Portland writer says people need to examine their anti-poverty biases

Portland-based writer and political consultant Hanna Brooks Olsen recently penned a piece with the headline, “You, Housed Person, Are Not The Victim Of Homelessness.” Olsen examines the anti-poverty bias behind posts on the NextDoor app complaining about people experiencing homelessness, and how that sentiment influences public policy.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. You, Housed Person, Are Not The Victim of Homelessness. That’s the headline of a recent essay on Medium by the Portland writer and political consultant Hanna Brooks Olsen. Olsen focused on what she sees as the anti-poverty bias behind posts like those found on the NextDoor app and the sentiment that people who have to simply see homelessness, as opposed to those who are living it, are being victimized. Hanna Brooks Olsen joins us now to talk about her essay. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Hanna Brooks Olsen: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Dave Miller: What prompted this recent essay?

Hanna Brooks Olsen: I moved to Portland from Seattle last year. I never joined NextDoor in Seattle because I knew that it was not a pleasant place to be, but in Portland I found that there was a lot more of a community and it was a lot more helpful. It was people exchanging produce and so I joined. It actually took a little while until I started to see this anti-poverty bias. But then once I started to see it, it was very consistent and the constant refrain seemed to be: Why is this happening to me? Why are there people in vans camped outside my house? Why do I have to see poverty when I go places? And it really crystallized for me when I noticed that other people were then offering empathy to the “victims” of the situation.

Dave Miller: What kind of empathy?

Hanna Brooks Olsen: Things like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry this is happening to you,” when the post was about ‘there’s a van parked in front of my house where someone lives’ and the response would be, “Oh my gosh, I am so sorry, this happened to me once. They were there for two days,” and then that’s it. Like that was the bad thing, The bad thing was someone’s residence was parked outside of their home for two days and then it was gone and that somehow that’s a catastrophe and not the fact that someone lives in a van is a catastrophe.

Dave Miller: How have you come to understand this?

Hanna Brooks Olsen: It is a daily work to be empathetic and to be understanding of the experience of people living in extreme poverty. It’s not easy. We are built as humans to not be especially empathetic. We have a number of biases that come with our brains. But for me, I’ve worked with this community quite a bit. I was the Editor in Chief of Real Change in Seattle for a season where I was pinch hitting and I was working with unhoused people to help them tell their stories. I have worked alongside Plymouth Housing, I have worked alongside Food for Lane County.  I’ve sort of continued to immerse myself in this community, in part to remain connected. And it’s difficult. It is very challenging to consistently remind yourself that, when you get to go home at night, into a house, you are not the victim, even though it feels really challenging.

Dave Miller: I can imagine what some people might say in response to your essay: that I don’t want to demonize people and I really do feel for them, but I’m dealing with human waste on the sidewalk or people screaming at night or piles of trash left behind or used hypodermic needles. And so the line would go, it’s not inhumane or inappropriate of me to not want this in front of the place where I live. How would you respond to that?

Hanna Brooks Olsen: You’re correct. That’s true. And the fact is, it is true that we are all victims of a structure that has created this problem and we are all victims of the symptoms of this problem. It’s true that piles of garbage, that human waste, that the rampant symptoms of unchecked mental health crises do make all of our lives more difficult. They raise our cortisol levels. We’re more stressed. It’s anxiety-making. That is true. In that way, we are all the victims of this. But we are not being victimized by homeless people. We’re being victimized by a structure that has slowly collapsed in front of our eyes and it goes way back. Back in 1993, Joel Blau published a book called The Visible Poor, which examined biases about homeless people, in the fact that they’re all drug addicts and they’re all crazy. This is 1993, which I just want to say, I was six when this book was published. So this is not new, but the thesis of that book was that it was structures, and not personal failures, that created this crisis. That’s really how I want people to reframe their thinking on this issue. Instead of seeing someone being homeless as an affront to you, seeing homelessness as an affront to all of us as an allegedly civilized society and then looking for who is the victimizer in that situation. Because I would say it’s corporations who don’t pay their taxes, it’s lawmakers who continue to try notably failed programs, and it’s all of us who check out when we just can’t deal with it anymore.

Dave Miller: What do you see as the connection between this victimization narrative that you’re describing and actual public policies related to homelessness?

Hanna Brooks Olsen: That’s a really good question. One thing I would encourage everyone to  think about in their own life. There’s an idea called the ‘thick-skin’ bias and it basically is the idea that someone who is being marginalized can take it better than you can. What this does in public policy is it risks focusing benefits and attention on people who already have benefits and already get attention through policy because we perceive them as being in greater need. So this is how we end up with encampment sweeps that do not actually have any concrete way to help the people in those encampments. Because what that does is it removes the visible poverty which makes the people who live inside feel better. They don’t have to look at it anymore. But it doesn’t actually provide services to the people who are there. And I would also underscore, when we have encampment sweeps, where people are forced to leave the encampment they are living in, it’s really rare that those come along with ecological help. It is really rare that there are additional services to help them clean up the soil, to clean up the groundwater. So we’re also not helping the climate writ large by allowing these sorts of cosmetic changes.

Dave Miller: Before I say goodbye, I’m just curious, at the beginning, you said that this is not easy. It takes daily work to be empathetic. I’m curious what goes through your own mind now, how that work works itself out when you see an old RV parked on your block that you assume is somebody’s home.

Hanna Brooks Olsen: One thing I think is really, really helpful is to consider the impacts of poverty on poor people. There is a lot of research on the cognitive impacts of poverty and that living in scarcity makes people make poor choices. It severs them from society and not only that, but there’s some research to that came out of the University of Queensland in Australia, which found that when people felt that disdain from housed people, when homeless people feel that disdain, which by the way, they do feel. Even though you might have that thick-skin bias against them, they know you hate them, right? They’re not immune to that. They then remove themselves further from society. And who could blame them? I mean, it’s very hard to expect someone to walk half a mile to put their trash in a garbage can when everybody around them treats them like trash. Why you don’t have that same responsibility to society when society has let you down so much. So for me is a lot of thinking about it’s not as though this person is any different and it’s not as though they are choosing things that are hard for me to look at it. It’s that this is a person who has been so harmed by our structures and so beaten down that like this is just where they. You have to just meet people where they are and then figure out if you can help because you can’t expect or wish them to just be different because that already didn’t happen.

Dave Miller: Hanna Brooks Olsen, thanks for your time today. I appreciate it.

Hanna Brooks Olsen: Thank you so much.

Dave Miller: Hanna Brooks Olsen is a writer and political consultant. You can read her article on Medium.

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