Remark: Sociologists and Researchers differenciate between the terms “homeless” and “chronically homeless”. Furthermore there are two
dimensions of homelessness – long-term ( and near-tearm (six month) homelessness.
Background:
Although visible and widespread homelessness emerged
unexpectedly in San Francisco in 1982, its causes are not a mystery. Events
that occurred in the preceding decade are:
- The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency destroyed thousands of low-cost single room occupancy hotels in the South of Market for "urban renewal."
- The City's Rehabilitation Assistance program (RAP) forced thousands of low-income tenants to leave the upper Haight-Ashbury, initiating a gentrification process that would virtually eliminate privately owned low-cost housing in the neighborhood.
- The City's Planning Department reported that over 6,000 single room occupancy units were lost from 1975-79, and another 1,700 from 1981-88.
- Rapidly increasing real estate values led to significant increases in rent citywide and displacement of low-income tenants through neighborhood gentrification.
- The statewide mental health system steadily declined and board-and-care homes were converted to market-rate homes, rental housing, or condominiums.
- The federal government responded to these events, which also occurred in similar forms throughout America's major cities, by sharply reducing the availability of subsidized housing. Thus, as the gap between people's incomes and housing costs widened, federal housing policy failed to intervene to prevent rising homelessness.
Idea | How can SNA
help with this problem?
The idea is to create an efficient
and low-cost opportunity to identify,
interact, integrate and (re)-incorporate homeless people who are out on
the streets of San Francisco into the community and society while meticulously
keeping track of the homeless population to better react in case of incidence,
to provide help and assistance (medical treatments, social work, insurance
etc.) and setting up strategies to
minimize the expenses of the City of San Francisco (especially because the city
is receiving federal funds for
homelessness form the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development - It costs $87 per day to incarcerate someone in the county jail - but it costs only $28 per day to shelter them ).
The idea is to develop a reliable
system for use by the city, non-profits and interested parties to track the use
of homeless services such as med treatments for drug and acohol addicts,
shelter space, etc.
“Sitting or lying on the sidewalk can result in a ticket. There are few public restrooms, but urinating on the street can result in a ticket. There are no showers, but anyone caught washing up in the library bathroom could be banned from the premises. Sleeping in a park overnight is illegal.” - (Source: http://www.sfbg.com/2014/03/25/san-franciscos-untouchables?page=0,1)Moreover, the next step would be to develop an app which would help the homeless people (yes, they do have phones!) to get an overview of any related information homeless people need. (e.g free and upcoming events for museums, public lectures, sports; opening hours for med treatments; stores or locations where organizations give away second-hand/used cloth, about free laundry places, places which give away food, where homeless can find legal support, free pre-school/daycare for children of homeless parents etc.)
Network Data
Collection - What data do you need?
Finding data for the challenge is
not a very difficult. Non-Profit-Organizations, the City of San Francisco and
the local newspapers are pretty well organized when it comes to data collection
in the past years.
For compiling up-to-date data
volunteers could go out on the streets –
labeled as such to show seriosity and provide at least little safety for the
people volunteering, e.g mobile phones could be carried by each volunteer to
ease communication between the helpers and function as a safety tool – and collectively find and
interview homeless about their race, name, age, maritial status, heritage
(birth certificates if legal due to data privacy and security), family members,
cause of homelessness and most common places they live and hang out on the
streets.
Additionally, a personal network
survey could be designed similar to a survey which was conducted by Clyde
Mitchell among homeless women and decribed in Social Networks in 1987.
(Source: Mitchell
JC. The components of strong ties among homeless women. Social Networks.
1987;9(1):37–47)
This type of survey has four modules. First, the homeless will provide
information about themselves such as age and gender. In this module, additional
information on drug use and drinking/sexual behaviours and attitudes will be collected, providing the necessary
non-structural variables. Second, the homeless will provide information with a
list of 20 network members, following standard personal network data collection
methods, which have shown that 20 alters is adequate to assess the variability
in network structure and composition.
To address ethical concerns associated with the ability to
identify those who appear as secondary participants via the profiles the
homeless provided in the social network section of our survey, the data can be
only consistent of the first names and the first letter of the last name for
the 20 adult network members.
In the third survey section, the homeless will provide
information about their network members, including but not limited to
demographics, provision of social support and the respondent’s perceptions of
the network members’ engagement in substance use and risky drinking/sexual
behaviours. In the final module, a homeless reports his perception of the level
of interaction among his network members. The third and fourth modules will
provide data we use calculate social network composition and fragmentation,
respectively.
Furthermore, the volunteers could
check the data against with the cities registry offices, the San Francisco Homeless
Count & Survey plus any other records such as studies from the National Law
Center on Homeless and Poverty, the FBI, the California Department of Justice
etc. provided by research groups or faculties of San Francisco’s universities
such as the “California’s New Vagrancy Laws: The Growing Enactment and
Enforcement of Anti-Homeless Laws in the Golden State”. (Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2558944)
Further Questions
·
What are the specifics of homeless and chronically
homeless people?
·
Is there any homelessness transition from
near-term to long-term homelessness?
What will be the most
important network measures?
Network
Fragmentation:
The number of network members who were unconnected to
respondent’s other alters (isolates), the number of small groups of two (dyads)
and the number of groups of three or more network members (components
greater/equal 3), because high numbers of isolates and dyads, plus low numbers
of groups of any size larger than 2 indicate network fragmentation.
Across all network members and
within subgroups of network members thought to drink alcohol to intoxication,
use drugs, have risky sex etc.
Social Network Composition:
Because all respondents will
report 20 network members and because it is interesting to see the overall
impact of the number of network members who are proactive and risky, the SNA
will be able to compare the count of network members who were reported to have
specific characteristics or were reported to have been met in particular social
environments: to indentify support available in men’s and women’s networks, the
number of family members, sex partners and other homeless individuals in the
network will be counted.
To gauge proactive peers, the
number of alters thought to be “responsible”, who “cared for the respondent”
and who would “provide assistance” to the respondent “no matter what” will be
counted.
Subgroups:
Indentification of clusters to
see among whom there are realtively strong, direct, intense an/or positive
ties”.
Hypothesis: Significant
differences between women and men groups
Questions: Are there specific
race-related subgroups?
Density Measures:
Is
the density higher than one or 0? Are the homeless well committed? How many
people do they know amongst themselves? Who do they stick to?
Closeness
Centrality:
Useful measure because the
concept of homeless people in SF does not require direct ties. Measurement of
indepence form control of others.
In
terms of near-term homelessness, being continuously homeless may be associated
with increased exposure to high-risk individuals and decreased exposure to
protective or supportive individuals. Specifically continuous, near-term
homelessness will be associated with greater proportions of risky network
members like drug users and sexual risk takers, and lesser proportions of
supportive network members like family. Further, we propose that because the
people e.g. a homeless man interacts with changes rapidly while they are on the
street, chronic homelessness is more strongly associated with network structure
than it is with network composition
(Source: Calsyn RJ, Morse GA. Predicting chronic
homelessness. Urban Affairs Review. 1991;27(1):155–164)
So, for example men who are
chronically homeless will have more fragmented networks than those not
chronically homeless, as evidenced by more isolated network members (isolates)
and groups of two (dyads) and fewer groups of three or more in the networks of
chronically homeless men, both overall and among risky subgroups of their
networks.
Sources
