global reach. He argues that before the 1980s homelessness could be attributed to cycles of depressed industrial production and a species of employee inflation or surplus labor, where too many workers were chasing too few jobs. Writing in 1992, Barak explains that after 1980 the very shape and content of industrial production radically shifted. There was a "transition from an industrial-based capitalist economy to a postindustrial capitalist service economy within the context of internationally developing global relations" (Barak, 1992, p. 24). Translation: The economy of heavy industry declined or downsized or transferred production operations to lower-wage markets overseas. Real wages declined, and middle-class and working-class expectations for a stable life dwindled. According to statistics compiled by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the number of homeless in the US doubled between 1984 and 1987 (Barry, 2000).
Only during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s was the homeless phenomenon as visible in the US as it became in the 1980s and as it has very much remained to the present day. The stock market crash of 1929 ushered in several years of systemic unemployment that affected workers not only on the fringes of society but also in its middle-class mainstream. Leuchtenburg analyzes the experience of unemployment during the Great Depression, which implied the prospect of losing the family home, as a reflection of American ambivalence toward the prospect of helplessness in the face of economic adversity:
If, in America, every man rises on his own merits, then he falls through his own failings. . . That people who were economically secure should perpetuate this myth is understandable; what is, at first glance, more surprising is that the jobless themselves should do so. The unemployed worker almost always experienced feelings of guilt and self-depreciation . . . could not smother the conviction t...