The Making of Homelessness

Over the past four decades, homelessness in the United States has grown into a nationwide travesty. The Making of Homelessness shows that this outcome was not inevitable. It is the result of deliberate policy choices that shifted responsibility away from the federal government and toward individuals, local governments, and private markets. Since the 1980s, federal housing and welfare policy has transitioned away from long-term investments that help people stay housed and toward short-term crisis responses that manage homelessness after it occurs.

Every day we hear narratives about homelessness that places blame on those living unhoused. The dominant narrative is that people fall into homelessness based on personal choice. Looking closer at the history, however, this story doesn’t quite add up. Rather, homelessness was created through intentional policy design.

Under neoliberal housing policy, governments have abandoned large-scale public housing, deregulated real estate markets, and empowered landlords, developers, and financial institutions to treat homes as investment assets, fueling gentrification, displacement, skyrocketing rents, and homelessness.

The 1980s fundamentally reshaped the nation’s response to poverty and homelessness. Under the Reagan administration, federal support for housing and social programs was dramatically reduced while responsibility shifted toward private markets, local governments, nonprofits, and individuals.

The poorest people in our community are always forced to pay the price of federal retreat. In the 1990s—as in every other decade—welfare recipients, public housing residents, immigrants, disabled folks, and people experiencing homelessness were being pushed through the same broken systems, then blamed for the outcome. Understanding that connection is the only way to be inclusive of the whole community. We are being targeted together, and our organizing has to be powerful enough to fight back together!

The Big Fascist Bill (BFB) legislation is a sweeping compilation of conservative fiscal and policy priorities that will add $5 trillion to the nation’s debt limit while significantly rolling back federal investments in food assistance, health care, climate justice, criminal justice, and more. At the same time, the BFB increases federal funding for ICE and the military, setting the stage for Trump’s intensifying fascist attacks against immigrants, the homeless, the poor, and others. This Fact Sheet is but a “snapshot” of the impacts already being felt.

The Western Regional Advocacy Project authored this report to support community organizing groups in their fight for dignity and justice. In the face of unprecedented cuts to US social services and drastic measures to criminalize our communities, we must remember: we have been here before and we can learn from the lessons of the past to resist in the present.
 
WRAP received research and drafting support from students and staff in the Homeless Rights Advocacy Clinic at Seattle University School of Law and the Policy Advocacy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law.