Homelessness

My wife and I went to San Diego to get together with friends and family for Thanksgiving. We stayed at a downtown San Diego hotel. While having breakfast at the hotel cafe Thursday morning I saw a homeless woman shuffle by on the sidewalk outside. The accoutrements of the trade labelled her as homeless whether or not she really was. The apparently 65-year-old white-haired woman wore a grimy stocking cap and pushed a wheeled, wire cart stuffed with bedrolls and plastic trash bags.

People like her are such a common sight in our society. I have seen them around home, scrounging in trash cans looking for cans and bottles or pushing a shopping cart behind bushes between streets and drainage ditches, getting ready to bed down for the night. Early morning runners along the St. John's River tell me they see encampments in the trees lining this local runoff channel. The local cops regularly sweep the city parks at night to roust them. They beg at freeway onramps. They are everywhere but they are invisible at the same time.

An estimate puts the number of Americans who experience homelessness during a year at 3.5 million. About 33% are chronically homeless. The number at any one time is thought to be about 800,000. It is believed the homeless population tripled between 1981 and 1989. You can look at some data from the National Coalition for the Homeless or the Los Angeles Homeless Services Coalition. They think about 59% of homeless people live out of their cars and 25% live in "makeshift shelters" like boxes. About 33% to 50% suffer from mental illness. Veterans are twice as likely to be homeless as the rest of the population. 43% are female and 39% are children. 25% are employed but cannot afford shelter. In fact, 76% had been employed within the past year.

You didn't used to see so many homeless before the eighties. Anecdotally I'd certainly support the findings about the numbers growing dramatically then and remaining high since. In addition to being a human tragedy for the homeless themselves I suspect they present quite a cost to society. Their camps and living arrangements in general cannot be very sanitary. They wash infrequently and urinate and defecate in the open. The chronically homeless support themselves by some combination of scrounging, begging, stealing, prostitution and dealing drugs. Only 7% have legitimate jobs and high percentages are drug and/or alcohol abusers.

In the past people like that were institutionalized. The non-functional mentally ill and non-functional addicts were "committed" to controlled state wards. In the interest of "freedom" and the Reagan-era desire to cut social services these tools and facilities were greatly scaled back in the 1980s. The result is what we see now. I'm not so sure that what we have is progress, or preferable to what we had before then. In a recent year there were 80,000 homeless in Los Angeles and 18,529 beds in homeless shelters. Are we saving money this way or costing ourselves? Are we serving the chronically homeless best this way or are there better ways? Is not the presence of hundreds of thousands of desperate vagabonds in the self-described greatest country on earth a national disgrace?