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 50 years by specific decisions about housing, hospitals, and budgets, which is precisely why it can be reversed.
The word "homelessness" is old. It entered American use in the 1870s to describe itinerant "tramps" looking for work. At the time, 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 still mostly explained as a matter of personal character. Researchers saw life on Skid Row itself as relatively permanent.
The old homelessness was cyclical and reversible. What replaced it after 1980 was structural. The new homelessness 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. By 1985, New York City had eliminated more than 100,000 SRO units. The city had a tax program meant to encourage converting SRO units into higher-rent apartments. According to a State Assembly study, the program eliminated nearly two-thirds of the remaining SRO stock between 1976 and 1981 alone.
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 vanishing housing. In the language of the time, it called the loss an "SRO crisis." Between 1970 and 1982, about 1.1 million single-room units disappeared. That was nearly half the national stock.
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 the federal money committed to subsidized housing was cut and recession hit, a different kind of homelessness appeared. Families, women, and younger, 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. That was one of the first times a mass audience saw an estimate of how large the city's modern homelessness was.
The Callahan consent decree required New York City to provide shelter to homeless men. The decree was 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 set 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 in 1982. (The Reagan administration stayed publicly silent on the issue until 1984.)
The federal money committed to subsidized housing is called budget authority. In constant dollars, it was about $82 billion at its 1978 peak. In the early 1980s it was cut by more than half, 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. The law at last treated the crisis 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 became homeless all at once, in the 1980s. The root causes are about housing and money. The other factors made an already-collapsing foundation worse.
Modern homelessness is about 50 years old. It began when we tore down the cheap housing, cut the budgets, and emptied the hospitals.
That history is the most hopeful fact about it. Homelessness is not a fixed feature of our neighbors' character. It's a condition we made by choosing what to fund and build. The same choice is what ends it.
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