If surveys and media commentary reflect public opinion, the problem of homelessness is regaining the attention it attracted during the '80s. Although recent concern is less over the plight of the homeless than over the burden of homelessness on the rest of society, the attention is heartening.
The conservative vanguard of this "backlash" identifies the problem as a public nuisance threatening communities with crime, infectious disease and begging; it contends that public policy is not the problem's cause (nor more public housing the solution) because the homeless cause their own condition. Their defining characteristic is not homelessness, a mere symptom by this analysis, but their pathological separation from mainstream society and support structures.To the contrary, over the past two decades, a number of public policy measures and other social factors have undeniably contributed to the snowballing epidemic of homelessness that continues today:
- Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill discharged 79 percent of the nation's public mental institution patients with inadequate provision for community care.
- Urban renewal displaced more than a million low-cost, single-room housing units during the '70s alone.
- Owing to an 80 percent cut in federal funds to low-income housing during the '80s, the nation was losing more than 500,000 low-rent units annually by the decade's end.
- 2.2 million workers were dislocated from their jobs in the early '80s, and the demand for production-line work and unskilled labor never rebounded after the recession of that period.
- The real value of the minimum wage dropped 31 percent through the '80s, while the value of the welfare grant for families (mostly the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program) fell 42 percent between 1972 and 1990.
The eroding incomes of poor Americans, combined with a shortage of affordable housing, caused homelessness for millions over the past decade.
Although many have become homeless solely because of low income and high housing costs, the vast majority have become homeless because their ability to compete for limited employment and/or housing slots was impaired by personal factors: drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, domestic violence (victims and abusers), etc.
The individual afflictions that keep people homeless are real. So are the contributing effects of public-policy decisions and economic changes that continue to fuel homelessness. A real solution must effectively address both the personal and the political causes.
When there is an adequate supply of affordable housing, residential substance abuse beds, treatment and care facilities for the mentally ill, job training and employment opportunities, and wages and income security for the disabled that leave no one living below the poverty line, then society can hold the homeless more accountable for their homelessness.