LITMIR.BIZ

Introduction

      And homeless near a thousand homes I stood,

      And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.

      William Wordsworth, 1842

      (Guilt and Sorrow Verse XLI)

      In the late 1980s, The New York Times ran a series of editorials dubbed “New Calcutta,” lamenting the rise of homelessness on New York City streets and urging the City to action (e.g. “New Calcutta,” 1988). The editorial writers may have chosen their foil poorly—wags complained with some justice that the Times was unfair to Calcutta (Gordon, 1989; Roeper, 1989). But the point of the metaphor was clear. How, the Times asked, could such abject poverty be permitted in a wealthy land?

      An entire generation has grown up since homelessness spilled out of skid rows and into the nation's consciousness. Young people have no memories of the days when they did not have to pick their way around their fellow citizens dwelling in the streets, and older adults can scarcely recapture their shocked disbelief that homelessness should arise here, in the United States.

      This book argues that the United States and other wealthy, industrialized countries have the resources to end homelessness, if we make the policy choices to do so. Further, there is a good deal of evidence about what works—and what does not work—to prevent and end homelessness for different groups of people. The recent halving of homelessness among veterans (Henry et al., 2018) shows what can be done with will and resources. But to end homelessness it is important to understand more about it and where it comes from.

      The book is organized around four questions: Who becomes homeless? Why do people become homeless? How do we end homelessness? How do we prevent it?

Chapter 1 asks who becomes homeless in the United States, focusing on people living in homeless shelters, on the streets, and in other places not intended to be lived in, and on particular groups such as single adults, families, youth on their own, veterans, and people with chronic patterns of homelessness. The chapter also provides estimates of the number of people who experience homelessness each year and shows that, because homelessness is a transient experience, the number is much larger over a longer period of time such as five years or a lifetime.

      Chapter 2 asks why people become homeless. Some writers have assumed that the characteristics of homeless people are in themselves a sufficient explanation. This chapter challenges this assumption and examines causes in social policies and sociocultural attitudes, including patterns of social exclusion, as well as individual characteristics. International comparisons help us understand why rates of homelessness are higher in the United States than in most of Western Europe. The chapter argues that homelessness is essentially a housing problem, marshaling evidence on how the current crisis of homelessness came to be.

      Chapter 3 asks how to end homelessness for particular groups of people who experience it, focusing on programs with strong evidence of effectiveness for resolving homelessness and improving the lives of families with children and of individuals who have challenges such as severe and persistent mental illness. Chapter 4 expands on this question, by examining comprehensive efforts to end homelessness. It introduces and assesses the components of the homeless services “system” that has grown up to address the problem and describes efforts to act strategically and with sufficient resources.

      The final two chapters ask how to prevent homelessness. Chapter 5 considers targeted prevention efforts directed at groups that are at special risk, and Chapter 6 proposes broader policy changes to end the structural conditions that give rise to homelessness.

      Some of the findings in each chapter may be surprising. For example, Chapter 1 shows that the age at which people are at highest risk of entering a homeless shelter in the United States is infancy and that half of adults who experience sheltered homelessness over the course of a year do not suffer from severe mental illness or have any other type of disability.

      Chapter 2 suggests that the structural factors (e.g. income inequality, housing costs) that cause high rates of homelessness are rather different from the individual vulnerabilities (e.g. having a young child, mental illness) that affect which particular individual or family will succumb. Chapter 4 notes that even service providers with long experience working with homeless people sometimes design ineffective policies and programs. And Chapter 5 shows that prevention programs with more failures may also have more impact (because programs that rarely fail are offering services to people unlikely to become homeless to begin with).

Some may find the title of this book odd—many Americans do not feel that they are living “in the midst of plenty” and so have little to spare for those with even less. Or they may not feel that those with less are deserving of their aid. As we endeavor to show in Chapters 2 and 6, the fact that too many Americans are struggling to get by is also a result of social choices such as recent changes in the tax code that provided most of the benefits to the wealthy.

      Throughout this book, our basic theme is that homelessness stems from failures of social policy, in particular policies that fail to provide affordable housing for the many people for whom other social policies fail to provide adequate income either from jobs or (when they are unable to work) from income supports.

      Does the United States have the resources to prevent homelessness? We think the answer is yes. To take just one example, America pays far more to subsidize housing for the wealthy than for the poor.

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