Small groups of people tending to makeshift structures of an encampment, disheveled men rummaging through garbage cans for food, and young women with small children lining up outside of shelters have become common sights across the world’s leading cities. This widespread growth in homelessness has been linked with economic, demographic, and cultural trends that have come to be known as “globalization”—the spread of manufacturing and financial activity across borders, heightened immigration, and the global ascendance of neoliberal ideology which favors free markets over government intervention. However, it is clear that these global trends interact with local conditions, such that the number and characteristics of people who become homeless may vary greatly across locales. Taking the United States as a case, what are the specific structural and demographic manifestations and correlates of its homeless problem? What factors influence whether or not homelessness is perceived as a social problem? Also, what are the different types of public policy responses that have emerged to address this persistent problem?
Structural Precipitants and Demographic Characteristics
As homelessness significantly increased throughout America’s urban landscape in the early 1980s, two opposing explanations emerged. The first laid blame on individual characteristics such as human capital deficits (e.g., limited education and job skills), substance abuse, mental illness, and criminality. The second pointed to broad structural changes in labor and housing markets and welfare provisions. However, it is now generally understood that homelessness is the result of the interaction of structural and individual factors. Structural factors help explain why the prospect of homelessness, particularly among some categories of individuals, has increased in recent years; individual factors help to identify who, among those groups most vulnerable to homelessness, is at greatest risk of becoming homeless.
Structural Precipitants
Economic Changes
As American manufacturing stagnated throughout the 1970s because of increased international competition and a series of oil shocks, firms began to close domestic plants and restructure workforces, displacing workers and driving up unemployment. Newly created jobs were more likely to be nonunion and concentrated in services, low paying, and unstable. A surge in immigration increased competition for low-skill jobs, especially disadvantaging urban residents with low educational attainment. A cheap form of cocaine called “crack” flooded the streets and significant numbers of inner-city residents used or trafficked the drug, rendering some of them vulnerable to addiction, felony conviction, and homelessness. In the early 1980s, early 1990s, and in the early post-9/11 period, cyclical economic recessions produced spikes in unemployment and forced firms to reduce labor costs to remain competitive.
Welfare Retrenchment
At the same time, the welfare state was being scaled back, beginning most notably in the early 1980s. While deinstitutionalization of large-scale state mental hospitals had begun decades earlier, sufficient funding for community-based mental health facilities, intended to replace large mental institutions, never materialized. As a result, many persons who would have been in mental hospitals in previous decades received insufficient mental health treatment and cycled through the streets, shelters, and jails. Also in the early 1980s, the federal government took measures to keep benefit levels low for households in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and restricted eligibility for benefits through the Supplemental Security Income program. Later, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 replaced AFDC with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a program with time limits on receipt of welfare benefits and job training. Although many participants in this program have found employment, evidence suggests that many find jobs that fail to lift them out of poverty.
Disappearing Affordable Housing
A decline in affordable housing intersected with economic polarization and stagnation and welfare retraction to increase vulnerability to homelessness. The federal government, already a minor investor in public housing compared with Europe and Asia, retreated from the rental housing market by reducing rental subsidies and all but halting the creation of public housing projects. At the same time, rising income inequality and population growth, trends more intense in major urban areas, pushed rents upward as lower-rent districts were gentrified. As a result, America’s urban poor faced a major housing affordability crisis.
Estimated Size and Characteristics of the Homeless Population
Population Size
Researchers at the Urban Institute have estimated the size of America’s homeless problem at two points in time, using similar definitions and methodologies. They counted persons using relief services for the extremely poor and homeless and used a moderately broad definition of homelessness that included people who were staying outside or in a car, an abandoned building or place of business, emergency or transitional shelter, a hotel or motel paid by a shelter voucher, or a place where they could not sleep for the next month without being asked to leave. A count in 1996 of the service-using adult homeless, which is estimated to include about 85 percent of the street homeless population, enumerated upward of 842,000 homeless people throughout the country at a single point in time. A comparison with a similar count conducted in 1987 shows that the national point-in-time homeless population did not decline over this 9-year period but remained approximately at the same level, despite a substantial growth in programs and the continuous economic growth of the late 1990s. Also, researchers using a national representative survey sample of U.S. adults estimated that 3.5 million people experience homelessness over a yearlong period.
Population Characteristics
The contemporary homeless population of the United States is diverse in terms of gender, family status, race and ethnicity, age, and disability status. According to the Urban Institute data, approximately 70 percent are male and 30 percent are female. About 75 percent are single individuals, 15 percent adults with children, and 10 percent adults living with one or more persons other than minor children. Many studies have found that adults with children are growing in proportion among the homeless. In terms of race and ethnicity, blacks are over-represented, making up 40 percent of the homeless population but 23 percent of the adult poor population. Whites are the largest group but are under-represented, making up 41 percent of the homeless population but 52 percent of the poor population. Latinos/as are also under-represented at 11 percent of the homeless population but 20 percent of the poor population. Native Americans are over-represented at 8 percent of the homeless population but 2 percent of the poor population. Although this study did not include data for Asians, local surveys consistently report substantial under-representation. Persons in their prime working years make up the majority of the adult homeless population, with approximately 80 percent between the ages of 25 and 54. Homelessness is rare among the elderly, likely because of social security programs, with only 2 percent of the homeless population over 65 years old. Alcohol, drug, and mental health problems are common among homeless persons, with only a third of homeless adults having no such problems and between 25 and 40 percent having struggled with one or more of these problems. The homeless of today, just as in the past, are located primarily in urban areas, particularly in central city neighborhoods.
Public Response to Homelessness
The manifestation of homelessness as a social problem has shown considerable variation across historical contexts. For example, homelessness was thought of as a minor problem, affecting only older alcoholic men in “skid row” neighborhoods in the early post-World War II period. However, by the early to mid-1980s, activists in urban communities were in an uproar about the increasing number of people fending for themselves on the streets and in emergency shelters.
What explains the shifts in prominence of homelessness as a social problem? Certainly increasing numbers and visibility of the homeless are critical. However, other factors are operative as well. First, who becomes homeless often affects the extent and nature of public reaction, as occurred when increasing numbers of women and children became homeless in the late 1980s and 1990s. The fact that many members of this new wave of homelessness were mentally ill, engaged in some form of substance abuse, or both, also affected how the public looked at the homeless.
The level and nature of attention that homelessness receives by the public is also influenced by the extent to which the public encounters homeless people in their daily lives, as well as the nature of the space in which the two groups confront one another. Some scholars have argued that public reaction to homelessness is influenced by the instrumental use and symbolic meaning of the space in which they negotiate their daily lives. When homeless persons eke out their subsistence mainly in “marginal spaces,” which have little, if any, economic, political, or symbolic value, they are not very likely to provoke a response by authorities. However, they are more likely to provoke a response when they move into “prime spaces” that are used by the domiciled for residential, recreational, or commercial purposes, or “transitional spaces” that have ambiguous use or are in the process of being transformed into prime space. When homeless persons enter prime and transitional spaces, they are likely to provoke two different responses. Political officials and their agents often try to contain the homeless population or reduce their visibility through differentially monitoring the spaces where they hang out, enforcing anti-panhandling and other ordinances, and disrupting their daily routines. Private citizens and commercial establishments also often engage in exclusionary, NIMBY (not in my backyard) activities that prevent homeless populations, or facilities serving them, from entering and settling in prime and transitional spaces.
It has also been noted that more sympathetic responses to homelessness are not constant, but wax and wane over time. Research has shown that both media attention to homelessness and participation in volunteer efforts to aid homeless persons tend to surge around the holiday season, increasing around Thanksgiving and peaking at Christmas time. It has been noted as well that as mass homelessness has persisted in urban America, public concern about it as a pressing problem has faded due to “compassion fatigue.” A slightly different take on this fading concern for homelessness is that it suffers a “liability of persistence.” This argument holds that it is not necessarily that the public has tired of being sympathetic to the homeless, but that the duration of the problem has caused people to believe that homelessness is a fixed aspect of contemporary urban society rather than a solvable problem. However, the emergence of recent local and national campaigns to “end homelessness” suggests that at least some citizens have not succumbed to compassion fatigue or the sense of hopelessness that often accompanies the persistence of a social problem.
Policy Efforts to Address Homelessness
Policy responses to persistent homelessness can generally be divided into at least four often coexisting categories. First, an “emergency” or “accommodation” response involves expanding shelters and food providers to lessen the hardship of homelessness but without doing much to help persons escape the streets. This approach was characteristic of the initial response to homelessness in the early 1980s. Out of this approach emerged a “restorative” response, which provides an extensive array of supportive services to remedy the individual shortcomings of persons who are homeless so they can compete, or at least function, in mainstream housed society. This is basically the approach of the Continuum of Care program, created by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Clinton administration, which encouraged localities to provide mental health and substance abuse treatment, employment counseling, case management, and household and parenting courses to guide persons through emergency and transitional shelters to permanent housing. A third type of response is “preventive” and aims to address the structural causes of homelessness by promoting the creation of affordable and subsidized housing, closing gaps in social service systems, and increasing the stock of living wage employment. This response is championed by advocacy groups and many researchers and is evident in the July 2003 Bring America Home Act (HR 2897). A final policy response consists of efforts to “criminalize” homelessness through ordinances that give police authority to cite both homeless persons for subsistence activities, such as panhandling and sleeping in public, and service providers who provide health care services and distribute meals in public parks. This NIMBY-like response is usually advocated by businesses, residents, and their political representatives in areas with sizable homeless populations.
To date, accommodative, restorative, and criminalizing responses have dominated, forming a two-pronged but contradictory approach in which a limited number of services are available to help persons subsist amid homelessness or exit their situation, and punitive efforts seek to discourage persons from living on the street, especially in prime spaces. However, recent campaigns to end homelessness have gained momentum. These efforts basically combine the preventative approach to “close the front door” into homelessness and the restorative approach to “open the back door” out of homelessness. While these plans to end homelessness incorporate both professional expertise regarding best social service practices and broader consciousness of structural causes, estimates of the cost to prevent future incidences of homelessness and move the currently homeless off the streets are far beyond what is presently devoted to the problem. Thus, the realization of the goal to end homelessness depends on the ability of partnership members to mobilize public concern about the problem and secure sufficient resources to implement all of the components of their ambitious plans.
Bibliography:
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- Burt, Martha. 1992. Over the Edge: The Growth of Homelessness in the 1980s. New York: Russell Sage.
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- Wright, James D., Beth A. Rubin, and Joel A. Devine. 1998. Beside the Golden Door: Policy, Politics, and the Homeless. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
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