Family Separations and Reunifications

Wars and natural disasters that uproot and displace whole communities produce both homelessness and family dispersal. But in twentieth-century urban America, losses of home and family usually occur under the more insidiously destructive conditions of poverty, discrimination, and disability. Understanding the varied processes linking homelessness to the rupture of family ties in these contexts must be part of any effort to avert both kinds of losses and the suffering they entail.

Homelessness in the United States changed markedly in the last half of the twentieth century. In the decades after 1950, urban skid rows were populated by men whose lack of family and other intimate ties, limited participation in the labor market, and residence in nonconventional “flophouse” or single-room occupancy dwellings, bespoke a disaffiliation from mainstream life and institutions. Indeed, contemporaneous notions of homelessness assumed such a disengagement. Though skid row residents were poor, their poverty was usually described as a by-product of the disaffiliation that infused their personalities and lifestyles. By the 1980s, however, the global deployment of capital to low-wage regions of the world, and its effects on the industrial economies of U.S. cities, had pushed many more persons into poverty. With both affordable housing and entitlement benefit dollars shrinking rapidly, urban poverty generated a growing population of homeless or marginally sheltered individuals. Meanwhile, related changes increased that population's diversity: shifts in the gender and race structure of the labor force, immigration patterns, and family organization. Those on the streets or seeking shelter included rising numbers of women and people of color, as well as individuals with psychiatric problems and drug addiction. The most striking change was the growth of family homelessness, as exemplified in New York City, where the number of sheltered families—usually single mothers and their children—increased by a factor of 160: from 30 in 1969 to 5,000 in 1985. These new demographics challenged prior understandings of homelessness as an outgrowth of disaffiliation, even as they reflected the new hardships faced by poor families.