Drug use skyrocketed in the U.S. in the 60’s and 70’s but widespread homeless emerged in 1982 when federal housing funding and mental health funds were slashed.
Randy ShawJun 4, 2025
Forty-Plus Years of Federal Inaction
Prior to 1982 the United States had no widespread visible homelessness since the Great Depression. Since 1982 homelessness has exploded. What happened? Why has the United States normalized nearly a million people living without homes even during economic boom times?
Maria Foscarinis, a longtime activist and attorney representing the unhoused, answers this question in
And Housing For All: The Fight to End Homelessness in America. Foscarinis details how the federal government’s failure to fund real solutions has allowed homelessness to not simply to persist but increase.
Blaming federal policies, rather than the unhoused themselves, goes against the current political mood. But I also began combating homelessness in 1982 and found her analysis indisputable. Extreme cutbacks in government funding for affordable housing and mental health care that began under Nixon and worsened under Reagan have left far too many Americans unable to avoid homelessness.
Four decades of rising homelessness has led many to seek alternative explanations. The most common blames homelessness on drug addiction, rather than the lack of housing low-income people can afford.
I offer the author’s and my own response to such claims below.
Homelessness Exploded Under Reagan
Foscarinis’ first three chapters should be essential reading for anyone interested in why homelessness skyrocketed in 1982. In addition to Nixon’s ending of new public housing in 1974 and Reagan’s massive 1981 budget cuts to affordable housing, she reminds us of other misguided policies.
For example, Reagan cut 500,000 disabled people from federal disability payments (SSI and SSDI). I remember how this impacted people in the Tenderloin. It was devastating. Reagan also cut off disabled person’s access to free mental health treatment. This caused vulnerable people to break down and fall into homelessness
How did Reagan discontinue people who had overcome all the hurdles to qualify for federal disability payments? By requiring recipients to re-apply for eligibility. Republicans are using the same trick now to cut millions of people from Medicaid. When you require people with government-certified disabilities to reapply for benefits but provide no assistance for doing so, people with proven disabilities miss the deadline. And after losing their benefits they become homeless.
Reagan’s housing cuts coincided with rising gentrification in San Francisco, New York City and other cities. Young people growing up in suburbs now preferred city living. Starting in the late 1970’s this caused rents to sharply rise in once affordable urban neighborhoods.
The federal government should have responded to rising rents by increasing affordable housing budgets to keep low-income people housed. The Reagan Administration did the opposite. Instead of expanding Section 8 rent subsidies and moving to ensure that low-income people priced out by gentrification got the assistance they needed, the 1981 HUD budget cuts allowed them to become homeless.
Foscarinis was actively involved in the legal and political struggles that occurred through the 1980’s. She won small but hard-fought victories but until 1987 the federal government largely refused to even acknowledge that homelessness was a problem.
From Emergency to Normalization
In 1987 Foscarinis played a leading role in passage of the McKinney-Vento Act. This long overdue federal funding to address homelessness was a breakthrough. But this first step was not followed by bigger funding commitments. She quotes Henry Gonzalez, then head of the House Housing Committee, saying he feared that “instead of attacking the root causes—the lack of affordable housing, Congress would stop at emergency responses.”
His fears proved correct.
Democrats took the White House in 1992, raising hopes that a serious effort to reduce homelessness would finally follow. That didn’t happen. Instead, Bill Clinton ended the federal welfare entitlement, contributing to rising family homelessness. The 1994 elections saw Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America usher in Republican control of the House, ending any chance for major new homelessness funding.
I led
a national campaign with Religious Witness With Homeless People that secured 50,000 additional Section 8 vouchers in the last Clinton budget. But it was too little too late. By then the dot com boom of the late 1990’s priced out even more vulnerable people, increasing the need for much higher levels of federal aid.
The 21st Century Continues Normalization
Foscarinis continues the narrative of the federal government failing to provide funding to end widespread homelessness through the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations. Successes, such as reducing homelessness among veterans, confirmed that increased affordable housing funding makes a positive difference. Many forget that President Obama only controlled Congress for his first two years; his administration could not make up for decades of underfunding in that short period.
By the time of Obama’s presidency, Republican Senators who backed affordable housing through the 1990’s and into the first Bush Administration were gone. The current Republican Party consistently opposes major increases in funding affordable housing and addressing homelessness. After all, the big cities where homelessness is the biggest problem are all run by Democrats.
Drugs v. Housing Affordability
Foscarinis ends her book with multiple chapters calling for “Housing as a Human Right.” She cites successes in Finland, examples of social housing in the United States, and makes a strong case. But Donald Trump’s election means that at least until 2029 there is no chance of the federal government declaring Housing as Human Right. Unfortunately, this goal is far from current political reality.
Foscarinis does not address rising claims in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles and other cities that drug addiction, not the lack of affordable housing, drives homelessness.
I disputed this belief in the original 1996 edition of The Activist’s Handbook (revised and updated in 2013). I noted that drug use skyrocketed in the U.S. in the 1960’s and 70’s but widespread homelessness did not result. America did not suddenly wake up in 1982 to hundreds of thousands eager to sleep outside under the stars. Instead, widespread homeless emerged in 1982 when federal housing funding and mental health funds were slashed as Foscarinis describes.
Are there people whose addictions keep them unhoused? Absolutely. There are also people who refuse housing because they prefer using drugs in encampments or on the street.
But that’s not why over 700,000 people (the official number is widely seen as too low) are homeless in America.
Programs offering drug-free housing options all require subsidized housing. Most low-income people who get off drugs cannot afford to live in major cities absent rent subsidies. There are also a lot of unhoused people not on drugs who only need rent subsidies to avoid homelessness.
“And Housing For All” offers an essential reminder of how America normalized widespread homelessness. Foscarinis, founder of the National Homelessness Law Center, has fought to end a crisis that continues to worsen.
This article was produced by Beyond Chron.
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.
BudgetAffordable HousingHousingEconomyHomelessness
By Randy Shaw
Randy Shaw is the Director of San Francisco's Tenderloin Housing Clinic and the Editor-in-Chief of the online daily newspaper "Beyond Chron," where this article comes from. He is the author of three books, "Beyond the Fields", "The Activist's Handbook", and "Reclaiming America".
You do not need to be Israeli or Iranian to sign. 
