"The homeless are indeed the most egregious symbol of a cruel economy." --Robert Hayes

hile numerous Third World peoples have seen their social programs rolled back under the gun of the International Monetary Fund, often despite the best efforts of their own governments to prevent it, Americans have witnessed controlling forces in their own government -- of their own free will, and indeed, with relish -- launch a similarly extensive societal disinvestment. The housing sector was impacted not only directly through policy decisions as they concerned housing, but also as a result of other policies relating to employment, wages, taxes, etc. As a result, American citizens now suffer in increasing numbers the plague of homelessness which has heretofore been symbolic of underdevelopment -- a phenomenon which development had promised to eliminate and indeed, which the period prior to that referred to as "development" had rarely witnessed.

Can one imagine a satisfactory life for a child if his or her family has no place to live? Well, many thousands of children across America today have no place to call home. One of the most devastating and heartbreaking aspects of poverty over the past few decades has been the increasing prevalence of children among the homeless in the United States. Entire families are now living on America's streets, homeless and begging for food. Homelessness is a permanent feature of poverty in America, and has reached epidemic proportions within American society.

Nobody knows exactly how many homeless people there are in America because the problems of achieving an accurate count are formidable. Conventional censuses and surveys are designed with the assumption that the respondents have an address through which they can be contacted and counted. Clearly, such an assumption cannot be made about the homeless. Estimates vary wildly and disputes over the meaning and measurement of homelessness abound, but in the first half of the 1990s, somewhere between six and ten million people in America had already experienced homelessness and perhaps more than a third of them were families with little children. This figure more than exceeds the entire population of numerous countries, such as my native Lithuania.

Standard discourse, however, muffles the impact of this truly substantial number of Americans who have experienced the shock of homelessness. Two numbers are usually employed to frame discussions of the size of the homeless population in the United States. The smaller number, 250,000 people, derives from the 1984 report of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The larger number, 2.2 million, stems from the 1980 congressional testimony of Mitch Snyder and Mary Ellen Hombs, advocates for the homeless, adjusted upward by their book, Homelessness in America: The Forced March to Nowhere, to a 1983 total of three million people. The HUD figure represents an estimate based on the number of homeless during one night; the two to three million number projects a total of those believed to be homeless over the course of one year.

The most widely cited example of a point-in-time estimate is the approximately 500,000 homeless people found in shelters, eating at soup kitchens, or congregating on the street during one week in 1988. At least 230,000 homeless use shelters in America's large cities at any given time. So, extrapolations from these data suggest that at any given time between 500,000 and 600,000 people in the United States are homeless. A variation of this estimate uses a projected annual rate of increase of five percent to produce a 1996 estimate of 760,000 people homeless on any given night, and between 1.2 and 2 million people who experience homelessness during one year.

In 1990, a national telephone survey identified formerly homeless people and produced lifetime and five-year prevalence estimates of homelessness. Seven percent of the respondents reported that they had been literally homeless (which means they not only had no place to be called home; they had no roof over their heads) at some point in their lives, and three percent reported being homeless at some point between 1985-1990. The Clinton Administration's Priority Home! The Federal Plan to Break the Cycle of Homelessness uses this data, corrected to include children, to estimate that between 4.95 million to 9.32 million people (with a mid-point of seven million) experienced homelessness in the latter half of the 1980s, and as many as 600,000 people are homeless on any given night.

A second study was undertaken in 1994 to refine the analysis with more explicit definitions and detailed information. This study found that 6.5 percent (twelve million adults nationwide!) of the respondents had been literally homeless at some point in their lives, and that 3.6 percent (6.6 million adults nationwide!) of the respondents had experienced homelessness between 1989-1994. Thus, it appears that twelve million adult residents of the U.S. have been literally homeless at some point in their lives.

Perhaps the most extraordinary estimate is the one presented by Paul Toro and Dennis McDonell in their 1991 study. They estimated that 12.2 million people, or 6.7 percent of the U.S. adult population, are at risk for homelessness at some time during their lives. Toro and McDonell went on to report that, if those individuals are included who are "living temporarily with friends or relatives," the percentage of people at risk of homelessness over their lifetime may reach twelve percent of the American adult population, about twenty-two million people. A new report released in December 1997 by the National Coalition for the Homeless documents massive increases in homelessness in the United States over the past ten years. The report, Homelessness in America: Unabated and Increasing -- A Ten Year Perspective, examines the changes in homelessness that have occurred since the passage of the first comprehensive homeless assistance legislation, the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, in 1987. Findings from detailed research on homelessness in fifteen geographic locations -- eleven urban, rural, and suburban communities and four states -- reveal increases in the number of employed persons who are homeless and increases in the number of children who are homeless.

Homelessness has increased dramatically over the past ten to fifteen years, according to this report. Many cities and charitable organizations such as the Salvation Army have doubled or tripled their shelter capacity in order to respond to increasing homelessness. In Boston, for example, shelter capacity increased by 246 percent between 1983 and 1995, increasing from 972 to 3,362 beds. The number of persons counted in the city's annual one-night homeless census increased forty percent between 1988 and 1996. In Los Angeles, shelter capacity more than tripled between 1986 and 1996, increasing from 3,495 to 10,800 beds. In the state of Minnesota, the number of persons in homeless shelters on one night more than quadrupled between 1985 and 1997. The increase in the number of persons receiving shelter in rural areas of the state (387 percent) was greater than in urban areas of the state (364 percent). In the state of Wisconsin, the number of persons receiving shelter more than doubled between 1987 and 1997, increasing from 11,000 to 24,600 people.

In Los Angeles, according to the city's own estimates, there are five to eight homeless persons for every available shelter bed. The lack of shelter availability in Los Angeles is exacerbated by the high percentage of shelters which charge fees: in 1996, forty-six percent of homeless programs in Los Angeles County charged for shelter beds. In the state of Virginia, 94,027 persons requested shelter in 1994, while 40,413 persons were turned away. In Seattle, there are two homeless persons for every available shelter bed. On the 1996 one-night shelter survey, 919 persons were turned away from shelter. ...

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