Odd dream...

Got a lot of money and a car in my dream--something I'm anticipating for some reason--and was downtown looking for a decent restaurant.  Only, it wasn't exactly Phoenix, Arizona.  It was a desert city on a grid and the area I was in had a lot of empty lots.  Anyway, I helped out someone that may have been homeless by giving them my pre-packed lunch.

I had stopped at a convenience store for something.  The convenience store was in an older, commercial area and was directly in front of an out-of-use commercial building, beside another which was still in use, and a large yard containing CONEX's, short sections of concrete traffic barriers, crates of this-that-and-the-other-thing, and a large number of pallets.

One thing led to another, and I found out there was a small group of them including a (putative) couple where the woman was pregnant, a guy that looked like a young Buddy Hackett, and some others.  In the process of being friendly, they raided my backpack and acquired some small bags of chips I had in there and one or two other things. 

I noticed a large, padded piece of cardboard that might be useful to them and pointed it out.  It was for packing and was probably about the area of a full-sized bed but only a few inches thick.  They pointed out it would be hard to carry around.  For some reason, I got the idea of wrapping it in plastic, tying a cord to one end, and storing it in a narrow vertical space, like between two buildings.  My thoughts were, it might be useful for a week or two.  They turned the idea down without thinking about it too much.

I was about to go when the manager of the business beside the store offered some of them some shelter in exchange for moving some of the short sections of traffic barrier inside.  I think he was primarily looking at the pregnant girl. 

The whole group sprang into action, manually manhandling the big concrete sections across the ground to the entrance of the working warehouse.  I don't know why, but I wanted to help.  I looked around for a lever and some form of skid or wheeled anything.  I found a low-slung wheeled trolley that would work, but I couldn't convince them to try and use it.  (Primarily, it was the guy that looked like Buddy Hackett.)

By this time, however, they had moved enough of them and the manager was happy.  He let in the pregnant women, another young woman, and the putative father.  Then, he closed the door and left the others outside.

Anyway, what it really got me thinking about were four things:

First, the lack of a durable social group among the homeless.  Personally, I saw them as a group when I walked up.  I expected them to function as a group.  The emotional read I got was that they were socially connected, but the end result was a complete focus on themselves and that was accepted by others.

Second, I really noticed the willingness to violate some of my expected personal boundaries and social norms.  This isn't any surprise for anyone who's had a lot of interaction with at least subsets of homeless people, but, hey!  It was my dream and my homeless people.

Third, I recognized that--at least as far as I've had real-life interactions with homeless people--and from conversations with others that have or have been homeless, they have an ongoing problem accumulating the "stuff" they need to survive and maintaining control over it.

Fourth, I contrasted them with what I learned this last semester about hunter-gatherer groups.  Both share a similar "problem"--lack of a static living situation, a very finite limit on what they can carry, and less control temporally on what resources they have available.

Then, I woke up.

My question is--and I would need to do a literature review to approach this--is how much of the homeless problem is simply the inability to form durable, interdependent social groups?

I mean, if social bonds (and social norms) are strongest between people who are the most familiar, have the ability to build reputations and reciprocal altruistic interactions, and have shared investment in mutual endeavors, could part of the homeless problem simply be a structural problem? 

Obviously, the reasons behind the breakdown of group building (or durability) could and probably are psychological--the effects of drug use on decision-making, for example, or simple mental illness--and I would need to identify or at least discriminate which group(s)/demographic(s) have this issue and why, but it's an interesting thesis.

Something to do while I wait for job offers...