Women, homelessness and Skid Row

I woke up early this morning, ate half a bag of Cheetos (seriously, they put Wotsits to shame, I plan on bringing as many packets of these back with me as possible), and attempted to process the mammoth amount of information that I took in from my second day at the Downtown Women’s Centre. I feel like before I go any further, or indeed stuff my face with yet more Cheetos, I need to re-wind and set the scene a little on women’s homelessness in the US and on Skid Row specifically, some of the issues women face, the services available to them, and how this differs from the UK.

In the US women can be homeless as a family, accompanied by their children, or be single, or to use the US term, ‘unaccompanied’ homeless. This is a key difference to the UK context as families with children are deemed as statutory homeless, and are therefore priority need for housing support. In the UK therefore, our homelessness provision only has to cover single or ‘unaccompanied’ women, in the US it has to cover EVERYONE; there is no statutory/non statutory division. It seems like resources for women then, have to be spread very thinly.

The Downtown Women’s Centre is based in the heart of Downtown LA, on the notorious skid row, and a survey they conducted in 2016 found that the majority of women there are as described above, unaccompanied by children (although they are still classed as homeless, women in families have broader access to shelter and housing than unaccompanied women). Before I came here, I knew that Skid row would be a pretty stark indicator of the sheer scale of  homelessness in LA, compared to in the UK, but on my first day walking up 5th street to get to the women’s centre, I was still astonished at the number of street, or to use the US term, ‘unsheltered’ women I saw. It is well known that in the UK homeless women are likely to stay hidden for longer, exhausting all options before they end up on the streets. Walking up 5th street that day, I wondered how many options these women had had available to them, and began to realise that it was very few.

A chat with Angel, the manager of the day centre at Downtown confirmed that homeless women on Skid Row experience many of the same issues as women in the UK. They are more likely than men to have experienced ongoing violence, trauma and abuse across their lives, experienced the loss of children, and to have worse mental health. What is different though, is how in the US these issues are compounded by lack of options, which for unaccompanied women boil down to either the streets, or a temporary bed in an emergency shelter (dormitory style and very short term - not comparable to hostels in the UK). Women on skid row are also more likely to be older, 48% of those surveyed were aged 51-61, so physical health then is likely to be much more of a concern (and no NHS?!?).  Most of the women are also African-American, which serves as a crucial reminder of the long term effects of institutionalised racism, and the way it  intersects with poverty and disadvantage.

So how does Downtown ‘do’ Housing First to address the complex and varied needs of the women that they serve? I’ll come back to that…....I’m definitely going to need more Cheetos.