Rather than being a constant and unchanging phenomenon, homelessness has emerged, disappeared, and returned many different times, for many different reasons throughout our nation's history. Most recently, that has looked like:
"Hobos" and Migratory Labor
With westward expansion finally coming to a close at the end of the 19th Century, a new form of growth started sweeping the country: urbanization. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, it became quite common for rootless job seekers to travel from city to city, primarily on trains, in search of new economic opportunity. In 1906, it is estimated that the number of "hobos" in the United States had reached 500,000 (about 0.6% of the nation’s population at the time). By 1911, the number surged to over 700,000, which is even larger than the number of people experiencing homelessness today.
The Great Depression
Following a decade of near exponential economic growth, the US stock market crashed in October of 1929, resulting in a deep financial depression. By the end of 1933, at the economy’s lowest point, 15 million Americans were unemployed, nearly 30% of the country’s banks had failed, home prices had fallen 67%, and about half of all residential mortgages were delinquent. In response, shanty towns (i.e., homeless encampments) started appearing all across the country. These areas became known as “Hoovervilles,” after President Herbert Hoover, who was widely blamed for the onset of the Great Depression.
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In the mid-2010s, San Francisco Bay Area media outlets launched the "SF Homeless Project" to investigate the persistent and growing challenge of homelessness in the region.Â
What is most striking about this resource is the timeframe. The reporting doesn't look back to the hobos at the end of the 1800s or the shantytowns during the Great Depression. Instead, it suggests that today’s homelessness is a relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, some articles even have an exact start date: 1982.
Despite our best efforts to advance a simple explanation of what’s driving this crisis, the truth is there is no singular cause of modern homelessness. Instead, modern homelessness is best understood as a portfolio of interconnected and reinforcing challenges.Â
Beginning in the early 1980s and accelerating to the present, a number of long-term societal and socioeconomic trends have converged:
- Rising housing costs (particularly rental housing)
- Declining real wages and economic shocks
- The racial wealth gap
- Broken behavioral health systems
- Domestic violence and household instability
- America's loneliness crisis and declining levels of social capital
- Exits to homelessness from healthcare, justice, and foster care systems
- The erosion of broader social safety nets and assistance
The cumulative impact of these trends has been the reduction of economic capacity for the most vulnerable among us. This economic vulnerability, in turn, has made it much more likely for individual or household crises to result in episodes of homelessness, especially in our country's most expensive rental housing markets.
Importantly, and at the risk of over-generalization, these crises tend to manifest in two ways:Â
- For most people, homelessness is a relatively short-term occurrence lasting a few weeks or months, and it is primarily driven by financial and relational crises (e.g., increasing housing costs, eviction, job loss, divorce, domestic violence).Â
- For a small but persistent minority, it is a long-term experience exacerbated by disabling health conditions (e.g., physical health, mental illness, addiction, traumatic brain injuries). This type of homelessness is called "chronic homelessness."
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Fundamentally, the homeless service sector has been tasked with solving a crisis it did not create. The problem is, our current response is not working.
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