Fighting Homelessness One Battle at a Time
Walter Herres runs SHILO, an interfaith organization that aids homeless men and women in the New Brunswick area. We shared a program…
Walter Herres runs SHILO, an interfaith organization that aids homeless men and women in the New Brunswick area. We shared a program tonight at the Reformed Church of Highland Park, me reading from my book, As an Alien in a Land of Promise, and him detailing his efforts to aid the homeless. Herres is formerly homeless, and spent time in prison for some bad decisions he made while living on he street. After prison, he connected with several local activists, who trained him to do outreach and he began to win the trust of men and women who live on New Brunswick’s streets.
New Brunswick is an epicenter of homelessness, due in no small part to its urban character and to its role as a transportation hub for transportation. It is a city of contrasts: poor by any measure, but home to the state university, one of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies, two regional hospitals and the county government. It is an arts hub, as well, with theaters, restaurants, and a thriving underground, and nationally known music scene. But it also is Home to a sizable homeless population, many of who congregate at the downtown train station.
“It is an epidemic, but you don’t see the epidemic except when they surface for food,” he said.
There were 546 homeless people in Middlesex County at the time of the 2017 Point in Time count, the mandated census of homeless individuals. The PIT is a snapshot of a single moment and it has to be viewed through that lens. Statewide, there 8,532 homeless individuals on he night of the count, which is down from the 2016 count.
Comparing year-to-year figures is not easy, given changes in methodology and definition in recent years, and because the conditions under which each count occurs can differ. It’s also important to remember that the homeless are a transient population, moving from place to place, city to city. Their trauma also makes them severely mistrustful and acts as a barrier to being included in the surveys.
Federal, state and local governments offer varying degrees of services, but also often have varying and often competing interests — local governments tend to be more punitive, seeking to keep the homeless away from revenue generating downtowns, while state and federal governments take a broader view, though filtered through ideology.
Herres attempts to navigate these competing interests, meeting the homeless where they are, feeding them, and getting them help. He’s skeptical of the rapid rehousing model currently in vogue, because too many of the homeless are suffering multiple traumas that limit their ability to survive in traditional housing. At the same time, it is nearly impossible to address the trauma without getting them into stable living conditions. You can’t be healed without stability, but you can’t have stability without being healed.
Herres uses a holistic approach, learning as much as he can about each individual through conversation — an interview process he says gets them to open up and trust him. He never refers to the people he helps as clients — they are Uncle Derrick and Auntie Rose, James, Pablo, Maria, and so on, all individuals with names and stories. Many are people het met during his time on the streets, some of whom helped him navigate the city.
Street mentors were important, especially because he was a suburban kid from the Spotswood-Helmetta area — “you drive through and you don’t even realize you’ve been there.” He attended Rutgers briefly, but failed out, falling prey to the allure of independence and partying. Once on the street, he did what was necessary to survive and ended up in jail.
For many, that is the end of the story. A criminal conviction, especially for drugs, can disqualify people from state services — a rule that remained in effect until recently in New Jersey. The rule was an artifact of the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush eras when all social ills were treated as if they were criminal behaviors. Punitive systems were put in place limiting access to an array of public services, which in turn made it that much more difficult to address questions of poverty and mental illness.
This is the wrong approach, especially for addressing homelessness, which is a systemic issue tied to the inherent unfairness built into American capitalism. If everyone is just fed based on their potential to create wealth — for themselves or for others — then those who cannot contribute in this way become human refuse, garbage to be tossed aside or tossed in jail.
In my experience writing about homelessness, most communities tend to use a punitive approach, treating the homeless as criminals, limiting their ability to find food or temporary shelter. Lakewood, former home to a tent city encampment, used police to harass the 80 to 100 tent dwellers who sought refuge there. Philadelphia banned the distribution and sharing of food by unlicensed individuals, preventing volunteers from feeding the homeless who were in the city’s parks. There have been the wins hat have banned camping, and others like New Brunswick that attempted to ban panhandling.
“Being homeless is like being a cow that doesn’t know where he is being shepherded to and is being shepherded from place to place,” Herres said.
Being homeless, itself, becomes a mental illness.
“Think of how you would feel after not showering for four days,” he said. “You feel like Tom Hanks in Castaway. Imagine feeling like that for five years. That’s what it feels like if you’re homeless. That’s how. a homeless person psychologically feels everyday when they wake up.”
Donate to SHILO through their Go Fund Me account here. You can purchase my book, As an Alien in a Land of Promise, a hybrid work of poetry, journalism, photography, here. Help fund my journalism by becoming a patron at Patreon — for as little as a dollar per creation, you’ll get access to members-only work, including my latest chapbook essay, Food Lines.