People have always fallen into poverty. But the mass, visible homelessness we know today is not ancient and not inevitable. It was assembled over roughly fifty years by specific decisions about housing, hospitals, and budgets, which is precisely why it can be reversed.
The word "homeless" is old; it entered American use in the 1870s to describe itinerant "tramps" looking for work, and the conversation was about character and morality, not housing.
For the next century, homelessness rose and fell with the economy. It spiked in the Great Depression, then World War II and the postwar boom pulled it back toward a baseline. It was mostly explained as a matter of personal character, and researchers saw life on Skid Row as relatively permanent.
The old homelessness was cyclical and reversible. What replaced it after 1980 was structural, and it never fell back to the old level.
Long before homelessness made headlines, the housing of last resort was being demolished, deliberately. The country's mental hospitals were emptied, and many of the people who left them landed in that same cheap housing.
"Slum clearance" and downtown redevelopment demolished the single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels that housed the poorest urban residents for a few dollars a night. New York City caused the loss of more than 100,000 SRO units by 1985, and a city tax program meant to encourage converting SRO units into higher-rent apartments eliminated nearly two-thirds of the remaining SRO stock between 1976 and 1981 alone, according to a State Assembly study.
State psychiatric hospitals released hundreds of thousands of patients. In New York, the state psychiatric-center population fell from about 85,000 to 27,000 between 1965 and 1979, but the community housing and care that were supposed to replace the hospitals were mostly never built.
The press was already documenting the disappearing housing, under the old vocabulary. Between 1970 and 1982, about 1.1 million single-room units, nearly half the national stock, disappeared.
A U.S. General Accounting Office study called the lack of affordable rental housing a "nationwide crisis" affecting "millions of Americans." The same year, the Callahan v. Carey lawsuit was filed in New York on behalf of homeless men.
As federal housing dollars were cut and recession hit, a different kind of homelessness appeared. Families, women, younger and more diverse people became homeless, and many slept in the open rather than in flophouses. Suddenly it was front-page news.
A page-one New York Times article publicized early field research by Ellen Baxter and Kim Hopper, one of the first times the modern scale of street homelessness was quantified for a mass audience.
The Callahan consent decree required New York City to provide shelter to homeless men: the first such guarantee in any U.S. city, and an early signal that homelessness was now a permanent government concern.
Rebecca Smith, 61, a former college valedictorian who had lived with schizophrenia, froze to death in a cardboard shelter on a New York street. Her death became a front-page story and helped fix the image of a "new," more diverse homeless population in the public mind.
Grassroots activists, big-city mayors, and members of Congress began insisting homelessness was a national emergency. The National Coalition for the Homeless was organized this year. (The Reagan administration stayed publicly silent on the issue until 1984.)
Budget authority for subsidized housing peaked at about $82 billion in 1978 (in constant dollars) and was cut by more than half in the early 1980s, even as the recession and stagnant wages pushed more families to the edge.
National news coverage of homelessness hit its high point. Congress passed the Stewart B. McKinney Act, the first major federal homeless-assistance law, treating the crisis, at last, as a federal responsibility.
Schematic of news coverage volume, illustrative of the documented trend, not exact article counts.
The popular story blamed individuals: addiction, mental illness, "bad choices." The structural story explains the timing: why so many people, all at once, in the 1980s. The roots are about housing and money. The rest compounded an already-collapsing foundation.
Modern homelessness is about fifty years old. It began when we tore down the cheap housing, cut the budgets, and emptied the hospitals, not because some people are permanently destined for the street.
That history is the most hopeful fact about it. The same choice that created the crisis, what we choose to fund and build, is the choice that ends it. Communities that have rebuilt that housing have driven their numbers down. Homelessness is not a fixed feature of our neighbors' character. It's a condition we made, and one we can choose to undo.
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