Reply #18: There was a minute amount of homelessness in big cities

[Warpy]

in skid row areas, alcoholics who hadn't been able to beg enough to get a room in a flophouse or who didn't have a pension check to sign over to a rooming house landlord every month. Probably 90% were men, since women could always trade sex for a night's housing.

After 1980, everything changed. Deinstitutionalization, that buzzword that meant closing state mental hospitals and turning the inamtes loose, created a population of people who were simply unable to care for themselves to the point of negotiating housing even with a monthly welfare check to pay for it. Reagan tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthy spurred a wave of gentrification in the cities, converting rooming houses back into single family mansions, thus throwing a lot of marginal workers out of the only housing they could afford. This is when we started seeing homeless people who were NOT skid row alcoholics, who had jobs, who had families.

Those were the two main mechanisms fueling the shame of large scale homelessness: throwing mental patients out to fend for themselves and creating the kind of wealth that depleted the marginal housing market. Reagan cut social programs for the former and housing programs for the latter.