Homelessness in the United States
Contextualizing History and Policy
Homelessness in the United States has a long, complex, and varied history. It is our aim to highlight key events, issues, and policies that have impacted the state of homelessness in the United States today. Check our Sources and Further Reading page for more interesting articles about homelessness. Enjoy, we hope you learn something new!
The Great Depression
1929 – 1939
The Stock Market Crash of 1929 brought an end to the prosperity of the 1920s and ushered in the economically crushing Great Depression. Troves of workers lost their jobs, with the unemployment rate peaking at 25.6% in 1933 (for reference unemployment during the Covid-19 pandemic peaked at 14.8% and a pre-pandemic unemployment rate of 3.6%). The joblessness of the Great Depression was soon followed by skyrocketing homelessness, with an estimate of millions moving in with other family members, on to the street, occupying abandoned housing. Many newly homeless individuals and families moved into shantytowns that popped up across the country referred to as Hoovervilles, in reference to President Herbert Hoover’s and Republican Party’s responsibility for the Great Depression. Many families started migrating west, to the dust bowl region enveloping North Texas, West Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and parts of the New Mexico and Colorado in search of itinerant formwork.
The New Deal
Americans came out to the polls in droves in response to rising dissatisfaction with the Hoover administrations culpability in and handling of the Great Depression, resulting a landslide victory for Franklin Roosevelt, winning 57.4% of the popular vote and 472 Electoral College votes (88.9%). Once in office in 1933 President Roosevelt enacted the First New Deal package, which addressed the most pressing needs of a nation hit hard by the Great Depression. The First New Deal included policy reforming banks and Wall Street, created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was a voluntary program that put unemployed men to work on projects that would conserve natural resources on government owned land, created the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built infrastructure in the hard-hit region, and other programs. The second New Deal was signed into law in 1935, which helped create the foundation of our social welfare system. It included the Social Security Act of 1935; still in effect today, it created financial benefits for retirees over 65 which, financial assistance to the disabled and unemployed. To read about more New Deal policies, click here.
The New Deal policies helped put American’s back to work and helped to end the Great Depression. The Great Depression would come to an end with the start of World War II, when many men enlisted in Military to fight over seas and women staying home and working in factories and other industries that supported the war.
Homelessness Among the Mentally Ill
From Institutionalization to Community Care & the Cracks Left In-between
Seriously mentally ill individuals make up an estimated 25% of the homeless population in the United States but it wasn’t always this way. Psychiatric Hospitals started first appearing in America in the late 18th Century and by 1955, state mental hospitals held 558,922 patients. These hospitals were originally intended to treat patients but because not much was known about the root causes of mental illness until the mid 20th Century they virtually became a place to hide the mentally ill from society. The treatments that were available were considered barbaric by today's standards; at the nation's first psychiatric hospitals leeches were used to blood let mentally ill patients, with the belief being that paranoid delusions and hallucinations were caused by high blood pressure that restricted blood vessels in the brain. Other treatments for mental illness at the time included cold baths and morphine (heroin). By the early 20th Century seriously mentally ill people in psychiatric hospitals were subject to new “treatments” like electric shock therapy(shown to the right), pre-frontal lobotomies, hydrotherapy, and sterilization (not as treatment but because it was thought that the mentally ill should not reproduce and pass on their illnesses). The first antipsychotic, Thorazine was introduced in 1953 and was shown to be effective in treating symptoms of psychosis, which gave many seriously mentally ill people the ability to live independently and manage their own lives.
Thanks to the activism of journalists like Nellie Bly the American public was alerted to the dismal conditions in psychiatric hospitals. In 1887 Bly faked being mentally ill to be admitted to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum in New York in order to expose the living conditions in the hospital; her expose alerted the American public to the treatment of mentally ill people in state psychiatric hospitals. Despite progress, barbaric treatment of the mentally ill persisted in state psychiatric hospitals. By the 1950s, an estimated 50,000 lobotomies are performed in the United States and Rosemary Kennedy, sister of President John F Kennedy was one of them. Rosemary experienced mood swings and seizures in her early twenties so at 23 her father decided she should have a pre-frontal lobotomy. After her lobotomy she was permanently incapacitated and unable to speak; she spent the rest of her life being cared for in a private institution until her passing in 2005.
The Community Mental Health Act of 1963
When he was elected president in 1961, President Kennedy, influenced by his family’s personal experiences with mental illness, made mental health service reform a priority in the United States. Denationalization was starting to gain support among American’s but the question remained as to what steps to take to treat the mentally ill and integrate them into society. The culmination of these concerns led to President Kennedy signing the Community Mental Health Act of 1963 (CMHA), which intended to shift mental health care from institutions and into the community. The legislation earmarked funding to build mental health and addiction care facilities across the united states and funded mental health research facilities. Funding was given to states to use at their discretion to build community mental health infrastructure that would fit the needs of their communities. Unfortunately, only about half of the intended community mental health centers were build and early centers struggled with infrastructure and management due to a lack of guidance from the government. Eventually The legislation led to considerable deinstitutionalization but because it didn’t build the safety net it intended we have our current reality where seriously mentally ill people make up 25% of the United States homeless populatin.
The Vietnam War
Veterans Face Joblessness, Homelessness & the Stigma of a Lost War
By its end, the Vietnam War was vastly unpopular with the American public. Now viewed by many as another unnecessary US Cold War-era intervention, the war devastated Vietnam and parts of Cambodia, created more political instability in the region, and resulted in the loss of over 2 million civilians and 1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Kong Fighters. The war marked the last time the United States utilized the draft, forcing many young people to fight in a war they didn’t even believe in and resulting in half a million armed service members being stationed in Vietnam. By the war's end in 1975, 57,939 members of the US armed forces had died or were missing and about 150,000 were wounded, but even those who survived were in many ways, casualties of war.
Many US veterans returned home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and disabilities incurred during the war like limb amputations and illness brought upon by exposure to Agent Orange. Vietnam Veterans were hit with stigma from all sides of the American populous; older generations looked down on them for “losing a war” and the younger anti-war generation often labeled them violent killers and blamed them, instead of Henry Kissinger and the Military Industrial Complex, for the violence that had destroyed the region. The Veterans Administration offered few benefits and was ill prepared to deal with men suffering from PTSD and physical disability. Many combat veterans were discriminated against when applying to jobs and some had PTSD so severe, they were unable to work and developed further mental health issues, which led to a high prevalence of homelessness among Vietnam veterans.
Today, the Department of Veterans Affairs offers far more services for veterans, from mental health services to housing vouchers, health care, disability compensation, education and training, and vocational rehabilitation and employment services.
Reagan, Welfare Cuts & Rising Poverty
Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, ushering in an era of massive financial deregulation, harrowing tax cuts, and an elevated war on drugs. Reagan was a staunch believer in “trickle down economics”, a theory that postulated that cutting taxes for the rich would result in them spending more money, which would trickle down into the rest of the economy, create jobs and strengthen the economy. In reality, the wealthy ended up hoarding that money which ended up just strengthening the wealth gap in our country. To pay for tax cuts Reagan, Economic Recovery Act cut social funding; he demanded a reevaluation of those receiving social welfare, speculating that the vast majority of those receiving social benefits were the “undeserving poor” who were just trying to defraud the government. He cut funding to schools, art programs, after school programs, medicaid, social security, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP also known as Food Stamps). Cutting funding to these programs greatly impacted the poor in the United States, particularly Black communities in cities. Reagan elevated the war on drugs, particularly through the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which mandated that the minimum sentence for possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine be 5 years, the same for possessing 500 grams of cocaine. This contributed to the prison population doubling under the Reagan going from 329,000 when he entered office to 627,000, when he left and contributed to the United States now having the highest rate of incarceration rate in the world. This further destabilized poor communities across the United States, with many families left with one earner when a family member was unjustly incarcerated. Watch the video bellow narrated by Jay Z for more information on how Reagan elevated the war on drugs and the consequences of his cuts to government spending.
The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail
Narrated by Jay Z
Illustration by Molly Crabapple
Clinton & Welfare to Work
The Reagan administration's attitudes towards the working poor and welfare infected much of the political landscape long after the end of his administration. Even the liberal Clinton administration was up in arms about wasteful government spending on what were vital social programs. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 represented a fundamental shift in how the federal government provides support to poor families. Before the 1996 law, low-income families were entitled to numerous welfare benefits, including cash, SNAP, and Medicaid. The 1996 reforms put in place a new requirement stipulating that every adult that receives welfare must have a job and additionally put a 5 year limit on cash benefits for families. This further contributed to the wealth gap in the United States by taking away vital funding that helped families get out of poverty. Click here to read about how it takes 20 years of nothing going wrong to make it out of poverty.
The Great Recession
The economic prosperity of the 1990s encouraged Americans to go after their dream of homeownership and banks obliged by offering subprime mortgages with low but variable interest rates to low earners who might be unable to afford them. When the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates many borrowers were unable to pay them off, leading to a slew of foreclosures, a drop in home prices, and the great recession. Predatory banks left homeowners in financial ruin. It had been unusual for investment banks to invest in mortgages in the past but firms like the Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, and Goldman Sachs bought mortgages from subprime lenders, bundled them into securities and sold them to investors, which included pension funds and insurance companies. When the subprime mortgage bubble burst, these banks that were responsible for the financial crisis went under, many of these banks went bankrupt, destabilizing the entire economy, only to be bailed out by the federal government and eventually being given fines that equated to a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, many Amernicans were left in financial ruin and went bankrupt themselves, but without any bail out from the government. This contributed to unemployment, housing instability, a tanked economy and an increase in homelessness during the great recession.
The The Covid-19 Pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic has had an insurmountable impact on the world's economy. Many businesses had to shut down or move to remote work. Frequently, the most economically vulnerable workers found themselves out of a job, with service sector jobs like the restaurant industry or factories, where people worked in close quarters, put workers at high risk of contracting Covid-19. Many of these workers applied for unemployment but due to states' dated unemployment systems it often took workers months to receive benefits. While the Covid-19 Economic Relief Bill provided extra unemployment for workers, stimulus payments, and a moratorium on evictions, many workers still suffered from a loss of income and were unable to pay their bills. The eviction moratorium ended in some states, like Texas, months ago and created an uptick in homeless families across the state. While the monitor has been renewed, for many who have been evicted it has been too late. Despite this, activists have been doing their best to keep homeless individuals safe during the Covid-19 Pandemic; many cities have set up socially distanced tent cities like the one to our left and in some cities are trying to reclaim government-owned housing to keep homeless families safe during the pandemic, watch the video below to find out more.
Video Title
Video Subtitle