Did Homelessness Begin in 1982?

I was born in 1986. Millennials like me — Americans born between approximately 1980 and 1996 — have never known a United States without homelessness. Seeing mentally ill, substance-dependent people living in impoverished conditions on the streets has simply become a normalized part of our day-to-day lives, particularly for those of us living in larger metropolitan areas.

Homelessness — or the lack of a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence — has, of course, existed for a very long time. One could even make the case that for 95%+ of our species’ existence we were “homeless” hunter gathers wandering the wild continents of the Earth.

Of course, to equate modern homelessness to hunter gatherer tribes is ridiculous. But for that statement to be absurd, that must mean there is something distinct about the current manifestation or “flavor” of homelessness that we observe today.

Upon closer inspection, we can see that there have actually been many flavors of homelessness throughout our nation’s history, each influenced by the unique socioeconomic circumstances of the time.

Colonists

When European colonizers first arrived in the Americas, they were homeless. In fact, patterns of colonization of the Americas were in part driven by homelessness in Europe.

In White Trash: The 400 Year Untold Story of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg observes:

In the profit-driven minds of well-connected men in…