Causes of Homelessness: Overview

Like the villages in the following tale, America's first response to homelessness was to mobilize and confront the threat by targeting the immediate needs of the homeless:

We responded to the crisis with shelters and soup kitchens, spearheaded by private charitable organizations but frequently supported by public-sector dollars. We were like the villagers in the introductory tale, although our efforts were aimed not at fishing babies out of the water but at keeping them afloat. After a time, these efforts were accompanied by more tangible efforts to bring people to dry land. Outreach and case management programs were designed to reduce barriers to health and social services, for instance. Transitional housing programs were developed to teach skills and provide support to people as they moved into their own apartments. Such efforts became increasingly sophisticated, reflecting a growing sensitivity to the continuum of care required to stabilize homeless people.

America's walk to the river's edge began in the early 1980s, when people of the United States awoke to find that masses of homeless people had appeared in their midst, seemingly overnight. Homelessness was not a new phenomenon, of course. Periods of pervasive homelessness had checkered our nation's history, most recently in a post-World War II population consisting largely of single, older, white males who inhabited the skid row neighborhoods of our largest cities, where they drew upon a network of private sector resources, including missions, cubicle flophouses, and singleroom occupancy (SRO) hotels. However, the new homelessness that we awoke to was a different, far more jarring phenomenon. Whereas homeless individuals during that prior period had remained safely ghettoized in the isolated urban niches ceded to them, these new homeless people were everywhere, occupying spaces throughout the city, spilling into the suburbs, and appearing even in rural areas. Moreover, they looked different from the homeless people we had become accustomed to. They were younger, more ethnically diverse, and more likely to include parents with dependent children. Even worse, whereas the vast majority of “homeless” individuals of decades past had been housed, albeit marginally, this new population was literally homeless, bedding down in large congregate shelters or on the streets and in other locations not meant for sleeping. More visible and far greater in number, they invaded our public consciousness and daily existences in a way that had not occurred since the Great Depression.

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