NCJ Number
123417
Journal
Contemporary Drug Problems Volume: 16 Issue: 3 Dated: (Fall 1989) Pages: 281-300
Date Published
1989
Length
20 pages
Annotation
New forms of community housing must be developed for homeless alcoholics, where they can live in comfort and safety, receive voluntary treatment, recover, and have long-term care in the case of chronic alcoholism.
Abstract
Alcoholics among the "new homeless" are modern versions of people once called "whisky bummers." Traditionally, having exhausted what family they had, homeless drunks were managed by saloon keepers; hotel and flophouse clerks; beat cops; missionaries; and turnkeys and attendants in city prisons, county jails, almshouses, general hospitals, and State asylums. For various reasons, these forms of housing for the alcoholic have been reduced or eliminated. New or revised forms of housing must be developed for homeless alcoholics. This might include community-based surrogates for the State hospital. This could take the form of recovery homes, which provide residential treatment on demand. Community development plans should include provisions for nonprofit cooperatives inhabited by recovering alcoholics and their families for as long as they choose to stay or as long as they can abide by the basic rules of cooperation. Humane management is perhaps the best that can be done for the homeless chronic alcoholic. One approach is to renovate surviving single-room-occupancy hotels and build similar kinds of housing operated in a sensitive and flexible manner. 34 notes.