The Homeless: Growing National Problem

Report Outline
Impact of the Recession
Past American Experiences
Sources of Homeless Relief
Special Focus

Impact of the Recession

Growing Problem Throughout the Nation

George Orwell's 1933 memoir, Down and Out in Paris and London, contains this rumination about the nature of poverty: “You have thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.”

With the nation mired in recession, more and more Americans are discovering firsthand the melancholy of poverty. Even worse, increasing numbers are finding themselves at the bottom rung of the poverty ladder—penniless and homeless. Highly visible evidence of the large numbers of homeless Americans is easy to find in nearly every city. Disheveled, dirty men and women can be seen huddled with their meager belongings in city parks, on street corners, in alleyways and abandoned buildings, and in airport, bus station and railway waiting rooms. In the last two years homeless persons have crowded emergency shelters in record numbers. Although exact numbers are impossible to come by, experts estimate that there are between 250,000 and one million homeless persons in the United States today.

“We are seeing the phenomenon all over the country,” said Mitch Snyder of the Community for Creative Non-Violence in Washington, D.C., a group that works with the homeless in the nation's capital and researches the problem nationwide. “In city after city across the country there's at least a growing awareness of the added dimension and seriousness of the problem of homeless people, of destitute people, of marginal people who are slipping quietly and quickly through the cracks.”