THE HOMELESS OF AMERICAN CITIES
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Homelessness in America is not a new phenomenon -- there have always been poor and disadvantaged people, vagrants, bums, immigrants starting new lives with next to nothing, and others who through choice or no choice of their own have been homeless. During the Great Depression, the terms "soup line" and "poor house" became household words. Conditions changed, and by the economic "boom years" of the 1950s and 1960s "poverty" was an issue but "homelessness" was not widespread in urban centers and was not considered to be a crisis. The 1980s brought a dramatic rise in homelessness in American cities. Different types of people have become homeless for a variety of new reasons and the problem of homeless has become a national issue. There are wide discrepancies in the estimates of how many are homeless. In 1984, the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimated that there were about 250,000 homeless people in America, while the Community for Creative Non-Violence reached an estimate of three million persons ("The Politics," 1987, p. 508). The differences allowed conservatives and liberals to choose different figures to argue either that the problem was not widespread, or that it was a mushrooming national crisis. By 1987, it was generally acknowledged that the situation had worsened and a number of groups, such as the National Coalition for the Homeless, were citing estimates of two to three million persons,
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be disappearing.
Adams analyzes the problem of homelessness in the context of our changing economic base, from an industrial society to a postindustrial service society. Older and inexpensive housing units which could have housed the homeless are being destroyed because it has become economically feasible to replace them with something else. However, these units are vanishing at a time when innercity demographics are changing in a different direction, increasing numbers of households consist of childless couples, single parent families, young singles living alone, and elderly persons living alone. Most of these people have limited incomes and require low- or medium-priced housing. When rents get beyond someone's means, government assistance may not be an answer: in 1984, a survey of 66 cities showed that the average waiting period for rental housing assistance was 20 months. Thus, the problem is not just "economic dislocations," but the disappearance "of the lowest rung of the housing ladder" (pp. 531-533).
The crunch between income and housing costs is probably the primary reason why homelessness is rising. Yet other public policy decisions have added to the problem. Mention was made earlier of a significant number o
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Approximate Word count = 3390
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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