For at least 150 years, Americans have used the adjective “homeless” to describe those without a domicile and to indicate an absence of ties to family or to a place and the people settled there. Understood in this broad sense of uprootedness, homelessness has been a recurrent (if not defining) feature of American life, particularly as the coincidence of livelihood, family and place declined with the rise of the market, the extension of the frontier and relentless urbanization. Indeed, by the 1870s, intermittent migration and precarious housing circumstances were such common hardships of working-class life that they warranted scarce comment. But note, too, an exotic, romantic strain in the understanding of homelessness in the tramp, at once a figure of menace and colorful resistance to industrial discipline, or legendary folk heroes who were homeless men like the Maine logger Paul Bunyan or the southwestern cowboy Pecos Bill. The term could encompass even the unmarried women who moved to the city for work in increasing numbers after the Civil War, or, during the Great Depression, families who, though housed, failed to meet state settlement (residency) requirements for public aid and thus were conveniently made federal charges. “Homeless” covered a big territory including routine hardship, defiance, adventure and even bureaucratic expedience This diffuse understanding of the term persists in popular culture; it is traced easily enough in the annals of labor, American bohemia, or the survivalist right. It is used now more than ever to define a bureaucratic category. During the 1980s, with a renaissance of shelterless poverty unlike any seen since the 1930s, the word was given a technical cast by scholars and policy-makers needing to bound survey samples and target eligibility for special services and housing benefits. They constructed a narrow, operational definition that counted as homeless only people living in shelters, out of doors, or in places not meant for human habitation. Whatever injustice it does to history, however it scants the subtle cultural work of ambiguous words, this definition has the stamp of authority.

Numbers Estimates of the size of America’s homeless population came to be based on this literal notion of houselessness. These estimates, some as low as 250,000, rapidly became controversial because they were based on one-night surveys and seemed to many to minimize the extent of homelessness, even when narrowly defined. However, by the early 1990s, the development of computerized data systems in some US jurisdictions made it possible to amass unduplicated counts of shelter users over stretches of time, thus providing a dynamic enumeration of this population. Data from big cities like New York City and Philadelphia, PA and smaller cities and counties in New England, the Midwest and California showed that between 4.4 percent and 13 percent of the local poor made use of public shelter annually during the late 1980s and early 1990s. A national telephone survey found that between 2.4 percent and 3.1 percent of the adult population—that is, between 4.4 million and 5.7 million adults—had been homeless at some time between 1985 and 1990. There is no longer any reasonable doubt that homelessness grew rapidly during the 1980s and had assumed massive proportions by 1990. No evidence suggests that the situation has changed in subsequent years. As in previous generations, periodic displacement and resort to a public bed has become a common feature of life for poor Americans.

Causes The homelessness that became so visible in the early 1980s resulted, at bottom, from the increasing numbers of individuals and families who could no longer afford to purchase housing. In large part, this was a consequence of a precipitous decline after 1974 in real wages, work opportunities and employment levels for a growing pool of baby-boomgeneration workers, particularly poorly educated people of minority status. Similarly the real value of most income maintenance benefits plummeted after 1974. In the 1980s many states or local jurisdictions dramatically curtailed or eliminated altogether General Assistance, the only welfare program available to able, non-elderly single men and women or couples without children in their custody—hence their disproportionate presence in shelters. After the mid-1970s, then, the poor became more numerous and they got poorer. Not only could fewer poor people establish and maintain independent households, but also friends and kin could not so readily afford to take them in for extended periods. Thus, time-honored traditions of mutual aid began to buckle, particularly in African American communities.

At the same time, the nation’s supply of low-cost rental housing was shrinking as the result of changes in the federal tax structure, rising interest rates and faltering federal commitment to the production and maintenance of public housing. While ample growth occurred in the national housing stock throughout the 1980s, the number of low-end units fell dramatically and the vacancy rate in that sector of the market became increasingly small. By 1989 there was a 5 million unit shortfall in housing affordable to poor people.

Part of the “affordable housing gap” consisted of a dearth of “marginal housing,” mainly the singleroom occupancy hotels that had for generations provided regular shelter for the alcoholics, substance abusers and mentally ill persons who had always comprised some portion of the desperately poor. Such disreputable structures were systematically destroyed by urban-renewal projects and private gentrification. This has had an important impact on the characteristics of today’s homeless population, of which perhaps 30 to 40 percent suffer from a current major mental disorder or a substance use disorder.

The erosion of marginal urban habitats coincided with laws passed in most states in the 1970s which made it difficult for persons with a mental illness to be committed to a psychiatric hospital or to be retained there for more than a few days. Similar laws eliminated the commitment of alcoholics and addicts and jail sentences for public drunkenness. This process of “deinstitutionalization”—a de facto change in housing policy—was intended to be accompanied by readily available residential care in local areas. Yet, after twenty years (longer in states like California and New York), community care remains an unfulfilled promise.