Two Publications

Two items I was involved with got published, one on Christmas Day and the other on the day after, Boxing Day. The timing doesn’t exactly maximize exposure, but I won’t complain.

The piece that came out on Christmas was an op-ed in the Delaware News-Journal in the form of an open letter to Wilmington’s incoming mayor. I teamed up with my predecessor at CCRS, Steve Peuquet on this, and I pasted the text into the previous blog entry here. I linked to the op-ed, but you are better off reading it in the blog entry. The News-Journal version is formatted poorly, its flow is interrupted by ads, the links to supporting sources are taken out, they slapped a headline on it that goes against the point of the piece, and Peuquet’s first name is misspelled. The piece is also really buried on the paper’s website. I don’t take it personally as it’s more a sign of the low priority they place on editorial and opinion material. Unfortunately, the N-J is one of only three outlets for op-eds in the Delaware news market that I am aware of. Of the other sources, one is a southern Delaware outlet, and the other has a decided activist slant.

Briefly, the point of the piece is to provide Wilmington’s incoming mayor (and outgoing DE governor) John Carney some practical advice on addressing homelessness, especially in light of recent events in Wilmington, in which the outgoing mayoral administration made a point to ratchet up the antagonism around homelessness before they rode into the sunset. The bulk of the letter consists of 10 simple steps, with either have minimal or no costs attached, by which a new mayoral administration can position itself for more success on this issue. The focus is on process, and intentionally doesn’t give any prescriptions on “solving” homelessness (contrary to the N-J headline).

I did send a copy of this, as a letter, to Carney before this version got published in the N-J. I wonder if he read it. I wonder if it will get any kind of response beyond from those who are involved in the issue locally and the cranks who comment on social media. But I’m glad it is out there publicly for two reasons. First, if it gets any attention, it serves to move the dialogue around homelessness past the Purzycki administration to Carney’s, where hopefully there will be more of a will to address this. Second, it offers a basic set of specific benchmarks for what the incoming administration actually does on the issue. I can see myself this time next year looking back on the ten items in the piece and writing about which of these were taken up, or alternately, what was taken up instead. Stay tuned.

The second piece is very different, a research letter that came out in the medical journal JAMA Open. The title of the piece is “Persistence of a Birth Cohort Effect in the US Among the Adult Homeless Population". The title is fairly self explanatory, and the letter isn’t long so, instead of summarizing it, I’ll just encourage you to click through the link (its open access) and read the piece. I’m fourth of seven authors on the piece, so I didn’t have a huge direct part in this. We are a tight group of colleagues/friends that have been documenting the aging of the homeless population for over a decade now. There has been a cohort who, when homelessness first became a prominent issue back in the 1980s, had a modal age in the mid-30s. As time has gone on, this age cohort, born during the latter part of the baby boom, has continued to be the age group at highest risk of experiencing homelessness, and now is around 60. In this letter, we show with recent Census and other data how this trend is continuing. Not surprisingly, there are may implications for a geriatrifying (sic) homeless population, but here we just put the basic, stark demographics out there.

While I’m prattling about this, I’ll also mention how there is a parallel cohort of homelessness researchers born during this time period of which I am a part. I now regularly recount how I got involved with homelessness through the Catholic Worker movement during the Reagan years when I was fresh out of college, and have continued from advocacy and direct work to a career anchored by research on the topic. For the students I teach and advise, this career now spans a time period that started way before almost all of them were born. I have a lot more thoughts on all that, which maybe I’ll write a separate piece about.