Not Gone, but Forgotten?

A few minutes into his Inaugural Address, on Jan. 20, 1989, George Bush--a Republican President often derided for his inattention to domestic problems--looked out at the crowd and declared, "My friends, we have work to do." The first task: helping "the homeless, lost and roaming." Ten years later, Bill Clinton--a Democratic President often praised for his acuity on social issues--delivered his seventh State of the Union address. In the course of 77 min. and 99 proposals, Clinton didn't offer any plans to combat homelessness. He never even brought it up.

What has become of this once pressing issue? In the 1980s homelessness was widely regarded as a national emergency, one that drew heavy media coverage and gave rise to mass demonstrations (in 1986, 5 million Americans joined hands along a 4,000-mile line across the country to raise money for the homeless). That kind of public outcry led to the passage of the first and only federal law to assist homeless Americans, the McKinney Act of 1987, which authorized millions of dollars in funding for housing and hunger relief. But today that spirit is gone. In 1987 the number of articles on homelessness that appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times totaled 847; in 1996 those four dailies ran just 200 stories on the subject. As recently as 1991, 8% of Americans said homelessness--more than crime, the budget deficit, education or the decline of American values--was "the main problem facing the country today." Only half as many people now believe that. "Most of the emphasis today is on the feel-good," says Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who founded a New York City homeless agency in 1986. "People don't want to focus on problems. But there's also the sense that the problem is apparently getting better."

But has it got 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 1988 to 1992 and found that between 5 million and 7 million Americans had been homeless at one time or another during those years.

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 1985 and 1997, and in New York City the average number of people staying in shelters climbed to 7,100 a night in 1997 after hitting a low of 6,000 in 1994. Homelessness has roiled San Francisco for much of the '90s: the Coalition for the Homeless estimates that 16,000 people are homeless there each night, twice as many as 10 years ago. Flush economic times may contribute to the problem: in many cities housing prices have soared out of reach of poor residents.

If the 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 pushed the encampments to the edges of the island of Manhattan.

The 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 programs.

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 class. As liberals drifted toward the margins of the political landscape, so did the homeless.