Points Of View Research

Points Of View

When starting this project I tried to think about things that were close to me at the time. Looking around I only saw my house and my parents as fort the unfortunate lock down, but as I started to spend more and more time with my parents I started to get more and more involved in their work life. I took an interest in my mothers work of being a homelessness and housing officer, I looked at what she was doing and the people she talks to on a daily basis and decided to do my 'points of view' project on homelessness.

San Francisco

My first pieces of research that I have concluded have been somewhat distant to me however highlight the global issue of homelessness, I looked into places with high homeless populations such as San Francisco. I watched a few short documentaries on youtube about San Francisco but the one I focused on was titled 'Chaos by the Bay: The Truth About Homelessness In San Francisco', the documentary really highlighted how evident the problem is, the imagery in the film was very powerful seeing rows and rows of tents under bridges. In the 'Tender Loin' in San Francisco there are masses and masses of tents that the council has decided to let happen, they no longer charge fines for the tents and have stopped jailing homeless people because of the sheer number of people. This may have seen like a good thing to do but it really just created more homelessness in the area.

Chaos by the Bay: The Truth About Homelessness In San Francisco

Can San Francisco Be Saved?

I found the documentary to be extremely critical of the San Francisco council and how they had dealt with their problems. I think this is a running theme in all areas of the world and is something that I may put a focus on. Another focus I am really interested in is why these people are homeless to begin with, and a big part of this is drug abuse. In the documentary it highlights the use of Fentanyl (a strong opioid painkiller) in the area. The use of opioids is a running theme when speaking about homelessness.

Invisible People

 In the video series 'Invisible People' they have intimate conversations with actively homeless people and in this especially interesting video the man viewed describes the use of heroin in his life and he describes it as a sort of barrier to leaving the streets.

Los Angeles Homeless Man Shares the Harsh Reality of Skid Row

My Mother

After i conducted this research I had realized I had been focusing more on American homelessness, so I turned back to the UK and conducted some more general research. I turned to my Mother for some primary research and to make this project more personal to me. At first she gave me some general information about homelessness in the UK and in the area where I live. She wrote:

HOMELESSNESS

Homelessness doesn't just include people who are 'roofless' it also includes people who are 'sofa surfing' moving from place to place usually family & friends, sleeping on their sofa or spare beds. Current legislation looks at people who are homeless or threatened with homelessness within the next 56 days. This could be they're being asked to leave by parents, family or friends; they are being evicted from a room in a house or tenancy they pay rent for due to rent arrears, other breaches of tenancy agreement or the landlord just wants the property back; mortgage arrears may mean a bank or other mortgage lender takes legal action to evict; being discharged from hospital with nowhere to live; being released from prison with nowhere to live etc 

There are lots of reasons why people loose their homes for example reduced or lack of income through redundancy, Ill health, reduced hours at work, relationship breakdown, sudden bereavement or a combination of these. Lack of money due to spending money on drugs, alcohol or gambling addictions. But most the time these are unforeseen circumstances out of the person's control.

Housing and Homeless legislation has changed enormously since the introduction of the Homeless Reduction Act 2017 which placed more duty on local government (the council) to prevent homelessness and have a duty to assist all people who present as homeless with a prevention duty and if already homeless a relief duty, to relieve their homeless situation. Prior to this unless someone was vulnerable enough to be considered to have a 'priority need' in housing legislation terms the council didn't need to help much. 

Priority Need is basically bias towards families rather than single people so if there are dependent children or someone is pregnant then priority need is straight forward but if someone has medical issues either physical or mental health, learning difficulties, vulnerable due to age young or old or is institutionalized through prison or being in one of the military services, vulnerability isn't straightforward and the threshold for vulnerability in housing terms can be very high.

Addictions are not considered to be a priority need on there own. If someone has physical health issues resulting from addictions this could mean they're vulnerable but mental health issues are much more sketchy to allow as vulnerable as often mental health professionals will not treat or even assess addicts until they address their addiction & this gets very complicated as many who suffer from mental health issues self medicate with illegal drugs. It's difficult to separate the two as did someone become mentally ill before or after they started taking drugs?

Vulnerability is described as 'it being more difficult to find and secure accommodation compared to an ordinary homeless person'? 

ROUGH SLEEPERS

Rough sleepers is a term used to used to describe a group of people who are sleeping out on the streets. There are lots of initiatives these days aimed at catching people early when they have only started sleeping rough so that they don't become 'entrenched rough sleepers' in other words sleeping out for month or years. There is scoot of evidence to show that entrenched rough sleepers have much shorter lifespans than the rest of the population.mi think it's like average age 45yrs compared to 75yrs. CRISIS have carried out lots of research to support this & the Homeless Reduction Act (HRA) was built on much of this research.

Rough sleepers were not really helped before the HRA because they either weren't assessed as having a priority need for reasons highlighted above or they didn't engage with services trying to help them for whatever reason....addiction, mental health, criminal/deviant choice of lifestyle, anti-establishment etc

There are great Housing First projects in some areas now days for this group. Where they're granted tenancies and are allowed to continue their choice of lifestyle such as getting substitute prescribed drugs for their Drug addiction whilst living in a property. They are required to engage weekly with their keyword and pay the rent and are encouraged to address their addiction but not told they have to. If they are arrested & spend time in prison they still have a tenancy when they're released so they don't have to start again every time with going to a hostel, then helped into independent living etc as this wasn't getting them anywhere which was demoralizing and many hostels wouldn't take them back any more because they had a history of rent arrears etc. Many drug, alcohol addicts have a high degree of self loathing and play on themselves being a victim which stops them moving on with their lives or changing their behavior.

Many people seen begging on the streets are not necessary rough sleepers at the moment as many have recently temporarily housed under Covid-19 legislation. Where they don't need a priority need for temporary accommodation while we help secure or long term because secured to reduce the risk of covid and often sofa surfing' options are reduced or disappeared because of risk of covid. They are begging however for money for their physical & psychological need for their 'fix'.

Many rough sleepers have had terbulant and sometimes tragic childhoods. Either through being taken into care at an early age for years, being neglected by parents or abused, being homeless as children with little stability, a lack of education and moral guidance, being in and out of prison, having mental health issues either brought on by the events in childhood or through having depression, anxiety, autism, ADHD, psychosis or other diagnosis which could also be genetic or brought on by drug abuse. We are truly a complex species!!

After reading through the general information that she gave me I started to have a more detailed understanding of homelessness in the UK, as well as this I started to understand that homelessness can mean many many things not just street homelessness. I think this is important to acknowledge when talking about homelessness, however I am much more interested in street homelessness at this point in time of my project. I also found the problem of addiction to be very interesting in her writing, how addicts are refused mental health treatment until they address their addictions, as you can probably guess this comes with a whole host of problems as how can we tell if the mental health issues were from drugs abuse or before their drug abuse.

As the text goes on we see that she starts to talk more directly about street homelessness. She states that street homeless have much much shorter life spans than others which I found very upsetting, I think it really shows the inhumanity that people who can actually do something have. She goes on to talk about homeless housing, which is something that she is very heavily involved in. Something that really made me think is that most homeless today during the Covid Pandemic actually have housing but are still begging on the street to fulfill their habits. It made me think twice about giving money to the homeless during the pandemic, especially if it was not going to be going anywhere productive.

I then asked her for some personal stories from her work as I thought it would help create a more personal and human perspective. She wrote:

ROSIE & JIM

I first met Rosie & Jim when they came into the council office as homeless. They were living in a tent in a field and had been all summer but it was now autumn and very wet & windy. They were quite happy here but the land was to be developed on and they were being asked to leave & threatened with legal action if they didn't. They had nowhere to go.

Rosie had her own social housing property previously when she had a different partner and their 2 young children. Her partner had left, she turned to drugs and the children were taken into the care of social services. Jim was younger than her but tried to help her stop the drugs and helped her with aging the rent. However because the children had gone and they only needed one bedroom instead of two the welfare benefits for the rent reduced and rent arrears got bigger & bigger. They didn't go for help and she lost the tenancy through eviction. Rosie stopped taking drugs.

They stayed with family for a while but this didn't work out because they were either overcrowded or the family members were quite dysfunctional themselves. Rosie was diagnosed with mental health issues and Jim was down as her carer. Both Rosie and Jim had been in care themselves as children had issues with trusting others, no parental guidance on how to be parents themselves and no support from family emotionally or other. Although Rosie was a few years older than Jim she acted younger.

They didn't get they managed their small income from benefits very well and kept chickens next to their tent with an extended bender on the side that Jim had built. 

Jim had no official ID as his parents hadn't kept a lot, his mum had changed his surname unofficially at a young age and his birth certificate had been lost when he was in care. This made it difficult to access services such as housing. 

They were not deemed to have a priority need through vulnerability until she fell pregnant again. We were then able to provide temporary accommodation & they were eventually given a new social tenancy. They were helped with parenting skills but the baby was taken into care.

SAMUEL

Samuel had a reputation among the support agencies for refusing to engage with them. He was a strong intelligent character leading other homeless by setting up commune type groups in the town center & decorating them with his impressive art work. He was a heroin addict and had been for many years and was entrenched homeless. Sleeping either rough outside in a sleeping bag outside shop doorways or on someone's sofa if he was lucky. He had a long term girlfriend who was also an addict but was very unwell & frail so was in and out of hospital. She eventually died of heart failure which caused Samuel to become grief stricken and deeply depressed. He finally agreed to engage with housing and support services and was housed in social housing though the sheltered scheme for people over 60 years old.

Looking at these personal stories have helped me feel more connected to these issues. 

Personal Research

After this I decided that I would go out and take some photographs of places that homeless people have been, walking around Bristol I found many areas and places that had been occupied by the homeless and it gave me a better understanding of the harsh reality that some people live in, I compiled the images onto a blog post which can be found here. 

The Young and Homeless

I started to do a little research into the youthful homeless and found these short BBC documentary series that highlighted real stories of young people.

Homeless At 14 After A Tragic Death: On The Streets Of Manchester

49 Days On The Streets: From The Day I Became Homeless

Looking at these videos made me think about the different views on how and why people are homeless, I thought about how most people have very different opinions on the homeless. Some people think that its not the youth that are homeless.

Jody Wood

Jody Wood's project 'Beauty In Transition ' was a project that created pop up salons for the homeless to go and use. This project aimed to show how the homeless are people just like anyone else. This idea is something that I will use, I want to highlight the abuse and disrespect that homeless people encounter. Wood created these photos that show the homeless in a new light, showing them as actual people.

Fanny Allié

This Artist created a piece titled 'The Glowing Homeless' which pictures a homeless person sleeping made of neon lights. I love how this piece highlights the homeless and shines 'light' onto the problem of rough sleeping. It also pushes this idea of the homeless almost being invisible to some people. This piece, to me, feels like the artist is trying to show that the homeless feel invisible as they need these bright lights to be seen. I am going to go further with the idea of invisibility in my own work.

Olivier Kugler

Kugler's way of working is something that I will take and use in this project. Instead of creating very specific points of views I am going to record an event that I will go to just like Kugler does. My points of views relying more on changes in colour, lighting and the angles of the photos used. Kugler takes many images and then uses them as reference to draw, as well as this he normally plants information in his work to spread a message and to keep people informed on social and political issues.

He complies different images together also to create these busy scenes.