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A Brief History of American Homelessness

From enslavement to Ronald Reagan and beyond, the history of homelessness tells the story of America.


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In 1729, Philadelphia passed a law allowing locals to deport homeless people. This hostility was the general attitude that plagued colonial-era vagrants and paupers, who were considered to be morally deficient. The first pan-handling ordinances appeared in New York and Philly in the 1820s. As for the South, slaves were considered to have homes, no matter how dilapidated. Meanwhile, whites assumed masterless free blacks were homeless, which was “tantamount to a crime,” as they would then wonder if the free blacks were fugitives. Speaking of runaway slaves?


Wrote Roberta Ann Johnson, "Although textbooks that describe the history of American homeless do not include them, the large number of runaway slaves should be considered as an early example of American homelessness.” They lived in “forests, mountains, and swamps of the south.” Some found refuge in native communities, while others ended up North, to face strict vagrancy laws, intensifying the search for jobs. The earliest NYC poorhouses in the mid-19th century also housed runaway slaves. W.E.B. Dubois studied the records of places that housed the homeless in Philadelphia in 1837 and found that 14% of them were black and that there were more homeless black women than men.


During the Civil War, the amount of enslaved runaways increased and some found shelter in the union army camps. Millions of homeless freed people existed at the end of the war, and instead of land reform policies that would give former slaveholder territory to black people, a good chunk of the black community were renting land from white owners or they were homeless migrant workers. With little economic independence and white violence threatening where they could move, opportunities for homeownership and generational wealth were dashed. Thousands of these migrant workers headed west to become cowboys, where they were also homeless, sleeping openly in the desert, and if lucky, sleeping in rented rooms. 


When first used on American soil in the 1870s, the term 'homelessness' described the people who traveled the country, riding the rails and looking for work. Tramp was defined as “all idle persons not having any visible means of support… wandering about and not giving a good account of themselves.” Homeless tramps were considered to be an emerging symbol of the moral crisis eroding the American home, though businesses that sprang up around freshly built train tracks needed them. In fact, such tramps had been around since the early 19th century. It was the Industrial Revolution, and more men, a lot of them immigrants, increasingly moved from rural farms and towns to big cities where the jobs were. They only increased in number following the Civil War. From 1873 to 1874, the American population was about 40 million people, and roughly 3 million were considered to be tramps, or hobos. Sometimes they found work, and sometimes they didn’t. These tramps were mostly young white men capable of physical labor, and social reformers believed the solution was jobs, not housing. The focus was on men, as a religious group noted that homelessness was “a crisis of men let loose from all habits of domestic life, wandering without aim or home.” In New York from 1874 to 1875, about 450,000 homeless people lived in police stations during the frigid winter months. 



Homelessness was a local and state matter, not a federal one. In 1892, Congress began investigating homelessness, but not much was done until the Great Depression, when building housing for low-income Americans became a priority. Back during the first wave of the Great Migration, thousands of black people moved North to overcrowded and overpriced sections of cities like New York and Chicago where they were constantly on the verge of homelessness. By the winter of 1932-1933, nearly one-quarter of Philadelphia’s homeless transients were black, as were one-tenth of Chicago’s sheltered men, one-fifth of Buffalo’s transients, and one-sixth of New York City’s public shelter clientele. These numbers would have been higher if not for the extensive kin network established among black people, who were always taking in friends and family in need, even if it meant overcrowded beds and rooms. Their homes were often inadequate, and they lived in dilapidated slums.



But the government's primary concern, in addition to these slums being an aesthetic blight for economic opportunities, was the thousands of homeless white people during the Great Depression. Though there were black residents among their numbers, it was mainly white faces huddled into those hundreds of infamous Hoovervilles we’ve heard so much about in American history courses. Many were from the Dustbowl and fled unlivable conditions to find jobs and housing. But in the south, about 192,000 black tenant farmers were forced off land due to production restrictions of The New Deal, and they became migrant workers and day laborers. Their desperate circumstances meant employers could pay them even less than what they did before the Depression.

In Georgia, migrant workers were pressured into going to Florida and New Jersey to work for as low as 3 cents per harvested field bag. Though the New Deal included provisions for tenant farmers, local governments could dole out benefits as they saw fit- and its no surprise that the racists usually provided more aid to white families. As a result, black migrant workers and sometimes their families lived under tin or metal sheets or large trees, and such homelessness was thought to be the natural habitat of blacks. An official from the Federal  Emergency Relief Administration explained, “local relief agents were more inclined to favor whites because the negro is better adjusted to the open country environment and is accustomed to getting along on less.” It’s no wonder that some black people turned to criminal activity such as running moonshine, running brothels, operating numbers games, and other stuff to make ends meet.  


After World War II, Congress passed the Housing Act of 1949 to get “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” By the 50s, cities like St. Louis were planning for slum clearance and the erection of low-income housing like the Pruitt-Igoe projects, highly isolated buildings that later were neglected. While such housing was given to minorities, the federal housing authority mortgage program was only available for white families, who could move into freshly built lily-white suburbs with plentiful resources. These suburbs did not allow black residents. 2/3 of the urban slums cleared out by cities were black. And in 41 cities, 60% of the tenants forced out of slums were moved into other slums. By 1967, urban renewal had destroyed 400,000 homes and only 41,580 new housing units were built, contributing to homelessness. This is where those extended family kinship networks again came in. This would continue to be a feature of the black community until the 80s, when friends and family were less likely to house crack addicts, who were disproportionately homeless. The loosening of kinship communities can also be explained by the migration of middle-class blacks away from cities, in the process cutting off their homes from family in need. 


During the 70s, the economic crisis and deindustrialization transitioned the economy from industry jobs to service jobs. 43% of black people were blue-collar workers compared to 35.5% of whites, meaning deindustrialization hit the black community especially hard.  In 1974, the Housing Choice Voucher Program, or Section 8, was unveiled. But it wasn’t until three years later that the federal government directly addressed homelessness, with the Stewart B McKinney Homeless Assistance Act. In addition to making provisions for federal money to be used on shelters and soup kitchens and created an agency on the homeless, the government finally defined homelessness. It was later amended in 2009 and now defines homelessness as:


  1. Individuals and families who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence and includes a subset for an individual who is exiting an institution where he or she resided for 90 days or less and who resided in an emergency shelter or a place not meant for human habitation immediately before entering that institution;

  2. Individuals and families who will imminently lose their primary nighttime residence

  3. Unaccompanied youth and families with children and youth who are defined as homeless under other federal statutes who do not otherwise qualify as homeless under this definition; or

  4. Individuals and families who are fleeing, or are attempting to flee, domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, stalking, or other dangerous or life-threatening conditions that relate to violence against the individual or a family member.


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Between 1979 and 1984, 44% of the net new jobs created paid poverty-level wages, and over three-quarters of the new jobs created during the 1980s were at minimum wage levels.” The modern era of homelessness began in the 1980s, thanks to gentrification, unemployment rates, public housing budget cuts in the haze of the 1970s recession, and not enough affordable housing on the private market, where developers try to outdo each other in catering expensive homes to the wealthy and affluent. Since the 1980s, rent in metro areas across the country have outpaced wages. But another issue that led to a more visible homeless population is the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people.


In the 60s, civil liberty activists pushed for better lives for those who spent lifetimes in shitty psychiatric care centers, by providing both new medication and community services. In 1960 there were 535,000 mental health patients living full time in state hospitals, and by 1980 that number was 137,000. But many governments didn’t provide enough funding for programs to help these individuals live normal lives, and along with the decline of cheap housing, meant more mentally ill people ended up in the streets or in shelters. There were also cuts to Supplemental Security Income benefits, and stricter requirements for the disability eligibility process, further leading more people to the streets.


The typical homeless person of the 1980s was under 40, more likely to have health issues or substance addictions than previous generations, and were more poor. Due to urban renewal, there were less rooming houses and skid rows for them to turn to. In a US census report by George Carter III, “In 1985, a gap of 4.54 million units existed between the number of low income units and the number of low income households, which became a 5.22-million unit gap by 1991. Four million affordable units were lost from the housing market between 1970 and 1990 when the units were upgraded, converted to condos, or demolished.”  This, along with the explosion of crack cocaine, exacerbated the rates of black homelessness, and black people became a bigger share of the total.


Said a New York City shelter director in 1984: “We’re just getting loads of people. It's hard to figure out who they are. All we know is that they're younger and blacker.'' There are several reasons why homelessness grew. In New York, the number of adult mental hospital inmates between 1965 and 1981 went from 85,000 to 23,000— with an estimated 47,000 ending up on the streets of the city. At the same time, the Big Apple wanted to attract higher-income residents who had been living in surrounding suburbs since 1940, so it offered tax incentives to encourage owners of cheap rooming houses and single-room occupancy hotels to convert to condos and rental apartments. Roughly 60% of SRO hotel rooms were gone by 1981. This happened in many cities. Affordable housing would steadily dry up as cost of living rose in the decades to come.


In D.C., Mitch Snyder and other activists for the National Coalition for the Homeless and Community for Creative Nonviolence occupied an abandoned federal building, with Mitch also leading a 51-day hunger strike. The publicity forced the Reagan administration to lease the building to the Community for Creative Nonviolence for $1 a year, and it became the largest shelter in the city. The Coalition For The Homeless had been founded in 1981 by Robert Hayes, a lawyer who litigated a New York case establishing that all unhoused people have the right to emergency shelter. Within 3 years of this agreement, there were 18 city-run public shelters that were struggling to house the homeless population. And the main goal of homeless shelters was not to solve homelessness, but rather to slap a band aid on it. Said the deputy administrator of the Human Resources Administration,  ''Our goals are very clear - temporary shelter so no one freezes to death.” 



Despite being warned about a prospective housing crisis in 1982, the Reagan administration stopped plans to build federally subsidized low-income housing, raised rent on such housing, and introduced cheap housing vouchers. And in true villain fashion, when the unhoused came up on the 1984 campaign trail, Reagan said, “the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.” At the same rally, he insisted that his government was not greedy or infringing on the rights of the poor. Quipped The Washington Post, “The estimated $30,000 to $35,000 cost of the presidential trip here was paid by the government rather than the Reagan-Bush '84 campaign.” Two months later he commissioned a report on homelessness, which undercounted the unhoused at being around 250,000 to 350,000— a number that experts believed to be sitting at half a million. The Village Voice extensively covered how the Reagan administration undercounted the homeless in a 1985 article. 


Until the mid-80s what was missing from much discourse by homelessness activists as well as dicks like Reagan, was the importance of mental health. Simply providing a job and a home were not enough when poor mental health, trauma, and drug use were a part of the equation. Rebecca Smith was a 61-year-old black former pianist and college valedictorian, with a family actively trying to bring her home, when she froze to death in a cardboard hut in January 1982. She had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic and hospitalized for ten years, where she had been subject to electromagnetic therapy, which did more damage to her mental state. Before her death, there were numerous attempts to move her to a unhoused shelter, and the city even sought a court order to forcibly move her, but could not secure one in time. Mitch Snyder, the champion for unhoused people, died by suicide in 1990. In the five years prior, the mental health crisis as it pertained to homelessness was becoming more evident. Black men, women, children, and transgender youth were becoming more numerous on the streets, as well as the mentally ill.


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On October 28 1987, the same year that democrats successfully pushed The McKinney Act, which gave over $1 billion to homeless programs, a woman named Joyce Brown was involuntarily committed to Bellevue Hospital under Project HELP, Mayor Ed Koch’s new initiative to remove erratic behaving mentally ill people from the streets using doctors and nurses in vans. Koch said, “If the crazies want to sue me, they have every right to sue, and by crazies I’m . . . talking about those who say, ‘No, you have no right to intervene to help.” Declaring “I’m not insane, just unhoused,” the former secretary Joyce Brown, who had been diagnosed as psychotic, also had a drug addiction. Her four sisters had been looking for her and trying to get her to come home. In addition to yelling insults to people, especially black men, she was a frequent traffic hazard who referred to herself as “Billie Boggs”, a local tv personality. While committed, Joyce secured representation by the Civil Liberties Union, who contested Koch’s program. Joyce was released after 11 weeks and was immediately asked to speak at Harvard University on homelessness, identifying as a political prisoner.


Reported The New York Times,


“Not too long ago, Joyce Brown lived on an Upper East Side sidewalk in front of a restaurant's hot air vent. She hurled insults at some passers-by, made friends with others and used the street for her bathroom. But in a little more than three months, Miss Brown, 40 years old, has been transformed from an anonymous street person into something of a media star. She has dined at Windows on the World and compiled a list of favorite restaurants. She has shopped at Bloomingdale's, Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor. She was interviewed on national and local television and received half a dozen movie and book offers.” 

The case was seen by conservatives as a woman winning the right to be homeless and for liberals, a win for bodily autonomy. Unfortunately, Brown’s mental episodes continued, as well as her heroin use— and the newfound spotlight probably didn’t help matters. New York Magazine found her on the streets back to her erratic behavior within three weeks of her Harvard speech. Eventually she was moved into a long-term supervised residence for the mentally ill and the movie and book offers never came to fruition. 


New York Magazine, 1988
New York Magazine, 1988

In July 1988, the city of New York’s homelessness problem was further made televised when Mayor Ed Koch imposed a 1AM curfew on Tompkins Square Park, which had become crowded with homeless people in tents. Many neighborhood residents as well as the homeless protested against the curfew in August. Police charged the 2-300 protesters and beat people up, causing 35 injuries while they yelled racist slurs. Multiple moments of police attacking defenseless unhoused people were caught on camera, bringing many members of the community together. Recalled a witness, “The streets were full of people who I see coming out of their houses every morning with briefcases...I mean people who work on Wall Street, and they're standing in the street screaming 'Kill the pigs!’" The curfew was revoked as police brutality complaints swelled. The capture of brutality on home video was still very novel. Only two cops would be charged with the use of excessive force, and only one would be fired— a woman.



Nationwide, involuntary hospitalization and medical treatment continued to be illegal since the 1970s, mentally ill unhoused people in dire need of treatment often continued self-medicating, making them prime targets of harassment, street violence, and arrests by the police. Summed up a psychiatrist, police “regard arrest and booking into jail as a more reliable way of securing involuntary detention of mentally disordered persons”. So plenty of mentally ill people were given freedom and autonomy when turned out on the streets from mental hospitals, where they could not be compelled to take prescribed medicine, only to be be re-detained in jail cells after a lack of the treatment they needed. The proportion of prison inmates with untreated mental illness would only grow, while the overall prison population grew from roughly 330,000 prisoners in 1980 to 771,000 by the decade’s end. 


During the 90s, sociologists established three types of homelessness when studying the population in New York and Philadelphia:


1) 80% were transient, meaning they had a single brief stay in a shelter

2) 10% were episodic, meaning they had repeated but brief stays

3) 10% were chronic


According to recent studies, more than 550,000 Americans are homeless on a typical night, and 1.4 million will spend time in a shelter during a given year. Roughly 37% of the nation's homeless are black. Native people also face high rates of homelessness. Additionally, domestic violence victims, the mentally ill, substance abusers, and veterans experience homelessness at higher rates than everyone else. Experts criticize current counting methods and say the number of people living in homelessness are higher. 


As one former librarian noted, the raging homelessness always impacts tax dollars. Writing in a 2007 essay titled, What They Didn't Teach Us in Library School, Chip Ward wrote “Cities that have tracked chronically homeless people for the police, jail, clinic, paramedic, emergency room, and other hospital services they require, estimate that a typical transient can cost taxpayers between $20,000 and $150,000 a year. You could not design a more expensive, wasteful, or ineffective way to provide healthcare to individuals who live on the street than by having librarians like me dispense it through paramedics and emergency rooms.” The best proposed solution, along with affordable housing, are long-term subsidies that allow people to pay only 30% of their income towards rent on the private market, with the government making up the rest. Not only would this be the moral and humane thing to do, it would be a monumental win for public health. 


Chip Ward continued in his essay,

“If an epidemic of deadly flu were to strike, if an easily communicable strain of tuberculosis or some other devastating disease emerges, paramedics will be overwhelmed by their homeless clients who are at high risk for such illnesses. [Beginning of Montage] People who drink until they pass out tend to aspirate and choke, and people who sleep outdoors at night breathe cold, damp air. People who sleep in crowded shelters breathe each other's air. If an epidemic strikes, the susceptibility of the homeless will translate into an increased risk of exposure for the rest of us and, eerily enough, our public libraries could become Ground Zeroes for the spread of killer flu. It's not just about libraries. The chronically homeless share bus stops, subways, park benches, handrails, restrooms, drinking fountains, and fast-food booths with us or with others we encounter daily, who also share the air we breathe and the surfaces we touch. When sick or drunk, they vomit in public restrooms (if we are lucky). Having a population that is at once vulnerable to disease and able to spread microbes widely to others is simply foolish -- and unnecessary -- public policy.”


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