JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 1999

Abelson / HOMELESS IN AMERICA

REVIEW ESSAY

HOMELESS IN AMERICA
MARTHA R. BURT, Over the Edge: The Growth of Homelessness in the
1980s. New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Washington, DC: Urban In-
stitute Press, 1992, xi, 267 pp., tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, in-
dex, $29.95 cloth.
STEPHANIE GOLDEN, The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of
Homelessness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, x, 319 pp.,
notes, bibliography, index, $25.00 cloth.
BRENDAN O’FLAHERTY, Making Room: The Economics of Homeless-
ness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, xi, 349 pp., tables,
appendix, notes, references, index, $39.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.
ROB ROSENTHAL, Homeless in Paradise: A Map of the Terrain. Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 1994, x, 265 pp., map, illustrations, appen-
dix, notes, index, $69.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.
DAVID A. SNOW and LEON ANDERSON, Down on Their Luck: A Study of
Homeless Street People. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993,
xiv, 391 pp., illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index, $45.00 cloth,
$14.00 paper.

As the number of Americans who are officially labeled homeless seems to

be decreasing at the end of the twentieth century, the topic of homelessness
has become a growth industry. In the 1990s, we have witnessed, if not an ex-
plosion of books on the subject, at least a constant stream of monographs,
“down-and-out” investigative reports, and policy studies by social scientists,
economists, historians, social welfare activists, and journalists. A glance at
the notes and references in the five titles under review points to at least ten
other recently published books that could have substituted for any one of
these. At once mundanely empirical and intensely personal, the literature on
the new homeless population in the United States is, ultimately, a study of so-
cial crisis in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate period, wherein a shifting
economy combined with the failure of political will to create a unique combi-
nation of dire poverty amidst extravagant wealth. As a struggle about social

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© 1999 Sage Publications, Inc.
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 Abelson / HOMELESS IN AMERICA 259

order and the meaning of urban space, homelessness has emerged as a sym-
bol of profound malaise. For perhaps the only time in our history, large num-
bers of people are homeless, not the result of natural or economic disaster but
of something else, a combination of factors that are at once both obvious and
difficult to agree upon.
Historical memory is short, and as the meaning of homelessness has
changed many times in the past two hundred years, we have forgotten (if we
ever knew) that casual laborers, vagrants, paupers—the wandering poor—al-
though few in number, were not unknown in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. And while colonial cities and towns acknowledged responsibility
for the local poor, they “warned out” the nonresident stranger. The war
widow and her children, the disabled soldier, the abandoned wife, the men-
tally unstable, and the chronically ill—all those who had legal settlement
rights—were entitled to a modicum of support. Sailors, casual laborers, im-
migrants, and former indentured servants—the transient poor—were viewed
as deviants and shunted from community to community. In a predominantly
agricultural society, however, little stigma was attached to being poor, and the
integration of different economic activities helped immunize most people
against the consequences of unemployment and economic uncertainty.1
But between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, macroeconomic and so-
cial changes in the form of immigration, rapid urbanization, and industriali-
zation led to a collective shift in consciousness. The social definition of
homelessness changed and became intimately associated with the darker,
more sinister meaning of urban life. By midcentury, particularly during the
panic of 1857, the cyclical nature of the economy and the dependence of
workers on steady employment became evident.2 It was during the depres-
sion of the 1870s and again in the severe economic crisis beginning in 1893,
however, that poverty became a distinct social problem and a metaphor for
urban disorder and personal disintegration. Yet, during these same decades,
the male tramp and the hobo assumed their symbolic, even iconic position in
the literature on poverty.3 Here, language became a social agent as the
tramp—the transient individual without permanent residence or stable
means of employment—was at once vilified as an outsider and a danger to the
established social order and romanticized as the embodiment of rugged
American individualism.
How do women fit into this picture? Uneasily. Always well represented
among the very poor, women, with and without children, had a distinctively
domestic role, and adherence to the family ethic shapes even sympathetic ac-
counts of female poverty and homelessness in the nineteenth century as in the
twentieth.4 While “long term joblessness produced severe hardship” for eve-
ryone, we know that women and men had diverse experiences.5 Few women
260 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 1999

tramped, and if they did, they passed as men. Needlework and domestic work
were the two primary occupations of poor women throughout the nineteenth
century, and when these failed, begging and prostitution were often the only
alternatives to the poorhouse or the police lodging house.
The Great Depression of the 1930s made poverty everyone’s concern.
Suddenly, the homeless became unwitting victims of an economic disaster.
Unlike earlier financial crises, the Depression was marked by the breadth of
the financial crash, the ineffectiveness of traditional methods of relieving
poverty, and, with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the legitimacy of the
notion of federal responsibility for the poor and unemployed.6
What marked this crisis as well was the extensive photographic record of
destitution. The contradictions between the 1930s and the present period are
striking. A national survey of the homeless taken in early 1990 confirmed the
visual evidence of modern homelessness: Women with children represented
34 percent of the “unsheltered” population, and single women without de-
pendents ranged from 12 percent to 20 percent of the total. These are not the
images of the Great Depression. In the South, Farm Security Administration
photographs of desperately poor families on their ruined farms or on the road
dominate the iconography; in the North, photos of men selling apples, camp-
ing out in Hoovervilles, or standing in long lines seeking shelter, work, or re-
lief inform our understanding of the period. Families in the South and men in
the North are the dominant conventions of representation. Homeless women
attracted little public attention even when sources make it clear that they were
“on the breadlines” and in the shelters during the early years of the Depres-
sion. While never comprising more than 10 percent of the homeless popula-
tion, unemployed women, both married and single, became a significant
problem during the Great Depression, and their virtual absence from the vis-
ual record is striking.
And this brings us to the present. The five books under consideration are a
random and somewhat puzzling selection of new academic work on home-
lessness. Linked by the word homeless in their titles, they fall roughly into
two categories. The Women Outside, Down on Their Luck, and Homeless in
Paradise are ethnographies that combine participant observation with his-
torical analysis and a search for the social roots of homelessness. The two
other titles, Over the Edge and Making Room, are data-driven social science
studies that explore the multiple causes of increasing impoverishment,
changing housing markets, and a variety of public policy issues. Race is men-
tioned briefly in all five books but in none of them, surprisingly, is it an ana-
lytical focus. Different as they are, however, in intent, methodology, and even
chosen audience, the authors agree with each other’s conclusions more often
than not.
 Abelson / HOMELESS IN AMERICA 261

The homelessness that these five books investigate is a complex phenome-

non that is no more than a local reflection of national issues. Federal policies
and legislation that affect monetary, mental health, and housing decisions are
the major culprits by helping first to create and then to exacerbate the situa-
tion. Yet, the interaction of a number of local factors, including municipal
housing regulations and the availability of public and low-rent housing, zon-
ing, work programs, and gentrification, are at play in any given situation.
These local issues coupled with the destruction of bounded skid-row districts
and single room occupancy (SRO) living units in the 1960s and 1970s forced
heretofore “hidden” street people to spread out across the cities and become
highly visible.
While they lean in one direction or another for answers, the five authors
shy away from any single explanation for the explosion of homelessness at
the end of the 1970s. They reject as inaccurate a monolithic image either of
the causes or of the results, both of which lead to dehumanized, stereotypic
perceptions of homeless people and a distortion of both their reality and ours.
There is a general consensus that personal vulnerability coupled with a pre-
cipitating event triggers the loss of permanent shelter (this destructive sce-
nario may be repeated again and again), but this event, while individual, is
tied inextricably to larger social and political issues. The authors note that
many, perhaps a large majority, of the homeless are without permanent shel-
ter only episodically; people who “have gone outside” can come in again.7
Others are chronically homeless, but, as Rob Rosenthal says in Homeless in
Paradise, disaffiliation is a gradual process, and “very few people are volun-
tarily homeless” (p. 35).
Language, as ever, is contested political territory, and it plays a key role
when speaking or writing about the homeless. The categories produced by
people who study homelessness become ours. We, the “housed people” or the
“domiciled citizens,” as Snow and Anderson awkwardly label the millions of
Americans who are not homeless, view street people through the lens of what
we consider to be representative of normality—what Michel Foucault has
called “the examiner’s normalizing gaze.”8 As public visibility and spatial
appropriation lead increasingly to negative attention, discussions of home-
lessness focus uneasily on demographic models and disease. Many believe
that street people are somehow fundamentally different. We instantly pa-
thologize the bag lady and demonstrate declining sympathy with her degra-
dation when we encounter her on the street. She is not a person but a social
problem to contain, a mere symbol of one of the more irrational and even
“colorful” aspects of urban life.
But language can be slippery, and what engaged my attention was the arbi-
trariness of just who qualifies as homeless, who can be officially labeled
262 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 1999

homeless. There is little consensus. The complex relationship between lan-

guage and experience becomes a confrontation over meaning. At what point
does “doubling up” or sleeping on someone’s floor slide into homelessness?9
Do all daytime street people overlap with the officially homeless, or do many
of the panhandlers, windshield washers, and canners have regular and secure
indoor places to sleep? Are squatters homeless? Defining and specifying
what and who is authentically homeless, these five authors explore various
levels of difference and acknowledge their individual cutoff points. While all
include women and children in welfare hotels and motels among the home-
less, at least one author does so reluctantly. Families in emergency housing,
like the infamous Martinique Hotel in New York City where Rachael and her
four children lived during the mid-1980s, were, according to Brendan O’Fla-
herty in Making Room, not considered to be homeless until late 1982.10 Since
they often remained in this housing for months (some stayed for years), chil-
dren attended school from this address, and welfare services were delivered
to this location. O’Flaherty asks, what made these families different from
those in the subsidized public housing projects? Rejecting the politics that
place families in emergency shelters among the homeless, he explicitly fo-
cuses on “official homelessness,” the heavily compromised one-night count,
housing-market definition, politics and all.
Beginning as a project of the National Bureau of Economic Research,
Making Room is a highly readable, if occasionally glib, economic analysis
that focuses on homelessness in six cities, only three of which—New York,
Newark, and Chicago—are in the United States. The other three—Toronto,
London, and Hamburg—are included in the study both for their possible
similarities and obvious differences. But, as Brendan O’Flaherty admits,
comparisons between the United States and other non-U.S. cities are almost
impossible, even with Toronto, which, like Chicago, is a Great Lakes city
with a fairly similar culture to many American cities. Histories, housing mar-
ket institutions, social policy, and even descriptive language are all so differ-
ent outside of the United States that real similarities become meaningless
(p. 7). If O’Flaherty’s comparisons are strained and ultimately lack weight,
his questions are key to any basic analysis of the problem: What is homeless-
ness? Why is it bad? What happened? Why did it happen? What can we do,
and what should we do about it?
Moving from an older definition of homelessness that referred to a status
in society rather than a condition of housing to the newer definition of “where
you slept last night,” the official American measurement of homelessness
has, according to O’Flaherty, become hopelessly vague, circular, and con-
fused (p. 11). Many facilities are left with ambiguous classifications. Bat-
tered women’s shelters, various kinds of detox facilities, and Salvation Army
 Abelson / HOMELESS IN AMERICA 263

rehabilitation centers may or may not be homeless shelters depending on lo-

cal usage and who is doing the counting. Clarification of meaning is crucial
because the all-important political numbers game and, consequently, money
depend on it.11 O’Flaherty cites Over the Edge, by Martha Burt, the other
quantitative study in this review, as an example of the problem of flawed la-
bels and methodology. Burt used a count of shelter beds in American cities in
late 1989 to determine the growth of homelessness during the 1980s. How-
ever, O’Flaherty says Burt’s data sets and those of the U.S. Census shelter
count of 1990 are “wildly discrepant.” He claims that “sometimes one
number is higher, sometimes the other” (p. 13). Both Burt and the Census re-
lied on local officials to identify shelters, and neither justified the definition
of “shelter” (p. 167). Where does this leave us? How do we make sense of the
morass of contradictory data and determine how many people are really with-
out housing and how they got that way?
Public images of the homeless are the people we see on the street, and
these images have changed radically over the course of almost three decades.
In the 1960s, the few street people anyone encountered where generally
white, male, and alcoholic. Although the Bowery in New York was, as far as
anyone knew, the only place in the city where men slept on the sidewalk,
these men had a place that was theirs, if only by default. By the late 1970s,
drug addicts, bag ladies, and mental patients joined the traditional alcoholic
street population and moved or were pushed out of the skid-row districts.
O’Flaherty notes that in 1978, decorative benches and seats were removed
from a host of outdoor and indoor locations to prevent their use as alfresco
bedrooms, and public bathrooms were being locked in city after city (p. 35).
Street homelessness, undocumented and almost unobserved until it exploded
in downtown areas across the country, formed the core of the new homeless
population in this country.
O’Flaherty’s strength is documenting these daytime symbols of public
poverty. He is mainly interested in the extent to which these single
adults—whom he labels, for want of a better word, the colloquial home-
less—are affected by housing market and shelter policies. Are they really
homeless? Are they inherently lazy? His findings are surprising. A large per-
centage of people he and his team of Columbia University students inter-
viewed in late March and early April 1993 had strong local ties: 70.2 percent
(146 individuals) had been in New York City for more than twenty years;
61.7 percent had close relatives in New York; 59.8 percent said they worked
seven days a week, and 41.9 percent claimed to work seven to nine hours per
day. Work consisted of collecting cans, panhandling, peddling, washing
windshields (legal in New York at the time), selling Street News, and un-
named odd jobs, including a variety of illegal activities (pp. 83-6). Are all
264 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 1999

these street people to be counted among the homeless? The answer is “possi-
bly” (p. 79). Eighty-six percent of the respondents in the study considered
themselves homeless, but based on where they had slept the night before,
only 80 percent of these were homeless in the official definition. Surpris-
ingly, very few street people in New York—6 to 7 percent—use the shelters
(pp. 92-3).
Throughout the discussion, O’Flaherty sets up and dismisses various
claims about the source of the new homelessness. He suggests that high inter-
est rates, decreasing availability of low-rent housing, improvement in the
quality and accessibility of shelters, and changes in tenancy laws probably
contributed to the rise in homelessness but were not definitive factors. Skepti-
cal about gentrification and rent control as popular explanations, he admits
that substance abuse, deinstitutionalization of mental patients, and growth of
the population of ex-offenders do have a relationship to increased homeless-
ness, but in this reading none of these accounts for the sudden rise in the
number of people on the street at the end of the 1970s. Local explanations are
more plausible: loss of public housing stock in Newark, for example; the re-
laxation of city shelter policies; and a drastic shrinkage of the middle class in
New York City. O’Flaherty shies away from any single answer. The causes,
he concludes, are subtle and hard to reverse; data is meager, and consensus
about solutions is lacking.
Martha Burt’s Over the Edge explores the “astonishing surge” in the
homeless population during the 1980s. A professional in the field of social
services, Burt directed the first national study of the urban homeless con-
ducted in 1987 by the Urban Institute. In this new study, she seeks to advance
public debate about our most disturbing domestic issue. Distinguishing be-
tween the causes of homelessness and the attributes of the homeless (her em-
phasis), she focuses on the “intricate interactions” of the many potential
causes of homelessness: housing (public policy), income (structural eco-
nomic factors), and personal vulnerabilities (pp. 11-2).
Examining the complex interactions that lead to homelessness, Burt, like
O’Flaherty, finds mono-causal explanations of little value. She singles out
Robert Hayes, former director of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York
City, as naive in his insistence on “housing, housing, housing” (p. 4). Home-
lessness is primarily a housing problem, however. Housing and income go
hand in hand, and Burt examines housing availability and changes in house-
hold income in detail. She is careful to elaborate the elements in “housing af-
fordability,” pointing out that one key component is the stock itself: whether
there are enough units, in the right places, of the appropriate size and condi-
tion to accommodate the families who need them and can afford them (p. 31).
Although not a new concept, shelter poverty becomes a venue for discussion
 Abelson / HOMELESS IN AMERICA 265

of the meaning of affordability and the twin problems of female-headed

households and racial discrimination.
There are no people in this book, just as there were none in Making Room.
The voices of the homeless are absent. In the introduction, Burt presents four
brief and fictitious “case histories” that she claims “correspond in their basic
outlines to the stories of many homeless people” (p. 4). Beyond these com-
posite narratives to which Burt never again refers, the material is all quantita-
tive. This is a lucid analysis of housing issues from the 1930s to the near pres-
ent in which it becomes very clear that federal involvement—a range of poli-
cies and subsidies that began during the Depression—has had an immense
impact on housing construction and the rise of homelessness. Burt suggests
that structural flaws in the housing market during the 1980s that culminated
in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 “reduced the incentives for investing in any
housing,” particularly low-cost housing, and are responsible for the persis-
tence of homelessness (p. 53). However, the explosion of homelessness pre-
ceded Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and Burt does not account for this; in
fact, she maintains that “In the 1950s, 1960s, and even the 1970s, people with
these special problems (alcohol abuse, mental illness, chemical dependency)
could and did maintain themselves in housing, even if their shelter was the
bare minimum” (p. 126).
No one denies the squeeze effect on the most vulnerable of the very poor
during the 1980s. Evidence for the absolute increase in poverty in the Reagan
years is hard to miss. Economic conditions in the early 1980s—recession, job
restructuring, severe unemployment, fall in the purchasing power of the
minimum wage—may, as the author suggests, have started many of the “less
advantaged men on the path to eventual homelessness” (p. 72). But what of
the less advantaged women? According to her own figures, 10 percent of the
homeless “households” consist of a single woman, and this figure does not
include single women with children. Any analysis of homelessness that so
easily glosses over the gender dimensions of the problem loses a degree of
credibility.
Throughout the text, Burt responds to the claim that the “new homeless”
of the 1980s are “just like you and me.”12 The assertion that “most people are
just a paycheck or two away from homelessness,” while made to arouse sym-
pathy and support for policies to aid the homeless, is just not true (p. 81). She
points out that, contrary to census statistics on family structure in this coun-
try, the two-parent, homeless family is an anomaly (p. 16). Homeless adults,
she feels, “resemble other poor people more than they resemble the American
average” (p. 21). While the homeless in this study are fundamentally differ-
ent from the rest of us, Burt concedes “they almost certainly would not
choose the streets if a minimal roof were available” (p. 126).
266 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 1999

Quoting Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, David Snow and Leon
Anderson see the 1980s as “the best of times, the worst of times,” a silent but
public confrontation between those at the top of the economic hierarchy and
those hundreds of thousands living on the streets of urban America. One of
the few studies of a city not in the Northeast, Down on Their Luck charts the
sudden increase in the number of homeless in Austin, Texas and the growing
recognition that the new homeless are younger (mid-thirties on the average),
more ethnically diverse, more female, and far more visible than the old skid-
row population. Participant observers (or buddy-researchers as they label
themselves), the two sociologists provide a detailed description of the daily
routine and survival strategies of unattached, mostly male, mostly white
homeless adults in Austin in the mid-1980s. Women, they write, are under-
represented in their sample for two reasons: Women with children comprise a
separate group that uses different services, and “the majority of childless
women developed means of survival independent of the Salvation Army”
(p. 27). In this otherwise solid ethnography, why is it that women, once again,
represent a group that needs to be studied separately? Are women a hidden
population or so very different from men, or is a male model driving this
research?
Employing a “multiperspectival analysis,” the authors spent time in the
field with homeless people; interviewed agency personnel, police officers,
and neighborhood activists; and taped in-depth interviews with “key infor-
mants,” six homeless men who had been on the streets from two months to
fourteen years. Their database is impressive: They tracked a random sample
of 767 homeless who had one or more contacts with the local Salvation Army
in the mid-1980s and had personal encounters with 168 individuals.
A major research concern was to capture the psychological adjustment
and material adaptation that all homeless people go through. The process is
grim. The subculture of street life—where people sleep, what they do during
the day, where they find toilets, what they eat and where, how they both help
and victimize each other, what social relations they form, how they get
money for food and cigarettes, drugs, and liquor—these basic questions are
the focus of this study.
“Work still remains a central dilemma in the lives of the homeless,” the
authors observe (p. 111). In investigating the relation between the homeless
and wage labor, they find that not only do the men have few job skills but that
“they are much less skilled than most of the American work force” (p. 113).
Echoing Martha Burt, they, too, conclude that the homeless are not just like
you and me. These authors also confirm what Brendan O’Flaherty discov-
ered: Homeless men are not homeless because they are lazy, but the obstacles
to regular work while homeless are formidable; a stable work history, refer-
 Abelson / HOMELESS IN AMERICA 267

ences, a permanent address, and a telephone number are just the more obvi-
ous difficulties. Eighty-five percent of the tracking sample’s more than six
hundred individuals who were not from Austin “indicated that they had come
to Austin in search of work” (p. 117). Most found only occasional day labor,
and the longer they were on the street, the less likely they were to look for
that. What Snow and Anderson call “shadow work”—opportunistic survival
strategies that include panhandling, selling and trading, scavenging, and
theft—comprise the work day for the majority of these homeless men.
The typologies the authors use as both organizing and conceptual tools
make for heavy going. When they start comparing “regular straddlers” to “in-
stitutionally adapted straddlers” and compare these groups to “outsiders” and
“the recently dislocated,” the jargon overwhelms their normally accessible
style.
Rob Rosenthal’s Homeless in Paradise is similar to the Snow and Ander-
son study. Combining participant observation with an analysis of structural
data, Rosenthal traces the forces that produce homelessness. But here, too,
the reader is bombarded with sociological typologies. In an otherwise clearly
written book, the author assails the reader with such descriptive subgroups as
“wingnuts,” “skiddlers,”and “transitory workers.”
Rosenthal was involved with the Homeless People’s Project in Santa Bar-
bara, California for almost five years in the mid-1980s. This study is an at-
tempt to recreate the landscape of that experience. In-depth oral histories
combined with hundreds of shelter intake interview forms, work with the
Single Parent Alliance, and his own edited field notes convey a picture of the
daily life of homeless people. Using displacement theory to understand the
social roots of homelessness, Rosenthal challenges the characterization of
homeless people as generally disaffiliated. “The great majority of homeless
people retain some . . . contact with housed relatives,” and the often obvious
despair and disengagement of street people, he believes, are both reactions to
their circumstances and signs of engagement (p. 82). His definition of who
should be considered homeless is broader than that which most social scien-
tists would accept. He includes anyone who has legal rights of residency of
less than seven days—in other words, those in shelters or doubling up with
friends, the “nearly homeless,” are often part of this discussion (p. 5).
The voices in this study are those of both men and women, and their stories
of life on the street are filled with the “terrible complexity” of daily existence.
Homelessness is hard, time-consuming work. Food is the easiest of the ne-
cessities to find. Many of the homeless receive food stamps, but these are in-
adequate and must be supplemented in one way or another. “Dumpster div-
ing” is one way. Keeping clean, finding a safe place for possessions, and en-
suring personal safety are far more difficult.
268 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 1999

Alone among the five authors, Rosenthal discusses the homeless people’s
movement. Organized in the winter of 1982-1983 in reaction to repeated en-
counters with the Santa Barbara police, the movement became a battle with
housed people over the issues of containment and the cultural interpretation
of homelessness. Who, in other words, was homeless, and what were the civil
rights of such an individual? Social movements, Rosenthal reminds us, re-
quire resources, and various “respectable” segments of the community were
involved in raising homelessness as a public issue. Short-lived though the
coalitions were, there were some victories for homeless rights. “Homeless-
ness not helplessness” became an organizing trope (p. 109).
In only one of these titles, The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of
Homelessness, is gender a clear-cut analytical category. Working from the
premise that female homelessness means something different to society than
does male homelessness, Stephanie Golden has written a disturbing book
that forces readers to take another look at the women they encounter on the
street. She analyzes the history of women outside, the social function they
have served, the fears they have engendered, and the persistent myths and
fantasies that still persist. “A homeless woman creates discomfort because
she cannot be categorized,” Golden writes. Even in the late twentieth century,
“women are so entirely defined in terms of whom they belong to that no cate-
gory exists for a woman without a family or home. . . . She exists apart from a
defined social context”; she is homeless. For women of color, the over-
whelming majority of homeless women by the end of the 1980s, “these atti-
tudes are compounded by racism” (p. 5).
The women in Golden’s study are not women with children, although they
may have children, but single women who have found refuge at a small
Catholic-run shelter in New York City called the Dwelling Place. Shelter is
the operative word here. Contrasting the Dwelling Place with the municipally
operated Brooklyn Women’s Shelter—“not a shelter but a doghouse,” ac-
cording to a former resident—Golden accuses the public facility of having
nothing to do with helping people. Its arbitrary rules and “its abusiveness
made sense only on the assumption that its purpose—as with the old poor-
houses—was punishment” (p. 4). The vision of the nuns and volunteers at the
Dwelling Place was that of creating a sense of community, of caring and trust
as a way to bring homeless women inside and back into society.
We tend to think of homelessness in the aggregate when, in fact, it is an in-
dividual issue. Individuals lose their niche, their network of support along
with jobs and housing, and become a social problem. Although Golden (ech-
oing Rob Rosenthal) suggests that madness is relative and some antisocial
behavior is “simply an adaptation to homeless life,” many women in the
Dwelling Place were, in fact, former patients in mental hospitals (p. 157).
 Abelson / HOMELESS IN AMERICA 269

Unable to cope outside the institution without adequate emotional or practi-

cal support, these women deteriorated and ended up on the street. Golden
documents both the physical and psychological meaning of life on the street:
the physical and moral demoralization, the loneliness and lack of truly recip-
rocal social relations, the numbness that explains how women endure the
stress and danger, and the infamous bags.
While homeless men are often seen pushing loaded shopping carts filled
with their possessions, women collect shopping bags. A particular female
image (and an emblem of the middle-class consumer), “bags,” she writes,
“resonate with meaning.” On the most practical level, women need a place to
keep things; on a deeper, metaphorical level, shopping bags and their assorted
contents project the image of carrying and caring, and while they reflect the
state of mind and feelings of the individual owner, they also fulfill an ex-
pected female role (pp. 45-6).
Although comparisons can be risky, homelessness is, in many respects,
timeless. Visible homelessness has almost always created a distinct sense of
urban disorder and anxiety. With the possible exception of the Great Depres-
sion, we still tend to see the homeless as outcasts—disconnected from com-
munity, morally suspect, disruptive of social order, and possibly dangerous.
Obviously, there are differences to consider as well. It may sound like an oxy-
moron, but the lack of affordable housing is the greatest single component in
the recent explosion of homelessness. The failure of both the public and pri-
vate housing markets and the inability of safety-net programs to function as
they should have created what is a national scandal. The material problem of
inadequate income relative to housing costs is a fact that each author recites
as a mantra.
Individual difficulties complicate the inability to afford housing, but
homelessness is the end result of problems that much of the housed world
would prefer to ignore. While these books reveal much about the dimensions
of modern homelessness and ask important questions, racial issues are sub-
merged, and gender is too often treated as a special category. There is still no
consensus about what is wrong and how it can be fixed. Gary Trudeau cap-
tured the essence of the dilemma in a Doonsbury cartoon in 1986:
Policeman: I don’t care if you are a reporter, I gonna have to cite you for public
sleeping. City of Santa Barbara ordinance. We’re trying to curb homelessness.
It’s not illegal to sleep per se. We just want those with no place to sleep to not
have a place to sleep some other place than here.13

—Elaine S. Abelson
New School for Social Research
270 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 1999

NOTES

1. Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts

(New York, 1986), 13; see also Charles Hoch, “A Brief History of the Homeless Problem in the
United States,” in Richard D. Bingham, Roy E. Green, and Sammis B. White, eds., The Home-
less in Contemporary Society (New York, 1987), 16-32; Gary Nash writes of the responsibility of
local communities to the very poor in The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Conscious-
ness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1979).
2. Keyssar, Out of Work, ch. 3.
3. Ibid., chs. 4, 5; Ellen Bassuk and Deborah Franklin, “Homelessness Past and Present:
The Case of the United States, 1890-1925,” in Padraig O’Malley, ed., Homelessness: New Eng-
land and Beyond (Boston, 1992), 25-48.
4. Stephanie Golden, The Women Outside: Myth and Meanings of Homelessness (Berkeley,
1992), 116.
5. Keyssar, Out of Work, ch. 6.
6. Ibid., 289.
7. Golden, The Women Outside, 68.
8. David A. Snow and Leon Anderson, Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street
People (Berkley, 1993), 314.
9. Rob Rosenthal, Homeless in Paradise: A Map of the Terrain (Philadelphia, 1994), 4-5;
Christopher Jencks asks these same questions. See Christopher Jencks, The Homeless (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1994), 3-6.
10. See Jonathan Kozol, Rachael and Her Children: Homeless Families in America (New
York, 1988).
11. Jencks,The Homeless, 16-20. For a discussion of the politicization of the numbers on any
given night, see Elliot Liebow, Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women (New York,
1993), 312.
12. Jencks agrees with Burt that the differences between the homeless population and “you
and me” are significant. See Jencks, The Homeless, 46.
13. O’Flaherty, 298. Rosenthal reproduces the Trudeau cartoon in Homeless in Paradise,
106. Jencks says almost the same thing when he writes, “When people contemplate human mis-
ery, the cliché that equates ‘out of sight’ with ‘out of mind’ is all too accurate.” See Jencks, The
Homeless, 7.