It is a political problem with a painfully human face. Unlike the arcane theories of Star Wars or the complex calculations of the budget deficit, homelessness is no abstraction. The homeless confront urban dwellers every day: sleeping on sidewalks and park benches, begging pedestrians for loose change, huddling in doorways for shelter or meandering the streets muttering to themselves. In cities that have flourished during the Reagan years, there are more homeless today than at any time since the Great Depression.
On any given night, an estimated 735,000 people in the U.S. are homeless. As many as 2 million may be without shelter for one night or more during the year. A deplorable situation that began with deinstitutionalized mental patients' living in the streets has grown to include the working poor and whole families. Nearly a quarter of the homeless have jobs; more than a third are families with children. "The growing phenomenon of homeless children," says a report from the National Academy of Sciences, "is nothing short of a national disgrace."
If the condition of the homeless is appalling, solutions can seem hopelessly complex. Offering the medical treatment necessary for a derelict alcoholic is different from providing job training and education for a welfare mother, counseling for a teenage runaway or more income for a worker trying to secure an apartment. Yet no matter what their other difficulties, the homeless share a simple problem: they need a place to live. The best response to homelessness is to build more housing. This wealthy nation should start with a basic policy: no American should have to sleep on the street.
But the Reagan Administration has had no effective housing policy for most of its eight years in power. Samuel Pierce, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is the only remaining member of Ronald Reagan's original Cabinet, yet he has been the Administration's invisible man. Federal support for subsidized housing has been slashed 77%, from $32.2 billion in 1981 to $7.5 billion this fiscal year. HUD authorized the construction of only 88,136 subsidized dwellings in 1987, compared with more than 224,000 in 1981.
Meanwhile, 2.5 million units of low-income housing have disappeared since 1980 through a brutal combination of market forces and government indifference. Tenements that housed the disadvantaged have been razed or renovated to make way for pricey apartments and high-rise office buildings. According to a 1986 congressional report, in the past decade the nation has lost half its single-room-occupancy hotels, long the housing of last resort for the poor. In New York City, tax-abatement policies of the early 1980s encouraged private developers to turn SRO buildings into luxury condominiums. The number of New York apartments renting for $300 a month or less dropped ; from 1.7 million in 1978 to 409,459 last year.