Where are all the homeless poor coming from? Generations of attacks!

(c) by Mark Dempsey

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the street, and stealing bread. - Anatole France

In a recent political conversation, my (male) friends were clucking their tongues at the current epidemic of homelessness, telling me it was a shame and unprecedented. However, few mentioned its origins, and fewer still had a remedy--and, as women know, men always want to fix problems. 

The specific policy suggestion in that conversation was term limits for legislators. That'll make 'em honest! 

But we've tried term limits in California, and it produces knowledgeable, unelected staff, who actually run things, and a layer of transient, elected "useful idiots" (i.e. politicians) to insulate the unelected staff's decision-making from the public. In short, it does not work as advertised and weakens the connection between the public and the government's response. So much for men's solutions!

The origins of the current attack on the poor probably began in ancient times, when poverty was interpreted as deserved punishment for bad behavior, and wealth was a sign of the god's approval. This is the same kind of thinking that leads its adherents to believe they deserve to be born without serious health problems. After all, there are no accidents, only just deserts!

A more recent source of the rise of homelessness was well intended. JFK had a special needs sister and decided he would try to close the big "One-Flew-Over-the-Cuckoo's-Nest" asylums, transferring patients to smaller facilities that could integrate them into their communities. In a vote that Daniel Patrick Moynihan described as one of the most shameful in his political career, congress approved closing the asylums but did not fund the replacement housing, turning many patients out into the street. In California, Governor Ronald Reagan just closed the state asylums. 

Science tells us that special needs schooling is most effective with eight or fewer students in classrooms, but the government doesn't fund that either. On the other hand, the military gets more than it requests from congress and even "progressives" vote for that.

The asylum closures left the former patients "footloose and fancy-free" -- free to self-medicate with both legal and illegal drugs. As one consequence, in 2016, the opioid epidemic produced more fatalities than the Vietnam war--in just that one year--and not just among former patients. 

More origins of homelessness: In 1971, Richard Nixon stopped the federal government from building affordable housing--and federal programs were never generous in the first place. But hey, the poor deserve their poverty! 

After cutting taxes on the wealthy roughly in half, and with his successor raising payroll taxes eightfold, Ronald Reagan cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. Could this impact our current lack of affordable housing and even wealth inequality? Gosh! I wonder!

In the '90s, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton conspired to "end welfare as we know it," turning the LBJ-era poverty program, AFDC (Aid For Dependent Children), into TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). While AFDC was a federal program, TANF is a block grant administered by the states. So if states are stingy in distributing public assistance, they may not reduce poverty, but they can still use the money they save by not helping the poor for something else. Of those needing public assistance, 76% got AFDC, but only 26% got TANF. And only 22% of the TANF money actually reaches the poor. 

LBJ's "Great Society" war on poverty programs cut poverty in half while they lasted. The increase in current poverty is obvious from the number of beggars and homeless on street corners even in suburbia. Meanwhile, Phoenix, AZ food banks report an 18% increase, year-over-year, in families relying on them for food in 2022, even after the height of the pandemic.

This generations-long attack on the poor--even those who deserved poverty--has finally got results. Sixty-five percent of seniors have only Social Security to fund their retirement. Forty percent of the U.S. population doesn't even have a $400 rainy day fund and must borrow or sell something to deal with emergencies like new tires. Building cities as sprawl means viable, unsubsidized transit is not available either, so the poor must own autos--in effect, a regressive tax.

The cumulative effect of these public policies has been an impoverished, desperate population, desperate enough to try crime. Even Forbes admits it: "Several studies have shown public assistance programs such as cash payments and housing aid can help reduce criminal activity." So poverty begets desperation, and desperation begets drug addiction and crime. 

As a testimonial to poor people's commitment to morality, thanks to the generosity of the poor--and they are far more generous than the wealthy--crime has been in decline in recent years, despite the impoverishment and immiseration of the population. "In the last 5 years Sacramento has seen decreasing violent crime and decline of property crime," says City-Data.com. Notice that website documents an increase in crime around the subprime-derivatives meltdown in 2007-8, so the economy at least correlates with crime rates.

Nevertheless, we read of increasingly desperate police confrontations--after all, they're dramatic and headline-worthy. In response, the City of Sacramento just purchased an armored vehicle ("the Rook") and the County just approved a $450 million addition to the jail, producing what amounts to a militarized homeless shelter and a replacement for those closed asylums. 

In response to the increase in desperation, the U.S. has increased its police spending enormously, too. The U.S. population increased by 42% between 1982 and 2017. In that same period, spending on policing increased by 187%. Now, with 5% of the world's population, the U.S. has 25% of its prisoners--five times the world's per-capita average, and seven times more than the Canadians' per-capita incarceration rates. 

So...is Canadian crime worse than U.S. crime? Nope, it's about the same. It does make some sense, though, since there are roughly a half million medical bankruptcies in the U.S. annually and zero in Canada. People in desperate situations adopt desperate solutions--even the desperate "solutions" of living on skid row or car-jacking for transportation. All these attacks on the poor demonstrate the way crime is a systemic, not just an individual problem. No Canadian has to start cooking meth to pay his spouse's hospital bill (the plot of Netflix's Breaking Bad series).

The U.S. has gone very far down this particular rabbit hole. Perhaps the next step is to change its motto from e pluribus unum ("From many, one") to "The beatings will continue until morale improves." This would have the virtue of being truthful because it's been generations now since the American public's sense of "justice"--actually, vengeance--has been harnessed to its attack on the poor.

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Side note, you might read How Mental Health Care Is Near-Impossible to Get on Medicaid from the Intercept--reporting that implies that if you're poor and have a mental illness, you're just out of luck.

Update: The U.S. does so much more to subsidize affluence than to help the poor. (The Financial Times) Excerpt: "Landlords in poorer areas earn 'basically double' those in more affluent districts — an extra $50 per apartment per month, after expenses. The outperformance, calculated from national surveys, held even when researchers factored in faster price rises in richer areas. 'The reason is that property values, mortgages and taxes are much lower in downmarket neighbourhoods, but rents aren’t that much lower,' says [sociologist] Desmond."

Update #2:

Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong

[Noahpinion, via The Big Picture 3-19-2023]

A failure or unwillingness to carefully look at the data has led countless people to believe that the primary drivers of homelessness are drugs, mental health, poverty, the weather, progressive policies, or virtually anything and everything that isn’t housing. And while some, but not all, of the aforementioned factors are indeed factors in homelessness, none of them, not a single one of them, are primary factors. Because if you want to understand homelessness, you have to follow the rent. And if you follow the rent, you will come to realize that homelessness is primarily a housing problem.

Update #3:

From an online petition:

The United States housing crisis is dire, and public housing remains one of the only tangible options preventing children and families from experiencing homelessness. But for too many, public housing remains increasingly inaccessible. The U.S. has the Faircloth Amendment to thank for that.

Passed in 1998 under a GOP-controlled Congress, the Faircloth Amendment prohibits any net increase in public-housing units, maintaining public housing units at 1999 levels and effectively preventing housing authorities from ever maintaining more public housing than they did then. Since the 1990s, some 250,000 public housing units have been demolished. Many major cities, including Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, have chosen to eradicate much of their public housing stock to stay within the limitation of Faircloth, with some cities even providing far less than the number of units Faircloth allows.

The Faircloth Amendment is the result of the villainization of low-income communities and welfare recipients. Those pushing Faircloth believed those who would need public housing were dependent on the government or abused taxpayer money.

But today, affordable housing continues to be increasingly out of reach for middle to low-income Americans. There is currently no locality in the country where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment priced at what the Department of Housing and Urban Development defines as “fair market rent.” Between the lack of affordable housing, the surge in communities experiencing homelessness, and the recent trend of local governments making moves to criminalize homelessness, Congress must act.

Repealing Faircloth and investing federal funding into public housing will go a long way in addressing America’s homelessness crisis, ensuring safe and affordable housing for children and families, and helping America stay afloat during a deadly pandemic and economic hardships caused by record-breaking inflation.

Sign if you agree: Everyone deserves access to affordable housing.

Participating Organizations
BOWL PAC
Bring American Home Now
Cedar Key Progress
Democratic Values
Daily Kos
ManagingLove
MICAH- Metropolitan Interfaith Council on Affordable Housing
People Demanding Action
Progressive Reform Network
Street Samaritans 

Update #4: Poverty in the U.S. should be considered a ‘major risk factor for death’ — and is associated with more fatalities than guns or homicides, study finds MarketWatch. Pro-life indeed!