By the end of the ’70s, the problem of homelessness had grown to such proportions that Mitch Snyder, the charismatic spokesman of the homeless movement, gave the estimate as three million homeless.[27]
The government and policymakers, however, wanted numbers they could rely on. Finally, in 1984, the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), came up with a number of 250 to 300,000 homeless people. This number was derived from hastily executed polls and telephone interviews amongst organizations and experts in all the big cities.
Later, Snyder admitted that his number of three million was greatly inflated: “Here are some numbers. They have no meaning, no value. We mean homeless is not just a small problem, but something of huge proportions.”[28]
One of the few efforts to both count and map the homeless population in a scientific way was done in 1985 by sociologist Peter Rossi in Chicago.[29] Interviewers worked in pairs, escorted by off-duty policemen. They checked a great number of randomly chosen blocks as well as all public assessable spaces where homeless people could be expected to be found, such as bus stations and airports, cheap all-night cinemas, vacant houses, dark alleys, porches, and parks. All people were briefly interviewed. Because all respondents got a small fee of five dollars, most of them cooperated.
Rossi counted nearly 3,000 homeless people in the city of Chicago—one out of every 1,000 inhabitants—of whom half stayed in shelters. The other half were out on the streets. This number was close to the estimate of the city, but was significantly lower than the number of 15 to 25,000 used by homeless organizations. Extrapolated to national numbers, it comes close to the HUD estimates.
Another survey dated from 1987, carried out by sociologist Martha Burt for the Urban Institute, a think tank based in Washington, DC. She counted 400,000 homeless people in the whole of America.[30] A HUD survey and other government censuses from 1990 give comparable numbers.[31]
For the city of New York, the Department of Homeless Services came up with a number of 25,000 sheltered homeless in 1994.[32]
Homeless organizations and experts estimated the total number of homeless in New York in 1996 to be somewhere between 40,000 and 120,000.[33]
The Coalition estimates that another 100,000 people are on the edge of homelessness—couch people and families that out of necessity live with two or three other families in small, overcrowded apartments.[34]
HOMELESSNESS THROUGH THE AGES
“Homelessness is not a new problem… It is as old as time,” said then Secretary of Health and Human Resources under Reagan, Margaret Heckler. Blaming homelessness on some universal human condition was the perfect justification not to pursue an active policy to tackle the problem.[35]
History and oral tradition have always been full of vagrants, bums, travelers, refugees, beggars, minstrels, fortune-tellers, gypsies, dynamic salesmen, and roving merchants. In short, everyone who was not settled down wandered the world in one way or another. What differs, however, is the way these people were received. Sometimes they were taken in with hospitality, seen as welcome visitors who broke the monotony of daily life with their fascinating tales about exotic places. At other times, they were chased away, ignored, or thrown into jail or labor camps. In their book Old Men of the Bowery, Cohen and Sokolovsky quote the historian Gilmore who says—maybe a bit too rosily—that back in the old days, strangers and wanderers were treated with a positive attitude. There was the tradition of unconditional hospitality: “The stranger is viewed as a mysterious person representing a magical, possibly threatening force.”[36] Providing hospitality, food, and shelter were seen as effective means to ward off evil curses. To prevent abuse, a three-day limit was set.
Later, there also came a religious component that put a high moral value on frugality and material detachment. According to Cohen and Sokolovsky, “The sanctity of charity to the poor and assisting strangers is a prevalent theme of the New Testament.”[37] Monasteries valorized poverty by forsaking worldly possessions. “The Franciscans… who adopted wandering and begging as a mode of living further helped to sanctify begging and vagabondage.”[38] After the Protestant Reformation and the centralization of the early European nation states, benevolence and tolerance slowly transformed into repression, for which the centralized government provided the apparatus, and the Protestant religion offered the ideological justification.
Ordinances and laws came into existence to punish vagrancy. Unwilling cases were put into labor camps. Wealth and prosperity during this earthly life were seen by Luther and Calvin as rewards for a righteous and laborious life. Beggars and the poor had no one to blame but themselves, they had strayed from the right path due to their laziness and weak character. These same protestant ethics are still very much alive in the United States today.[39]
In the history of the U.S., most homeless people endured a miserable fate envied by no one. The occurrence of homelessness was like a thermometer for the American economy.[40] Hopper (2003) describes in graphic details the squalor of homeless life in the early twentieth century. Through the ages, however, there has been one type of homeless individual—the hobo—who, just like the cowboy, became an American folk-hero, glorified in both literature (Jack London) and music (Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan). In 1923, Nels Anderson, a sociologist who himself spent years on the road, published The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. His book is a classic in urban anthropology because of the wealth of ethnographic descriptions by an insider. The name hobo is derived from “hoe boys,” after the most prevalent piece of equipment in agriculture. The archetypal hobo had a rebellious spirit and was severely afflicted by what the Germans so aptly call “wanderlust.” They had their own songs and ballads such as “The Tramp Confession” and “Nothing to Do but Go”:
I’m the wandering son with the nervous feet,
That never were meant for a steady beat;
I’ve had many a job for a while,
I’ve been on the bum and I’ve lived in style;
And there was the road, stretchin’ mile after mile,
And nothing to do but go.[41]
27
Barak,
28
Jencks, The
31
Burt,
32
About 7,000 homeless in shelters and 5,000 families (18,000 people) in welfare hotels. See the statistical report, historical data on the NYC DHS website.
33
The estimate of 40,000 to 120,000 is from Captain Bryan Henry of the Metro North Police. In their annual report of 1994, the Coalition mentions a number of 75,000. Keith Cylar from
36
Ibid., 40. Also see the third chapter of
37
Matthew 25: 34, 35. “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.” I Peter 4: 9 “Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.”
40
The American Civil War, the sudden influx of migrants in the middle of the 19th century, the financial crash of Black September in 1873, devastating drought in the Midwest in the 1930s, and the Great Depression are examples of crises that led to high rates of homelessness. Cohen and Sokolovsky cover these events in depth. In the same way, the banking and foreclosure crisis of 2008 has resulted in a growing number of homeless people and the emergence of new Hoovervilles. The term ‘hooverville’ was coined during the reign of President Hoover in the Great Depression for shanty towns built by the homeless and unemployed.