Homelessness in Hyannis

BARNSTABLE, MASS.—Most postcards sent from my hometown feature John F. Kennedy ’40 squinting into the sun, haloed by a swath of sail, or sand dunes tumbling toward the water, girdled by a snow fence or bearded men in sou’westers clutching lobsters that are the over-enthusiastic red of Chinese takeout spareribs. Here on the biceps of Cape Cod, where much of the year-round population of 48,000 devotes itself to fleecing summer visitors, there is money to be made in the picturesque.

This idealized landscape is a big part of the reason why, on July 15, the Barnstable Department of Public Works dismantled six ramshackle homeless camps nestled in the woods of Hyannis, that most urban of Barnstable’s seven villages. The operation removed one and a half tons of trash and displaced an estimated two-dozen people.

Businesspeople and social services workers had debated the move a few days before in a meeting punctuated by slides of soiled toilet paper deposited near the camps and a local booster’s accusation that the Housing Assistance Corporation “attracted” homeless people to Hyannis with its services. It was town councilor Gary Brown, however, who spoke for the business community.

“We value every man and woman. I want to help people out,” the Cape Cod Times quoted councilor Brown as saying. “But at some point, there are priorities. Our children are our priority. We have a business community and a tourist industry, and both are being hurt by these camps.”

The children whom councilor Brown invoked were, of course, a school of red herrings. Barnstable’s priority is not its natives; the business community’s concerns lie elsewhere. Even the most energetic public relations effort by the aforementioned booster, the doyen of the Hyannis Main Street Business Improvement District and Hyannis’ leading Babbitt, cannot reconcile the Kennedy Compound with the homeless camp, the lobster-wielding old salt with the shuffling transient and the undulating sand dunes with the drifts of tiny liquor bottles that sanitation workers shoveled into dump trucks in mid-July. The homeless camps hurt the tourist industry; the homeless camps had to go.

Razing the camps did nothing, of course, to solve the underlying problem of homelessness on Cape Cod. Some of those living in the camps were alcoholics; since no Cape Cod homeless shelter allows alcohol— a so-called “wet” shelter in Hyannis has met with stiff opposition—these people have few housing options. Some of those who had been living in the camps were released from mental institutions in the de-institutionalization movement of the 1970s, and struggle with their mental health. Although local charities such as the Salvation Army provided emergency lodging for some of those displaced by the dismantling of the camps, they could provide neither the long-term housing nor the counseling that the former residents of the homeless camps so desperately need. There is no denying the camps were unpleasant, but removing them without making plans to address the larger problem of persistent homelessness is as archaic a remedy as bleeding a patient to combat an infection.

In a recent editorial, the Cape Cod Times—the Cape’s only daily paper—argues for the removal of the Hyannis homeless shelter from its current location. “If plans proceed to move the Cape’s only overnight shelter and related medical services from their downtown locations to a site further out of town—or even to another town—the prospect of some of the homeless panhandling on Main Street, sleeping on the village green and urinating on the sidewalks, may become less convenient,” the Times editorialized.

Like the platoon of Babbitts who succeeded in having the homeless camps removed from Hyannis, the Cape Cod Times seems to believe that removing homeless people from tourists’ view will resolve the problem of homelessness—that the only problem with homelessness is its unattractiveness and its undermining of the Cape’s bucolic image.

In an interview the Cape Cod Times conducted the day after the city hauled away the remains of the six camps, a homeless woman complained: “We’re not bothering anyone This town doesn’t want the homeless here. They are trying to get us all off the Cape.” Like an aging courtesan, Barnstable is learning the danger of relying on its looks for a living—and like an aging courtesan, it has yet to learn that handsome is as handsome does.

Phoebe M.W. Kosman ’05, a Crimson editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. She is currently working on the railroad, where people from Connecticut patronize her. In her spare time, she watches tourists struggle with rotaries.