up with the American Dream.”
Allen is a slim black man, so tall I crane my neck to look at him. His dull skin hangs on his cheeks, flaps over his eyes.
I ask him what homelessness is like. His nose twitches. “I’ve been in Austin almost 51 years. And believe it or not, I’m not homeless. I’m homeless by choice. My address is [].”
Well, shoot. The first person I talk to.
I adore my mother, but I’d been so sure she was so wrong. She’s simply bitter that she immigrated with a five-hundred-dollar debt, drudged away for twenty years to build an extraordinary life—and meanwhile, druggies are camped out, panhandling people like her, too lazy to work. Naw, I said—they’re humans, and they’ve all been forced into these terrible situations.
Allen continues: “The homeless people are addicts. They sleep, dream, and eat. They don’t want to take the time to fill out an application, apply to a job, wait two, three weeks for money: they want it now, so they can have their drugs. I’m one of those people.”
I can’t tell whether to laugh or grimace, so I do both.
“My home is leased out, to pay for my addiction and the lifestyle I like to do.”
And now?
“I’m happy.”
Others, too. Heavyset Wilbur flails his crutches, motioning me over to his red booth. He introduces me to JD, a quiet man, on leave from his construction company until he recovers from a heart attack. Old Wilbur with his shattered leg and JD with his crippled chest: they both refuse help from their families, but why—for their dignity? I don’t tell my mom.
Then I visit the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH) and meet its executive director: froggy, white-as-flour Mitchell Gibbs.
“Nobody who is homeless, chose specifically to be homeless.” Alright.
“I’ve never talked to somebody who said, yeah when I was five, I thought that looked really cool. I want to live on the street, eat out of garbage cans, not have a place to poop.” He pauses. “Never had anyone say they chose those experiences.”
I’m just starting this investigation, and all I want is to keep believing him. To justify my childhood conviction that everyone not only needs compassion, but also deserves it.
The next Sunday, I visit The Church Under the Bridge, and while I’m talking with Loco—pasty white man in his sixties, whiskey aficionado—another man approaches.
Nawin is a Nepali, lanky, probably in his forties: skin an ashen chestnut hue, hard, sheened with oil. Deep wrinkles around his eyes taper to his temples.
“I came here in 2011,” he rattles softly, a clipped, tonal accent.
“Go on.”
Nawin was born in Kathmandu, capital of Nepal. After fourteen years of education in neighboring India, he returned for college, married, then ran the family jewelry business for twenty-two years.
In 1998 when his wife suddenly wanted to move, alone, to America, he quietly let her. She thrived there, he says. There: “She got married to another man. She asked me for the divorce, and I gave it to her. And no one is helping me.” He pauses and bites his lip a little.
By some trick of the law, his business and his house were under her name, he says. Without his consent, she sold his business and shared the money with her new husband.
Nawin came to America off the last of his savings in 2011, seeking a fresh beginning. He worked in Maryland gas stations for four years, rooming with a friend.
In 2016, another friend called from Austin, describing incredible job opportunities. He arrived in September, staying at a Motel 6, and soon obtained a job interview at a Chinese buffet.
On his way, he was changing Metro buses. “I went to a store, like this”—he points to a Shell across the street—“and buy a soda. And I looked my wallet in the back. It’s gone.”
Everything was in it.
“I lost my green card, I lost my ID, I lost my social security, and I lost my money and I don’t have any single penny.”
He can’t access his bank account, he says, or replace his lost bank card; he needs his ID. He had been homeless for fifteen days before we met.
All he wants to do, he says, is reclaim his future.
“Start again my business. For jewelry again. Rings, bracelets, earrings, necklaces, all kind of different kind of jewelry.”
Before we part ways, he promises me a necklace, his eyes warm.
Is homelessness a choice?
In August 2016, we argued about it for the first time.
Mom: Every homeless person chooses it.
Me: Nobody chooses homelessness—it's forced on them.
I was born into privilege, complete with grand piano and personal computers, kings’ feasts and state-of-the-art education. And I’ve been lucky to have the means and permission to pursue some answers, speaking with dozens of the poorest in my community.
It is uncomfortable. I've been pushed to realize that I will, actually, be an adult someday, and will have to make choices to shape my future for good—and part of life is choosing incessantly how to live. As Michael, salt-bearded sinewy black man, said: "From the time we wake up, to the time we go to sleep—[life is] a series of choices. Some will be the right choices; some will be wrong." He made the choices that landed him in prison. "And when it [doesn’t] turn out to be the right choice, try to learn from it." He made the choices that brought him out in half-time with a Commercial Driving License, veterinary training, and all the education he could squeeze. One thing we all generally share with the homeless is an ability to choose—to make small, specific decisions. The difference for me is the breadth of my options: white or wheat, ballet or dinner with friends, AP Physics or AP Chem, in-state or out-of-state college, journalism or law? Power is the ability to make increasingly complicated choices.
My mistake in the first place, then, was ascribing to the homeless such clear-cut power. Do you choose homelessness? It's like asking if you choose wealth. There's an element of luck. There’s the fact that any situation is made up of a plurality of choices, not all by the person living it. For me: did I choose innate privilege? No: I'm lucky for my born-into advantage. But my born-into advantage was actually created by both the choices and the good luck of my parents. So when Allen claimed complete control: looking back, I wonder. Leasing his house to fund his drug habit: “I’m homeless by choice,” he’d said. And maybe that’s true, but maybe it’s a function of his drug addiction, a function of the prison time that left his eyes dead, a function of his environment and upbringing, a function of where and how he was born.
So it’s true that calling the homeless ‘underprivileged’ is an oversimplification—sometimes it is their own specific choices that help render them helpless. But study the background. Because otherwise—or at the same time—it really is due to bad luck, lack of silver-platter privilege. Then, it’s on the powerless to want to make the choices to better themselves. And many do want. They want so hard it hurts. Just one example: after every hospital visit, Alex ignores their directives and works anyway, slowly building savings. “You can do it, but you gotta want it. Nothing’s coming to you hands-free,” he said. Alex, Michael, Nawin, and the vast majority of those I’ve met—they want out.
But the homeless have little to begin with. When I work, I’ll be choosing to build from a base of privilege, whereas they, choose as hard as they might, build from comparatively nothing. This lack of a buffer makes living so volatile. You can choose to work for money but you can’t control it when you lose your ID and your job, or when your mother falls sick in Houston under your financial responsibility, or when your husband buys himself more whiskey with your coin—or even, to an extent, when drugs drench your mantra. It’s choice and it’s luck.
And it’s 2017, and I’m looking around at many of us, the more-lucky. We confine ourselves to our levels of power, gazing forward or up, never glancing down—recognizing our luck and relishing the fruits of our choices. Or even, we remember wrong, giving ourselves credit for our privilege, believing that our pure luck was created by our own sheer will. Then we’re smug. If you want money, you work for it, literally: Get a job, you bum. We nurse ambition as a sorry substitute for empathy—we Americans, including my mom, have notoriously believed in self-reliance. President Nixon described in his 1971 speech “Address to the Nation on Labor Day” that a “work ethic” is central to American character, explaining why “most of us consider it immoral to be lazy or slothful” (Nixon). But by legitimizing our “desire to get ahead,” Nixon simultaneously implies that people, even the homeless, generally want to help themselves—just as I’ve observed. In his article “A World Without Work,” The Atlantic senior editor Derek Thompson explains that relaxation can ultimately be dissatisfactory: “many people are happier complaining about jobs than they are luxuriating in too much leisure.” He would argue that the same drive for self-improvement that prompts some to shun the homeless implies that most, including the homeless, actually “want to work, and they are miserable when they cannot” (Thompson)—as I’ve observed. Thus, as 19th century steel mogul Andrew Carnegie stated in his “Gospel of Wealth” ideology, in helping others, “the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves”—to provide “part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so” (Carnegie). So ultimately, we owe the less-powerful the ability to choose upward.
How can we move towards providing this ability, the “part of the means?” First, this society needs an attitude shift. We foster a healthy empathy and look for ways to exercise choice toward a fairer hierarchy of power. Humble, we recognize our own luck in flux. We reach down to grasp hands—talking frankly, exposing roots. In order to inspire this mindset, we need more deep, investigative journalism on homelessness, since ‘the news’ sparks conversation and creates topical issues. Organizations need to bring individual stories of homeless people to the public eye and examine plausible solutions. Today, the only such large-scale project is The Guardian’s series “Outside in America”—alongside smaller personal projects such as nation video-interview project “Invisible People,” interview-tour “50 Sandwiches,” and my own Austin-area contribution, “Austin Street Humans” (“Outside; Horvath; Doering; Zou). Observing these smaller creative projects as inspiration, news organizations from The New York Times to local publications need to follow The Guardian’s lead, using their resources and especially their ready access to large audiences to increase public understanding. This will start a shift, that may eventually lead a chance passerby to resist the urge to avert his eyes—that may inspire informed donations to nonprofits, provoke direct aid to empower individuals to improve.
On the government side, homelessness is by definition the state of having no home: and the groundwork of a home is a house. According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty’s 2014 report to the UN, lack of affordable housing results in around 3.5 million people experiencing homelessness in America each year (Racial). Thus, another solution goal is improving housing itself.
Housing has trended toward a strengthening government-private sector partnership. In her journal article, Cornell MBA Anastasia Kalugina explains government incentives such as the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), which gives developers a “dollar-for-dollar reduction in tax liability” (Kalugina). This incentivizes organizations to develop affordable housing units and stimulates investors to fund them. The government should expand this program to ensure growing affordable housing, providing the homeless units to choose from in the first place.
Today, Section 8 and public housing are the main approaches to providing direct aid to the needy. Under Section 8, the government provides families vouchers usable toward any private-sector unit they find, whereas the government owns and operates public-housing complexes itself. Cost-wise, vouchers are cheapest for the government—a comprehensive report by the United States General Accounting Office states that LIHTC and the other HUD programs have all been at least 149% the cost of housing vouchers (Czerwinski). Also, unlike Section 8, public housing concentrates poverty and amplifies crime, according to research from the HUD (Utt; Sackett). In my own investigation, individuals such as Sabrina and ‘Boris’ have shunned dangerous public housing and were saved by Section 8—Sabrina explained that recently receiving her housing voucher, after years of wait, will allow her to regain custody of her daughter from Child Protective Services and begin anew. The issue with Section 8 is that the vouchers are currently available primarily to families (Lindblom). Because, according to the HUD’s 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, more than 60% of the homeless are single individuals, expanding Section 8 opportunities to single individuals would combat homelessness by providing safe, cost-effective choices (Henry).
Another increasingly-popular tactic is comprised of “tiny homes,” built for the homeless usually as temporary shelters. Tiny homes have the potential to be effective—for example, in Austin, Mobile Loaves and Fish’s Community First! Village provides not only small homes for reduced rent, but also services and job opportunities, creating a sustainable community (“Community”). ‘Dana’ and Ramero, when I met them, were both nearing move-in dates for Community First! homes, excited to begin rebuilding their lives like several of their friends had. In other cases, tiny-home communities have failed due to conflict with city authorities concerned with poverty-concentration and quick-fix ineffectiveness of ‘shantytowns’ (Lewis; Monticello). Tiny-home villages should be constructed with networks of services to maximize sustainability and provide valid housing choices.
Overall, by increasing journalism presence, and improving affordable housing through tax credits, expanding Section 8, and improving tiny-home communities, we can work to give the unlucky the ability to choose improvement. If I’ve learned anything about the homeless, they’re humans: just as any other people group, they are not all deplorables, deserving scorn—they are not all angels, deserving blind pity. Like you and I, they are not always kind, thoughtful, warm—they are not always deceitful, bitter, mean. They are people, no more, no less—they are people, and that should be enough to deserve opportunity. So we work to empower.
And when it’s beyond our control, when it’s more-or-less up to luck—we sit down with a homeless person for the first time. The least we can do is love. The least we can do is listen.
Works Cited
- Carnegie, Andrew. "Wealth." North American Review June 1889: n. pag. Carnegie Corporation of New York. Carnegie Corporation of New York. Web. 20 Apr. 2017.
- "Community First! Village." Mobile Loaves and Fishes. Mobile Loaves and Fishes, 2017. Web. 21 May 2017.
- Czerwinski, Stanley J. Federal Housing Programs: What They Cost and What They Provide. Rep. United States General Accounting Office, 2001. Web. 11 Apr. 2017.
- Doering, Justin. "50 Sandwiches." 50 Sandwiches. N.p., 2017. Web. 21 May 2017. <https://fiftysandwiches.com/>.
- Henry, Meghan, Rian Watt, Lily Rosenthal, and Azim Shivji. The 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress. Rep. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, n.d. Web. 11 Apr. 2017.
- Horvath, Mark. "Invisible People." Invisible People. N.p., 2017. Web. 21 May 2017. <https://invisiblepeople.tv/>.
- Kalugina, Anastasia. "Affordable Housing Policies: An Overview." Cornell Real Estate Review 14.10 (2016): 76-83. Academic Search Complete [EBSCO]. Web. 3 Mar. 2017.
- Lewis, Paul. "Tiny Houses: Salvation for the Homeless or a Dead End?" The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 23 Mar. 2017. Web. 21 May 2017.
- Lindblom, Eric N. "Toward a Comprehensive Homelessness Prevention Strategy." Housing Policy Debate 2.3 (1991): 957-1025. Academic Search Complete [EBSCO]. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.
- Monticello, Justin. "This LA Musician Built $1,200 Tiny Houses for the Homeless."Reason.com. Reason Foundation, 09 Dec. 2016. Web. 21 May 2017.
- Nixon, Richard. "Address to the Nation on Labor Day." 6 Sept. 1971. The American Presidency Project. Web. 15 Apr. 2017.
- "Outside in America." The Guardian. Ed. Alastair Gee. Guardian News and Media, 2017. Web. 21 May 2017.
- Racial Discrimination in Housing and Homelessness in the United States. Rep. National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, 3 July 2014. Web. 10 Apr. 2017.
- "Rental Assistance." U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2017. Web. 19 Apr. 2017. <https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=%2Ftopics%2Frental_assistance>.
- Sackett, Chase. "Neighborhoods and Violent Crime." Evidence Matters (2016): n. pag. Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R). U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2016. Web. 12 Apr. 2017.
- Thompson, Derek. "A World Without Work." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 17 Aug. 2015. Web. 21 May 2017.
- Utt, Ronald D. "Policies In The United States To Provide Housing Assistance To Low-Income Households." Economic Affairs 28.2 (2008): 11-16. Academic Search Complete [EBSCO]. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.
- Zou, Isabella. "Austin Street Humans." Austin Street Humans. N.p., 2017. Web. 21 May 2017.
About the Author
Isabella Zou is a first-year student at Yale University and hopes to major in the social sciences. In 2016, she founded Austin Street Humans, a journalism project focused on investigating and reporting the life stories of people experiencing homelessness in Austin. She is now the Executive Director of After Hello, a non-profit organization that focuses on connecting students with opportunities to build relationships with people experiencing homelessness. More of her organization's work can be found at www.austinstreethumans.org.