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I thought I saw my former Los Angeles neighbor, Sarah, in Lincoln recently. She was standing at the intersection of South 27th Street and Nebraska Parkway holding a cardboard sign. The placard said she was homeless. Still.
Obviously, it wasn’t Los Angeles Sarah, the name I gave to a woman who 40 years ago slept in doorways, panhandled in front of Quinn’s Grocery Store and wandered our middle-class neighborhood of duplexes, gift shops, restaurants and art galleries near the intersection of Melrose and La Cienega.
Although I spoke to her several times, she never responded nor acknowledged me, so I never actually met her or knew her real name. She was in her own world, one that seemed a million miles from the one in which she found herself. I wrote a piece about Sarah many years ago because of the impact she had on me.
Homelessness was the men at the hobo camp by the railroad tracks three blocks east of my home in Grand Island. I’d never been around people sleeping on bus stop benches, lying on sidewalks or pushing grocery carts around the city. People we walked around, stepped over and chose not to see. People like the young woman slowly meandering through our neighborhood.
Nebraska, where people do indeed experience homelessness, has, like much of the rest of the country, seen an uptick in rates. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Nebraska, after a drop in homelessness the previous 15 years, saw numbers begin to climb again in 2024.
Exact numbers are difficult to ascertain given the fluid nature of counting who is temporarily or permanently without shelter. Nor do the reasons families and individuals who experience homelessness fit into a neat formula.
According to advocates for the homeless — or, as some prefer, the unhoused — lacking shelter can be the result of a variety of factors by themselves or in combination, including a catastrophic medical diagnosis that wipes out savings, job loss, earnings unable to keep up with rising housing costs, drug or alcohol addiction, mental illness, a traumatic event or domestic violence. Advocates also tell us that many Americans are just a couple paychecks from homelessness.
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The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reports that of the nearly three quarters of a million people in the country who will experience homelessness on any given night, almost 275,000 of them will sleep on the streets. In Nebraska, winter weather increases the severity — up to and including death — for anyone facing a night without shelter.
What had brought the state’s homelessness numbers down was an increased civic commitment by groups from police departments to churches to aid agencies providing emergency housing and access to social services. The Alliance estimates 13 percent of the over 2,700 Nebraskans who may experience homelessness tonight, will sleep on the street. It also reports that in 2024, no community in America had enough permanent housing to serve everyone experiencing homelessness.
We might expect to see more Sarahs on street corners with cardboard signs as the headlines bode poorly for moving people from homelessness to finding permanent residence. We read last week that Americans, not those in other countries, are picking up 90% of the added costs brought about by a year of increased tariffs. The “affordability crisis” has hit housing costs particularly hard. The Urban Institute reports that monthly home payments have increased 40% in the last 25 years.
Advocates also remind us that solutions to slow the increase in numbers and move people from the streets and shelters into permanent residences will require a combination of efforts. Critical among them will be more affordable housing and expanded access to needed social services, neither of which carry much clout in today’s political milieu.
All of us can do one thing: Stop relying on stigmas about the homeless, many of which are founded on inaccurate or incomplete information. I had plenty of those when Sarah moved into my Los Angeles neighborhood. But a little research enlightened me.
Aside from the obvious — no one chooses homelessness — chief among the slings and slights the homeless face are loneliness and being invisible. That was four decades ago. My guess is that this reality remains the same, because nothing changes if nothing changes.
Sarah took to sleeping on the steps of a small theater around the corner from my house. It held live performances a couple times a week. She would wait until it was closed to carry her meager belongings, including a couple of ratty blankets, and sleep on the front steps behind the theater’s high wrought iron fence and gate.
Then Sarah disappeared. Curious, I checked at the theater. A heavy padlock was on the gate’s latch. She was locked out of her “home.” Ironic, I thought. In Nebraska we would have just gone next door.
We always left a spare key with the neighbors.
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