No fixed address?
To be a citizen, you have to be visible. To be visible, you have to be locatable within the formal system. Throughout history, that visibility has meant ownership of land or real property. Since time immemorial, citizenship has been connected to land, especially in English common law, running back from the English 1832 Reform Act and even Magna Carta, which stood among other things for the proposition that a ‘large enough’ land holding entitled one to vote.
All of us here represent the landowners
Since then, societies have used many different proxies for voting status, of which the principal one has always been, where do you live? It has its legitimacy: because place is fixed, address is verifiable, and a person should have only one primary residence. (Even today, to open a
So prevalent is this association – adobe = citizenship – that among our euphemisms for vagrancy is ‘no fixed address.’
Addresses also matter not solely for their symbolism but as the channel by which the formal sector – including government – reaches to the informal. Lack of an address cuts you off from benefits, and is yet another barrier to escaping homelessness. Now technology is changing that, as profiled in the Washington Post:
On D.C. Streets, the Cellphone as Lifeline
Homeless People Turn to Technology to Track Assistance and Opportunities
To the usual trappings that help many homeless people endure life on the streets — woolen blankets, shopping carts or cardboard box shelters — add the humble cellphone.
Today, it’s not unusual for the homeless to whip out Nokia 6085 GoPhones (with optional Bluetooth and USB connectivity), stop at a public computer to check e-mail or urge friends to read their blogs.
Despite being homeless, Gwendolyn Bell manages to keep a cellphone. “A cellphone is the only way you can call to keep up with your food stamps, your housing application, your job,” says Rommel McBride, who spent six years on the streets.
Ms. Bell’s cellphone also demonstrates another principle of housing finance ecosystems: people will pay for what they want to consume, not what you give them for free.
[S]ome conservative commentators … bemoaned a society where people who don’t have homes can afford mobile phones.
We all choose what we can afford. Used properly, cell phones are invaluable.
Conversely, once you can contact an individual, here or she has existence and psychological proximity even if she’s separated by a half-dozen time zones. When you call a colleague on his or her cell phones, how often is your first question, Where are you?
We’ve gotta stay connected
Once reliable contact is established, people gain formal visibility, which gives them political legitimacy.
It’s another sign of a society in transition by way of technology, as businesses shed physical addresses for cyberspace and homeless people can establish an online presence and chase opportunities digitally.
The cell phone is generation-skipping technology, and it’s revolutionizing the world even faster than is the Internet.
“Having a phone isn’t even a privilege anymore — it’s a necessity,” said Rommel McBride, 50, who spent about six years on the streets before recently being placed in a city housing program. He has had a mobile phone for a year. “A cellphone is the only way you can call to keep up with your food stamps, your housing application, your job. When you’re living in a shelter or sleeping on the streets, it’s your last line of communication with the world.”
Throughout history, we’ve tended to punish poverty (by throwing people into work houses, for example) and thus made it impossible for people in poverty to escape from it. To be saved from economic drowning, you have to be visible to the lifeboat.
We’re getting a strong signal now
Advocates who work with the District’s homeless estimate that 30% to 45% of the people they help have cellphones. A smaller number have e-mail accounts, and some blog to chronicle their lives on the streets.
As communications technology gets cheap, communications use skyrockets. In terms of urban planning and civic society, this is an unalloyed good thing.
“Phones are really a lifeline for many people,” said Adam Rocap, director of social services at Miriam’s Kitchen, a nonprofit drop-in center for the homeless. During a string of attacks against homeless people sleeping downtown in the fall, two victims called 911 for help after they were assaulted, he said.
Cell phones enable people to form networks, and to tap the formal networks.
At Miriam’s Kitchen this month, dozens of cellphones snapped to attention and captured photos of first lady Michelle Obama when she stopped by to serve lunch.
A patron of Miriam’s Kitchen uses a cellphone to take a photo of first lady Michelle Obama as she helps serve lunch. “Phones are really a lifeline for many people,” says Adam Rocap, director of social services at Miriam’s Kitchen.
But the technology is advancing so quickly that a simple cellphone is fairly cheap. At the Communication Connection, a store at
The $29.95 Samsung A500 comes with 200 minutes. The H2O Wireless is $20 with 200 free minutes. There is no bill to pay. Once the minutes are gone, owners can return to the store and add time for about 10 cents a minute.
“Sometimes, they pay [for minutes] with cups of coins,” Camp said.
Given that each minute is hard-earned, there is a brisk economy to the way many calls are conducted. “It’s ‘Hello. How you doin’? Okay. Goodbye,’ click. You don’t get but a minute of my phone time,” said McBride, who uses his phone primarily to set up face-to-face conversations, rather than chat his minutes away.
My colleague David Porteous is part of the effort to pioneer mobile banking. Even as the phone is an information lifeline, it can be a financial lifeline as well – particularly as money becomes ever more abstract, informational rather than tangible.
Some get their phones from relatives who want to know they have a way of staying in contact. Ronald Collins-El, 45, got one from his nephew. While he stays at the homeless shelter on the campus of St. Elizabeths, he uses it to keep in touch with family members and to organize his numerous medical appointments, payments and bills.
Ronald Collins-El is homeless and utilizes three cell phones, one of which he uses for a phone book.
Cell phones make possible extended family networks. The phone answered by your relative is a phone not resold for drugs, and a link back to the family.
“When I was married and housed, I had a cellphone,” he said. “I still have a life even though I don’t have a house.”
Or take the case of Chris, 42, a recovering crack cocaine addict who asked that his last name not be used because he keeps his homelessness a secret from his employers.
Chris got an entry-level job at
Reliability means connectivity. Until the coming of cell phones, ground phones meant domiciles. Or the boarding house pay phone.
Look, kid, I got an important ransom-note call to make, can I get some privacy?
This time, he got a pay-as-you-go cellphone and gave his boss the number. “I live up near the Capitol — give me a call anytime if you need extra hands,” he told his employer, being vague about where he bedded down each night.
He received numerous calls to come in early or to work an extra shift. After less than a year on the job, he was promoted. “No one there knows I’m homeless,” he said. “I would never have been able to do this without the cellphone.”
As a substitute for permanent housing, might the cell phone be an electronic lifeline out of the poverty trap?
“When I was married and housed, I had a cellphone,” says Ronald Collins-El, who uses three phones. “I still have a life even though I don’t have a house.”
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