Word: homeless
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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...
Today few reputable authorities are willing even to surmise how many people are homeless. But many researchers believe the problem is no less acute than it was in the mid-1980s. The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which publishes an annual survey on hunger and homelessness in 30 cities, says demand for emergency shelter has increased every year since the survey began in 1985, including an 11% jump in 1998. The number of people counted in Boston's annual one-night homeless census rose 40% between 1988 and 1996. Minnesota's nightly shelter population quadrupled between...
...homeless have vanished from public consciousness in the '90s, it may be because in many cities they have vanished from sight. Cuomo attributes this to the expansion of shelters and other services; but increasingly, frustrated municipal governments are responding to the problem by cracking down on panhandling, sweeping homeless encampments out of parks and off streets and outlawing sleeping in public. At least 50 cities--from Chicago to Tucson, Ariz., to liberal Berkeley, Calif.--have antivagrancy laws on the books. Such measures only displace the homeless, however. New York's clampdown on vagrancy in Times Square, for instance, has merely...
...rise of such laws suggests that middle-class Americans have exhausted their reserves of compassion for the homeless and now see them as responsible for their own fate. "People decided that homeless people were affecting their quality of life," says Ralph Nunez, president of the New York-based Homes for the Homeless, "and they got fed up." But how fed up? In a recent survey conducted by researchers at Wayne State University, 80% of respondents said they favored increased federal spending on the homeless, and two-thirds said they would agree to a $25 tax hike to pay for homeless...
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...