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THE HOMELESS CRISIS

Homelessness in America

After the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society programs of the 1960s, many Americans believed that homelessness was no longer a serious problem in the United States; but in the 1980s the number of homeless Americans grew dramatically, and their plight came to be recognized as one of the leading social problems of the decade. Starting in the early 1980s homeless people—often called "street people"—became an increasingly frequent sight in New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Saint Louis; and most other major cities, as well as many smaller cities. Men and women of all ages, individuals and families from varied backgrounds and circumstances—shabbily dressed and inadequately nourished—began roaming city streets, sleeping on benches in summer and on heating grates or in crowded public shelters in winter. The sight of people who for one reason or another had "slipped between the cracks" of the system, fallen through the social safety nets designed to help those in crisis, tore at the conscience of what was still the richest country in the world, even in the recession-plagued early years of the 1980s. Estimates of the number of homeless people ranged from three hundred thousand or five hundred thousand to as many as 2 million or 3 million. Because, by definition, the homeless had no permanent addresses at which they could be contacted and counted, statistics were never reliable, but as the decade continued most observers believed that the number of homeless individuals was closer to the high range of 2 million to 3 million, and that the numbers were growing by something like 25 percent per year.

Public Awareness

As the crisis built, the issue of homelessness gained wide coverage in the media: television networks produced special reports and made-for-television movies; newspapers printed numerous stories and editorials; articles began to fill magazines and scholarly journals; academic studies were conducted and Congressional hearings held. One of the most important books on the subject was Michael Harrington's The New American Poverty (1984). Meanwhile, the issue of homelessness began to be framed by the growing affluence and conspicuous consumption of many more-fortunate Americans.

Families with Children

According to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, families with children, mostly women caring for children alone, were "the fastest growing segment of the homeless." The coalition estimated that the proportion of homeless people in families varied from 25 percent in some cities to 70 percent in others. Many homeless families were turned away from emergency shelters because of lack of space. According to a Providence, Rhode Island, official reporting in 1988 to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the emotional impact of homelessness on families included "fighting, fear, depression (acute or chronic), feelings of failure, and lack of stability.…These families are so beaten, it's almost to the point of self-abuse." In the same year a study of twenty-seven cities by the U.S. Conference of Mayors estimated that one in every four homeless people was under nineteen years of age. In his Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America (1988), Jonathan Kozol wrote that if all the homeless children in the country "were gathered in one city, they would represent a larger population than that of Atlanta, Denver, or St. Louis. Because they are scattered in a thousand cities, they are easily unseen."

Causes of Homelessness

Homelessness has been a problem throughout American history, particularly after the rise of urbanization and industrialization; but experts and officials who grappled with the problem in the early 1980s labored to explain why the homeless population in America had grown so large—and why it had grown so suddenly. The debate about the causes of this homelessness was politically charged and never fully resolved. Almost all participants agreed, however, that no single cause lay behind the crisis. Most advocates for the homeless were fierce critics of the Reagan administration, pointing to Republican economic and social policies as a principal agent in precipitating and aggravating the crisis. They blamed Republican-inspired cuts in social-welfare programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for pushing many individuals into the situation of being unable to make rent payments. Critics of the Republicans also decried dramatic cuts in federal assistance for subsidized low-income housing. Under the Reagan administration, the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was reduced from $36 billion in 1980, the last year of the Carter administration, to $14 billion in 1987.

Multiple Factors

At the same time, most people agreed that other economic forces also contributed to the homeless problem. For example, some of the homeless were working people whose low wages, frequently from mininum-wage jobs, did not allow them to keep up with the rising cost of living, much less the rising price of housing. Experts also pointed to a continuing nationwide decline in manufacturing jobs, which in many cases forced displaced workers to take lower-wage positions. Another factor compounding the homeless problem was the urban renewal and development projects that destroyed many old buildings, including the single-room-occupancy hotels (SROs) that had been subsidized by cities to provide housing for low-income people, particularly the elderly. Furthermore, there was gentrification, the process whereby old buildings and neighborhoods that provided low-income housing were converted to condominiums and cooperatives, frequently for the young urban professionals who were moving in increasing numbers into the cities, reversing an earlier trend of suburbanization. In rural areas the farm crisis of the 1980s, in which thousands of farmers lost their farms and their homes, contributed to the stream of the homeless heading for cities in search of work. The homeless population was certainly increased by the "deinstitutionalization" of mental patients that began in 1960s and 1970s. Well-intentioned laws designed to guard mentally ill people from involuntary commitment to institutions except under clearly defined conditions resulted in the release of many patients who, unable to care for themselves, often ended up living in the streets. Some officials claimed deinstitutionalization was possibly the leading cause of homelessness; this claim was hotly contested by others, who viewed it as a means of shrugging off responsibility for the situation.

Activism

As homelessness grew through the 1980s, many homeless advocacy groups lobbied city, state, and federal officials, urging both short- and long-term measures to meet the burgeoning problems of the homeless. The most prominent of these groups was the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV), headed by Mitch Snyder, a former advertising executive who campaigned throughout the 1980s on behalf of the homeless. Abandoning his own family and taking up residence in a homeless shelter, he led many nonviolent protests aimed at increasing public awareness and ameliorating the conditions of homeless people. In 1984 he engaged in a hunger strike to secure an abandoned federal building in Washington, D.C., for use as a homeless shelter. President Reagan acceded to his demands. In 1989 Snyder led the "Housing Now!" march on Washington, in which 250,000 people participated. His activities were the subject of a 1985 made-for-television movie, Samaritan, starring Martin Sheen. Snyder committed suicide in 1990.

Other Responses

On the front lines of the homeless crisis, most cities, to meet at least the minimum daily needs for food and housing, worked hard to maintain and even expand their systems of emergency public shelters. Existing shelters, which had met the needs of the homeless for years, were inadequate to the demands of the 1980s dilemma. Cities also contracted with commercial hotels, sometimes called "welfare hotels," to provide temporary accommodations for homeless families. At the same time many churches and synagogues set up "soup kitchens" and sometimes provided limited shelter. Volunteer organizations joined the effort to provide assistance, and charitable organizations such as the Salvation Army and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and relief organizations such as the American Red Cross, Catholic Charities USA, and the Children's Defense Fund also helped.

Federal Responses

As for the federal government, President Reagan seldom publicly addressed the issue of homelessness. In a remark reported by The New York Times in December 1988 Reagan said that many of the homeless "are homeless…you might say, by choice," a remark that seemed to typify his response to the issue through his two terms in office. For its part, Congress held hearings about the homeless crisis and passed several pieces of legislation, the most significant of which was the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, reluctantly signed into law by President Reagan in 1987. The McKinney Act, the first comprehensive federal legislation designed to combat homelessness, authorized the spending of __BODY__ billion in 1987 and 1988 (only $600 million was actually appropriated) and included twenty provisions for homeless aid, including emergency-shelter funds, health care, job training, and the establishing of the Interagency Council on the Homeless to coordinate federal programs assisting the homeless.

No Simple Solutions

As the decade progressed, so did the crisis. In a 1989 poll reported in The New York Times, 65 percent of those responding favored greater federal spending on homelessness. But despite increased national awareness of the crisis and various legislative and charitable efforts to alleviate its severity, the numbers of homeless people remained large. While the nature of the problem and its solutions continued to be debated, public attention to the issue began to wane. A front-page New York Times article in 1990 reported, "A decade after the vast numbers of homeless people began to be seen on New York City's streets, officials and advocates fear that homelessness has become embedded in the city's life for the foreseeable future."