Word: 80s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...better? Reliable estimates of the homeless population have always been hard to come by. In the early '80s Mitch Snyder, the late founder of the Center for Creative Non-Violence, an advocacy group in Washington, claimed that there were 3 million homeless in America on any given night. He later admitted that he'd made up the figure. A 1988 Urban Institute survey offered an estimate of 600,000 homeless; but after the 1990 Census, the General Accounting Office put the number at 300,000. A 1994 study examined computer data on shelter turnover rates from...
Ultimately, the best explanation for why Americans stopped talking about homelessness lies not in policies or public opinion but in politics. In the '80s liberal advocacy for the homeless was of a piece with Democratic outrage at Reagan Administration policies toward the poor. But the homeless issue also splintered urban liberalism, sending some working- and middle-class voters into the arms of Republicans who vowed to curtail entitlements and tighten the screws on vagrancy. To survive, Democrats revised their image as the party of the dispossessed by acceding to welfare reform, cutting aid to the homeless and courting the middle...
...regardless of their other problems. "No matter what is true about the homeless," says Mary Ann Gleason, executive director of the National Coalition of the Homeless, "they all have a lack of housing." That sounds like a return to the "housing, housing, housing" mantra that liberals sang in the '80s. Getting Americans to take the idea seriously again might require the return of liberalism itself...
...entire mission is coming in at an absurdly cheap (for NASA) $165.6 million. Stardust is part of the space agency's "fast and cheap" Discovery series (Mars Pathfinder with its robot rover was another). Like Pathfinder (and unlike the instrument-packed billion-dollar probes of the 1970s and '80s), Stardust is as stripped down as it can be. The 848-lb. spacecraft carries just solar panels, a camera, a radio, a spectrometer to analyze sunlight bouncing off the comet, a few sensors and the all-important sample-collecting system...
...Leverett '80s Dance, a staple of the socialcalendar each semester, will take place again thisspring, but a date has not yet been set. Thisdance is always packed, and has been closed in thepast because of riotous crowds...