Whatever happened to the homeless? Not so long ago they haunted Americans at almost every turn. In our largest cities, aggressive panhandlers blocked the sidewalks by day and street people dozed on the bus-stop benches and steam grates by night. On our living room TV sets, their grievances were pressed relentlessly in news shows, docudramas, and movies of the week. An influential coalition of activists emerged to secure their rights. The public was understandably alarmed on being told that America had generated — rather suddenly — a large beggar underclass of citizens who lacked the means even to put a roof over their heads.
As the media flashed images of tattered, destitute people curling up in cardboard boxes on cold nights, elected officials across the political spectrum united in seeking greater government spending to address the startling phenomenon. An entire political movement petitioned for redress of the concerns of these lowest of the low. They scored impressive victories in Congress and major municipalities. By the time Ronald Reagan left offce, the homeless were commonly pointed to as compelling evidence of a hardhearted ” Decade of Greed” over which he had allegedly presided. President Bush, seeking a “kinder, gentler nation,” joined Congress in funding the federal homeless-relief programs that today receive more than $ 1 billion annually.
But the TV cameras and journalists — even the political activists whose enterprise is the marketing of group entitlements — have largely moved on to other interests of late. The street people remain, to be sure, in numbers that are probably at least as high as when the homeless-rights movement began more than a decade ago. Yet theirs is a cause that shows every sign of being in its terminal stages, without the public attention and sympathy gained so readily in the eighties.
Many of the cities once known for their publicly funded hospitality toward the homeless have grown weary of the expense and disorder that accompanied the rise in the homeless population. After Washington, D. C., residents passed a right-to-shelter law in 1984 by a more than two-to-one margin, the number of homeless seeking free housing surged dramatically. At first, the city sought to deal with the heightened demand by increasing its annual budget for homeless services, from $ 9 million to $ 40 million between 1985 and 1990. In 1990, the District Council finally acknowledged budgetary realities and voted to repeal the right-to-shelter law. Voters upheld the repeal in a ballot initiative.
At least 42 cities have adopted new measures to discourage vagrancy or to move the homeless into less desirable locations. Police in New York have prodded the homeless out of the pricier districts of Manhattan; it is a rare street person these days who can slumber without disturbance in boutique doorways along Madison Avenue or on Grand Central’s marble floors. After a homeless person was suspected of raping two women on Boston Common last year, Mayor Tom Menino prohibited “loitering” and sleeping on the Common and in the adjacent Public Garden at night. Capping a series of city ordinances cracking down on aggressive panhandling and drinking and urinating in public, Seattle officials in January barred the homeless encampments that had previously left a trail of feces, urine, and abandoned needles outside City Hall. Atlanta, meanwhile, has moved the homeless out of high-visibility areas in anticipation of the Summer Olympics.
San Francisco’s anti-vagrancy efforts have received the most national attention, probably because, with its reputation as a haven for anything-goes individualism, the city would seem the last redoubt of homeless activism. Sensing that even his metropolis had its limits, former mayor Frank Jordan took measures in the early nineties to discourage vagrancy in some of the city’s most famous and profitable quarters.
These efforts became known as the Matrix programs. Matrix I involved police sweeps of targeted neighborhoods, including Civic Center, St. Mary’s Park, and Union Square. Matrix II focused on removing campers from their illegal lodgings in Golden Gate Park. While polls indicated that a plurality of San Franciscans supported Jordan’s policies, his recent defeat by Willie Brown may well bring these reforms to an end. Mayor Brown has ambiguously instructed Police Chief Fred Lau “to enforce the law, but not to the extent that the homeless or the poor are singled out.”
If San Francisco is still ambivalent about breaking with homeless orthodoxy, in the rest of the country the homeless-rights movement is collapsing under mounting public resistance. The reasons for the collapse are open to some interpretation. Those on the left still committed to the aims of the movement will argue that its downfall is due to America’s callousness toward the poor. The Right might well respond that the election of Bill Clinton made the issue go away, since it was anti-Republican animus that brought the issue to life in the early 1980s.
But no amount of interpretation can obscure the fact that the homeless- rights movement has failed. And the story of its rise and fall reveals some unpleasant things about the nation’s leadership — judges, politicians, lawyers, professional activists, and the press. Yet the cynicism and self- service that were too often displayed in the forging of this movement are matched by something both heartening and illuminating: the common sense of the American people even in the face of a well-orchestrated campaign of illusion.
An autopsy of the homeless-rights movement must begin with an appraisal of the vital legal groundwork laid by the Supreme Court a decade before the activists took the stage. In the 1972 case Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, the court overturned vagrancy laws across the nation that reflected an Anglo-American legal tradition extending back to the 14th century in England and to ancient Athens before then. Vagrancy laws sought to uphold public order and personal responsibility by encouraging gainful employment and stable ties to family and neighbors.
In an opinion written by Justice William O. Douglas, the court ruled vagrancy laws void for vagueness and unconstitutional. Douglas devoted much of his opinion to discussing the value of recreational walking, which he curiously equated with vagrancy. He noted that “wandering or strolling” had been “extolled by Walt Whitman and Vachel Lindsay,” for example.
Thus did poetry and law combine to stimulate a seismic change in attitude toward a class of people whom Western societies had previously viewed as a threat to social stability. The type of people who have come to be known as the homeless are of course scarcely ly unique to the United States. All societies to some degree have fretted over and penalized a certain number of citizens who rebel against family and career commitments and prefer to live an independent, nomadic existence, even at the subsistence level. Americans once referred to such people as “hobos” and “tramps,” or more harshly as ” derelicts” and “bums.”
While these labels may well strike us today as mean-spirited, they once served an important social purpose. They discouraged through public scorn the extreme individualistic license that marked such people. The idyllic portrait of vagrancy painted by the Papachriswu opinion contrasted starkly with the dangers Americans had till then seen in permitting people to reject family and civic attachments, to roam and beg from orderly, responsible citizens. The Supreme Court, however, came to view such vagrants as a persecuted class that deserved protection, not a legal stimulus to change its behavior.
The decriminalization of vagrancy, by itself, might not have produced the nomadic population redefined, in the early 1980s, as “the homeless.” But this overthrow of age-old legal practice was accompanied by a separate and equally fateful legal revolution — the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Following successful lobbying and litigation by civil libertarians, mentally ill patients were released onto America’s streets in large numbers from state hospitals and other mental-health institutions. In the eighties, civil liberties groups sought and won judicial recognition of the “right” of the mentally ill to live as vagrants, free from any public supervision or restraint.
The most famous, saddening symbol of this legal battle was Billie Boggs, a mad New York street person celebrated at Harvard Law School for her legal victories. Boggs subsequently returned to a street life of squalor and defecating on public sidewalks. Other such symbols would follow. There was Larry Hogue, a “homeless” crack addict on Manhattan’s Upper West Side who became known as the “Wild Man of 96th Street” for the violent crimes he committed on the many occasions he was released from psychiatric hospitals. In Washington, the 1993 death of 43-year-old Yetta M. Adams across the street from the offces of the Department of Housing and Urban Development prompted a sermon from HUD secretary Henry Cisneros on the need for more federal aid to the homeless. Adams, suffering from schizophrenia, died of complications from diabetes; she had repeatedly spurned help from a variety of social service agencies.
The fact that such people are still reflexively labeled “homeless,” a term that doesn’t even begin to describe their varying pathologies, is the result of a deception at the heart and origin of the homeless-rights movement. As the old psychiatric facilities began emptying in the seventies and eighties, civil libertarians and allied lawyers and activists willfully suppressed meaningful distinctions between street denizens — some of whom were mentally ill, many of whom were alcoholics and drug addicts, and only a small number of whom were merely lacking the means to put a roof over their heads. All were renamed “the homeless,” their lowest common denominator, and then put on display en masse as heart-rending proof that “Reaganomics” was brutalizing the poor.
The novelty of the new movement’s defining term — there is virtually no record of “homeless” as a synonym for vagrant prior to the 1980s — can best be understood by considering the descriptions it replaced. In his 1980 book The Manners and Customs of the Police, prominent sociologist Donald Black spoke, for example, of the residents of”skid row.” “Sociologically,” he noted, “skid row is not so much a matter of geography as of lifestyle, involving nomadism, unemployment, heavy consumption of alcoholic beverages, foraging, begging, and a principled rejection of conventional modes of existence.”
This analysis is typical of both popular and academic attitudes toward this class of people up to that time. It was recognized that America, like all societies before it and consistent with human nature, would always have a certain number of people unwilling to submit to the habits and responsibilities of the majority. Yet those who refuse to accommodate themselves to society’s minimum demands — overwhelmingly men who wish to live as loners, fleeing all personal accountability — assert, in effect, that meaningful contributions to our loved ones and to society are optional rather than a basic duty of citizenship.
The homeless-rights movement could not succeed, then, without radically transforming these enduring beliefs — to the point where drifters would become an object of pity instead of ire, and to the even further point where civilized society would be condemned for shirking its obligations to these drifters, rather than the reverse.
The leaders of this movement and their allies in government and the press accomplished this transformation through various misrepresentations and a new conception of individual rights. First, they promoted the view that the homeless were people “just like us,” folks who had lost their jobs or were otherwise down on their luck economically. Their plight was said to be a social injustice stemming from unkind federal budget cuts and, more broadly, the energized capitalism of the eighties. Second, legal activists for the homeless picked up where Justice Douglas left off. They argued that the homeless were, in essence, people who simply enjoyed strolling too much — people who had a legal right to live as vagabonds without government interference. Many judges ratified this new, extreme vision of personal liberty, even for the deinstitutionalized insane.
These two approaches played upon Americans’ altruism and individualism, and both were quite successful for a time. The homeless-rights agenda advanced with little opposition during most of the eighties. This was in no small part because of the media’s active assistance. TV news shows in the 1980s regularly included features about “life on the streets,” describing the hardships of this new class of paupers.
Interspersed with these stories were favorable profiles of activists. The late Mitch Snyder became the most famous, distinguished by his trademark camouflage apparel and his undocumented estimate of three million homeless Americans.
Elected officials responded to rising public concern by creating new government programs to aid the homeless. At the federal level, these efforts culminated in the McKinney Act, which was signed into law in 1987 and coordinated federal homeless-assistance programs. In New York City, spending on homeless families soared from $ 18 million in 1982 to $ 290 million in 1993. Several other major cities enacted “right-to-shelter” mandates, such as Initiative 17 in Washington, D. C., passed by the voters in 1984.
But Americans, as might be expected, eventually grew curious about this unusual new group of welfare recipients. It was this curiosity that proved the homeless movement’s undoing. As the clichamong lawyers goes, 80 percent of a case is the facts; and save for the mentally ill, homeless activists had a challenging clientele to portray in a sympathetic light. They also had to contend with a wave of studies that drew unflattering conclusions about the homeless.
A few academics defied the dogma of the day and investigated the claims that the homeless were ordinary people who had suffered temporary financial misfortune. Many, it turned out instead, were convicted criminals. In the late 80s, Peter Rossi, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, analyzed 16 studies and found that about 40 percent of the homeless had actually spent time in jail or prison.
Alice Baum and Donald Burnes, authors of,4 Nation in Denial: The Truth About Homelessness, estimated that up to 83 percent of the homeless were either alcoholic, drug-addicted, mentally ill, or some combination of the three. Even the Cuomo Commission, a homeless study group headed by Andrew Cuomo, the governor’s son, discovered in 1992 that 80 percent of New York’s homeless who were given urinalysis tested positive for illegal drugs, mostly cocaine.
As time went on, it also became ever more apparent that there was no credible causal link between the budgetary policies of the Reagan administration and the growth of the homeless population. Federal housing subsidies for low-income families rose in real terms by over 50 percent during the 1980s. Economics was relevant to the alleged crisis only to the extent that economic incentives lured more and more people into a life of homelessness.
While, for instance, the number of shelter beds in America rose in the 1980s from 98,000 to 275,000, the new beds were promptly occupied without any appreciable reduction in the homeless population. In a 1988 study of New York City’s shelters, 90 percent of the families arriving were found to be receiving welfare benefits already; they were drawn to the shelters by the offer of free housing. Journalists chuckled and feigned horror when President Reagan suggested, in oft-quoted remarks, that some people choose such a lifestyle. By the end of Reagan’s tenure, the data were starting to bear him out.
These studies confirmed what the public had already figured out firsthand. Personal encounters with the homeless proved even more important to the change in public attitude than these scholarly labo. Americans who, in response to this apparent crisis, had been more generous with their dollar bills for a while learned to save them for reputable charities. An offer to buy a homeless person some food would frequently be met with a scoff or a renewed plea for money; the money was in fact being sought to procure alcohol or feed some other vice. Public complaints grew louder about aggressive panhandling, exemplified by the squeegee men who expected to be paid by gridlocked commuters for washing the windshields they had just doused with dirty water or mixtures of water and urine.
For a while, the gentle term “homeless” worked magically to transform those it described into simple victims without fault for their situation. But the term and the movement that bore its name did not square with reality. Americans came to believe that, in the language of the streets, they were being conned.
Even homeless activists, in moments of candor, would confess deceit. Robert Hayes, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, admitted in 1989 that homeless advocates had sought to suppress facts about the criminal and drug-dependent nature of many of the homeless. He explained to the New York Times that the activists “feared that the public would lose its sympathy for the homeless.”
By 1990, the size of the homeless population was demonstrated persuasively to be but a small percentage of what activists claimed. The Bush administration directed the Census Bureau to undertake a special one-night count of the homeless in March 1990, by combing streets and shelters after hours. The bureau found only about 230,000 homeless, a figure revised later to 240,000. Martha Burt, director of the Urban Institute’s social-services research program, estimated in 1991 that the homeless population probably ranged from 354,700 to 461,800. What had once looked like a huge national problem suddenly appeared to be much more manageable. The homeless amounted to only a fraction of one percent of Americans, and a deeply troubled, unusual fraction at that.
The press, for its part, eventually grew cynical. In July 1990, following Mitch Snyder’s suicide, homeless activists seeking a more generous right-to- shelter law in Washington attended a meeting of the D. C. Board of Elections. There, they placed an urn containing Snyder’s ashes before the group, explaining that they wished him to be “present” for the assemblage. The article in the Washington Post describing this posthumous appearance was tellingly headlined: “Guilt Ploy Tried Again by Homeless.”
Unlike the recent civil-rights movements on behalf of racial minorities and women, the homeless-rights movement did not attack any genuine or even plausible injustice as defined by the American majority. Once the public could see through the fog of inflated statistics and misleading press coverage, it saw a manufactured crisis.
Except for the mentally ill, who became pathetic pawns in the debate, the homeless are manifestly not “just like us.” They are fellow citizens who deserve our love and compassion. But those same qualities require that they be held to a higher standard than the self-destructive behavior that distinguishes them. The homeless are homeless not because of a cruel twist of fate, but because, by and large, they have turned their backs on their loved ones and communities, preferring to go it alone.
Despite all the misdirection from our society’s elites, the American public figured this out in a relatively short span of time. Americans came to realize that their globally famous generosity was being exploited. As this realization set in, passing vagrancy-type laws that could withstand judicial scrutiny became a priority in many areas. Terms like “transient” began to slip back into the public discussion of the issue. And Americans who continue to aid the homeless financially give donations increasingly to established charities such as the Salvation Army and the St. Vincent de Paul Society (” the Sally” and “Vinnie”s” in irreverent street vernacular), to ensure that their money is spent on sustenance instead of addictions.
Though the nation has learned a costly lesson from the “homeless” experience of the 1980s and from the billions of dollars lost along the way, it may yet prove to have been a salutary lesson. We are redis-covering the rationale for the vagrancy laws that safeguarded Western societies for so many centuries. If we now better understand human nature and the crisis of public order that results from allowing men to follow their antisocial impulses, this cannot be a loss for civilization. And if homelessness, as the term is used today, no longer seems to preoccupy us, it is not because we concluded that we should not care about the homeless. It is because we got to know them better.
Andrew Peyton Thomas, a Bradley Fellow of the Heritable Foundation, is an assistant attorney general for Arizona and author of Crime and the Sacking of America: The Roots of Chaos.
