How America’s homeless went from mobile work force to urban blight
Once, they were just individuals with nowhere to live
Before there was “the homeless,” there were just people without places to live. They were Gold Rush fortune seekers, hobos and vagrants, “freaks” and free spirits. They were outcasts: anarchists, alcoholics, drug addicts, and “insane” people. These itinerants — or, depending on how you see it, incorrigibles — have been a formative part of the American story. But over time, the way our culture treats and regards them has changed. Somewhere along the way, we stopped thinking of them as individuals without dwellings and started thinking of them as “the homeless:” a largely undifferentiated mass often rendered in reductive terms. They are a social ill—a “scourge,” a “blight,” a “crisis.” And yet whenever we try to come up with systemic solutions, the individual reappears, and we justify the problem by chalking it up to mental illness, substance abuse, or laziness.
We are no longer surprised by homelessness. In 2016, an American city without sleeping bodies on its streets is virtually unimaginable. But most of us, stepping over those bodies on our way to work or home, just keep walking. We feel there isn’t anything we can do. How did we get here? How did something so shocking become invisible?
Nearly everyone agrees that it has something to do with Ronald Reagan, “the Great Communicator.” When he became governor of California in 1967, Reagan continued the aggressive deinstitutionalization initiated by his predecessor Edmund G. Brown, nearly emptying state mental hospitals by the early 1970s. Vietnam veterans were returning in large numbers, traumatized and in many cases addicted to drugs. In the absence of effective local care, many of them also ended up on the streets.
Later, as president, Reagan vilified the urban poor, popularized the racist term “welfare queen,” and slashed the Department of Housing and Urban Development budget — the primary supplier of low-income housing subsidies — from $32 billion in 1981 to $7.5 billion by 1988. He also cut federal assistance to local governments, funding for public transit, and anti-poverty programming. More low-income housing was being torn down than being built. Urban poverty, violence, and decrepitude reached their nadir. The homeless population ballooned.
Like many conservatives, Reagan believed that homelessness was a choice. “One problem we’ve had,” he said in a 1988 interview, “even in the best of times . . . is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.’’ Yes, you might say that — if you disregard entirely the interplay of structural factors that influence poverty and access to opportunity.
Reagan may have also been drawing, if even unwittingly, on an abiding American fantasy. In fact, the idea that people are “homeless by choice” has a long history here. There’s even some truth to it. The rugged romance of the rootless wanderer is woven into many other, more triumphant narratives of Americanness. It’s tough to disentangle it from the defiance that characterized the very founding of the country, not to mention the promise of Manifest Destiny, the roar of the railroad, the folk heroism of countless frontiersmen, migrant unionizers, “Okies,” and sailors — and, later, the exhilarating freedom offered by the interstate highway system, that “open road.”
Many 19th century hobos were actually peripatetic Civil War vets seeking short-term employment. They worked in industrial factories in Cleveland or Chicago in springtime, moved on to berry farms in Oklahoma in summer, and then the orange groves of California and the lumberyards of the Pacific Northwest in the fall.
And though some saw them as bums, they were largely a mobile labor class. A New York Times article from 1923 describes a shift in the popular understanding of the hobo. No longer simply “the bedraggled individual of motion pictures, brother to the porch climber, or…the comic hobo of the Sunday supplement fleeing from the snapping jaws of a watchdog,” the hobo class were a “floating fraternity,” according to one sociologist. They were “young and virile,” motivated, and highly employable. Some even attended Hobo Colleges in New York and Chicago, where they exchanged hygiene and safety tips and listened to lectures on political theory.
Unsurprisingly, some of those who chose the traveling life were socialists or anarchists. For them, wandering was a political act, a disavowal of social norms. Some were artists or artisans, or at least hung out with grungy creatives in the cities they visited. The term “Hobohemia” was used by Sinclair Lewis in 1917 to describe the tousled nonconformity of low-rent urban districts, and it later appeared in the 1937 standard “The Lady Is a Tramp” (“My Hobohemia is the place to be”).
In his 1960 essay “The Vanishing American Hobo,” Jack Kerouac traces a cultural history of vagrancy as self-reliance, a lineage from Jesus to the Bowery. He laments the heavy policing of “hoboing,” arguing that central to American identity is “a definite special idea of footwalking freedom going back to the days of Jim Bridger and Johnny Appleseed.”
But that was 1960. And Kerouac was a handsome white guy with little reason to be wary of cops.
By the 1980s, threadbare tents dotted city streets. Highway overpasses served as makeshift shelter from the elements. Entire families lived in cars. Drug addicts used freely in neighborhoods that had fallen into seemingly terminal disrepair. The late-stage hobos that urban dwellers were used to, “grizzled, single, white, older alcoholic men who…circulated between flophouses and missions in the nation’s Skid Rows,” according to historian Marian Moser Jones, were joined by many, many more women, children, African-Americans and people with mental illness. Homelessness had become a fact of urban life.
And “homeless” as a classification of Americans started to ossify. As Jones argues, social scientists, many federally funded through the National Institute of Mental Health, developed a science of homelessness in the 1980s. The assumptions implicit in that first generation of research — namely, individual-level analysis of the homeless with a heavy focus on mental illness and substance abuse — have carried through to today. As is so often the case, those who set out to study a phenomenon ended up defining it. The result has been “a long legacy of sociological research that focused on the individual and cultural pathology of the poor rather than on the economic and political causes of poverty.”
Many people now understand that the “choice” to be homeless isn’t really a choice at all. It is, at the least, relative. And always influenced by many other factors: race, class, gender and sexuality, to name just a few. Still, we don’t know quite how to understand it. And lack of consensus around the causes and characteristics of homelessness extend well beyond the general public to advocates and officials and even to homeless people themselves. One need only read one of many modern-day ethnographies (Teresa Gowan’s Hobos, Hustlers & Backsliders and Jeffrey Schonberg and Philippe Bourgois’s Righteous Dopefiend, both about San Francisco, are two of the best) to understand that homeless individuals, in Gowan’s words, have “profoundly dissonant perspectives” on their own circumstances. The on-the-ground reality of “the life” is complex, nuanced, ever-evolving, and above all, different for everyone.
The US has been dangerously slow in figuring out how to grapple seriously with the structural factors that result in — perhaps even build in — homeless populations. And the more “the homeless” has solidified as a category in the American imagination, the more inertia seems to have set in, both politically and socially. Increasingly, we talk about homelessness not through the idiom of motion — transience, wandering, seeking — but of immobility. It’s a stubborn, intractable problem that seems to go nowhere. In spite of narratives that individualize the problem of homelessness, we seem collectively unable to reckon with the diversity and the humanity of the homeless. In the unfortunate story we now tell ourselves, they are a vast hopeless collective of hopeless individuals.
