During the past three decades, Margaret Miles (B.A. ’87) has interviewed hundreds of people experiencing homelessness. One woman stands out.

Faith looked, says Miles, “like what people used to call a ‘bag lady.’ She had her shopping cart full of individual bags full of who knows what. She dressed in multiple layers and had multiple hats on. She usually sat hunched over and wouldn’t make eye contact.”

At the time, Miles was serving as the director of development and communications at St. Stephen’s Human Services, which provides emergency shelter in Minneapolis. Miles—who studied English literature, world literature, and writing at the U of M—worked in various capacities for St. Stephens, including as interim executive director, from 1996 to 2014. Today she works as a consultant.

Through conversation with Faith, Miles and her coworkers learned that, while she suffered from mental health issues, much of her presentation amounted to a deliberate strategy. “She intentionally looked unapproachable for her own safety. She hid her precious belongings under all those other plastic bags,” Miles explains. “These were survival skills.”

Ultimately, Faith received medical treatment and moved into an apartment.

The lesson Miles took away was to approach people not with judgment, but curiosity. That spirit of curiosity has guided her work ever since.

Sharing stories from the street

Inspired in part by Faith’s story, Miles launched the Oral History of Homelessness in 2008. At the time, she frequently found herself relaying the stories of people in need to donors who could help. She figured, why not cut out the middleman and empower people to tell their own stories?

She worried that those already navigating the byzantine bureaucracy surrounding homelessness wouldn’t want to answer yet another set of questions. But it turns out that most were eager to talk.

“One woman said to me, ‘Sharing my story is painful. But if sharing my story means nobody else has to go through that pain, then I really want to participate.’”

Miles also recruited local photographers to shoot portraits. Many participants had lost treasured family photos at the same time they’d lost their homes. One woman, Miles recalls, posed with her 1-year-old child. It was the only photo of her baby she had.

The project culminated in a photo exhibit that included phone numbers connected to the subjects’ oral testimony. By the time the project wound down in 2012, Miles and her collaborators had collected some 500 interviews—making it one of the most extensive independent projects of its kind in the United States.

Miles received an Archie Green Fellowship with the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, a Bush Foundation Fellowship in the Arts, a Loft-McKnight Fellowship, Jerome Foundation travel and study grants, and Minnesota State Arts Board grants to help support her writing and work.

As a collective archive, Mile’s hopes her project helps pinpoint the socioeconomic roots of homelessness and dispels the notion that “homeless people” are a type; a homogenous group. “When I see people on the street, I think, ‘she is my sister, she’s my neighbor, she’s my mom, she’s somebody’s child.’” Insecure housing doesn’t discriminate.

In addition to interviewing unhoused people, Miles also recorded stories from the social workers, administrators, clergy, and outreach workers entrusted to help them. These tapes inspired her latest work, a book (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press) focusing on how the city of Minneapolis responded to a major homelessness crisis 45 years ago.

Looking back, pushing forward

In 1981, Miles says, the crisis came on “like a light switch.” The pastor at St. Stephens told her that he found himself literally stepping over sleeping bodies as he went to preach on Sunday mornings. A perfect storm, Miles explains, included rising housing costs, a stagnant minimum wage, and the elimination of affordable housing, such as the single-room occupancy hotels that once clustered in parts of Minneapolis.

The state also shrank key supports for low-income people, including a modest cash assistance program. Before these structural economic changes, most people could find housing.

“Maybe it wasn’t great, or dignified, or all the things that we hope for in a rental unit—but it was a place to be, right?” says Miles. “So homelessness just kind of exploded on the scene, and I’m telling the story of how that looked in Minneapolis.”

With a tradition of progressive politics—and bitterly cold winters—Minneapolis stepped up in ways others didn’t. For example, Miles cites a coalition of 13 churches that worked together to form an emergency shelter system in the early 1980s. “I have not found that kind of response in any other cities,” Miles says.

As she finishes the new book, Miles’ own home is getting a little quieter as she sends her son Louie off to college. Thirteen years ago, Miles and her wife, Cathy ten Broeke, made Minnesota history when they were the first same-sex couple to marry legally—on the stroke of midnight when the law took effect. They were among several couples whose vows were officiated by then-mayor R.T. Rybak on the steps of Minneapolis City Hall.

“[W]e were a symbol of that moment,” Miles says. “We felt very lucky.”

Miles hopes her work plays a part in removing luck as a factor in whether all Minnesotans can live in dignity and safety. Today, the United States is again facing a dramatic upsurge in housing instability as a housing shortage and declining earning power push more people into homelessness.

“What’s frustrating for people who do this work is that this has never been an unsolvable problem, should there be the political will,” Miles says. “It simply is about having a sufficient amount of housing in a variety that works for different people.”

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