Hunger and homelesness are haunting the president these days. The public doesn’t seem to buy the findings of his hunger task force, namely that it was unable to “substantiate allegations of rampant hunger.” And on January 31 he referred to the “people who are sleeping on the grates” as “the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.” Yet two months later, he personally intervened to postpone the closing of a large shelter in a federally-owned building in Washington—a shelter that hundreds of people seem to have chosen as preferable to the grates. It is possible, of course, that the president was uncomfortable with his choice, since the Community for Creative Nonviolence, which operated the emergency refuge, had planned a protest march that would have brought the issue up to the White House gates. 

Homelessness has become an election-year issue. Clearly, the fact that some two million Americans are roofless repre-sents only the tip of the iceberg; it is less a problem in itself than a symptom of deeper, ongoing problems. Although Mr. Reagan would hardly agree, it is a symptom of the bankruptcy of our militarized economic system. 

Homelessness baffles the public. If official unemployment (i.e., all civilian workers) is down to 8,772,000, a “mere” 7.8 percent (a figure which excludes the involuntarily underemployed and those who have given up looking for work), why does this phenomenon persist? Why are there so many more undomiciled people in 1984 than in 1975, when the recession of the 1970s hit its worst point? 

Let’s compare the two years in terms of the four major causes of homelessness: unemployment, displacement from housing, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, and inadequacy of social benefits. 

In 1975 official unemployment was higher: 8.5 percent. On the other hand, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in that year 78 percent of the jobless enjoyed unemployment compensation; in March 1984 only 37 percent of the unemployed received it. (During the 1975 recession, unemployed workers were eligible for up to 65 weeks in benefits.) Today some 5,544,630 “officially” jobless and some 1,457,000 “discouraged” jobless, or a total of 7,001,630 Americans, are without work and without unemployment compensation. Never since the inception of the program have so many unemployed been left without benefits. 

Back in 1975 black unemployment was 13.9 percent. Today it’s 16.6. Black teenagers (whose unemployment rate is currently 46.7 percent) and blacks in their twenties are disproportionately represented among the chronically homeless. In nine years the economy has moved steadily in the direction of high technology, leaving behind those who are limited in education, work training, and job experience. The majority of the chronically homeless—however able-bodied they may be—are simply unemployable in today’s economy. Displacement from low-income housing is one of the most widespread factors in homelessness. According to the Legal Services Anti-Displacement Project, displacement afflicts some 2.5 million Americans each year; moreover, some half million lower-rent units ate lost each year through conversion, abandonment, inflation, arson, and demolition. 

Let us focus on one example. Condo conversion has been accelerating since 1975. Research shows that 86,000 units were converted between 1970 and 1975, and 280,000 more in the following four years. Most existing tenants cannot afford the converted units because monthly costs often double; HUD has estimated that about two-thirds of the occupants move out. Many such condos were single-room occupancy hotels (SROs), traditional havens for single persons on welfare. I/n New York City alone, SROs have declined from about 50,000 units in 1975 to less than 14,000 in 1982. On the Upper West Side of New York, where many of these SROs have succumbed to conversion, rents for one-bedroom apartments now bring $700 or more. Moreover, this process has been aided by tax abatements of up to 100 percent. This pattern is being repeated in all large metropolitan cities. 

As homelessness was growing in the past decade, so, too, was the proportion of income that the poor pay for shelter. The 1977 Annual Housing Survey reveals that in 1976 more than 5.8 million households paid over half of their incomes for shelter, including utilities. In 1980 (the latest year for which figures are available) more than 7 million households were paying over fifty percent of their incomes for shelter.

Space limitations preclude exploring the complexities of housing problems. The point is that displacement is a symptom of the overall shortage of low-income housing. The basic reason for the shortage is that housing for people with low and moderate incomes is no longer “profitable” on its own, without government subsidy. In the past decade, but especially during the first three years of the Reagan administration, the role of the federal government in the housing field has been shrinking. Even Congress’ recent approval of 100,000 newly subsidized units (a victory for housing advocates over President Reagan’s initial opposition) represents only a third of what it provided annually in the 1970s.

In virtually every city across the country, Americans have become alternatively repelled, mystified, and intrigued by the spectacle of men and women living in cardboard boxes, or washing their laundry in public restrooms, or getting on their knees in buses and screaming.

The mentally ill constitute about a third of the homeless population. Most have been discharged from institutions to community-based “systems.” Yet according to Dr. John Talbott, president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, fewer than 25 percent of the patients discharged from the state mental hospitals remain in any mental health program. Many are not even referred to such a program. Others are merely given a bus token and directions to a welfare office.

Despite mounting public criticism, the release movement, which began in the mid-1950s, has continued. In 1975 there were 193,721 persons in state mental hospitals; by 1982 they numbered only 125,200.

Community-based treatment and special housing facilities have not grown commensurately. In 1963 mental health professionals set 2000 community-based centers as a national goal; only 717 have been created. In the years 1977-82 New York State spent $3.1 billion on mental hospitals and only $540 million on services in the community. The picture is similar in other states. Furthermore, growing numbers of the mentally disabled on the streets are young “chronics” who have never been in an institution.

For the mentally ill, sheer survival is even more important than treatment. Ten years ago thousands of them lived in SROs; now these hotels are disappearing. Three years ago many more were receiving social security disability or Supplemental Security Income (assistance for the indigent aged, blind, or disabled). During the first two years of the Reagan administration, more than 350,000 recipients—nearly a third of them psychiatrically impaired—were dropped from disability rolls. They included hallucinating ex-patients who had not worked for years, paranoid persons who had been fired from their jobs, and at least one incontinent man who wore seven pairs of pants at one time.

Under the Reagan administration, many recipients of assistance have been dropped from the rolls. Hundreds of thousands of “working poor” families receiving supplemental Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), have had their supplement (an incentive to work) cut down or cut out—despite the administration’s avowed espousal of the work ethic. Supplementary Security Income has disqualified thousands of recipients. Daycare (which made it possible for poor mothers to work), Medicaid, and school feeding programs have been cut. True, overall outlays for food programs have increased, but only because of the increase in food prices and in the number applying. Over one million people have lost their eligibility for food stamps since 1981, and average food stamp benefits have been cut by 14 percent. Today the average stipend amounts to 47 Cents per person per meal.

State governments were supposed to sew up any holes in the safety net. Instead, pressed by recession and cuts in federal aid, they lowered case welfare benefits by 17 percent between 1979 and 1983. In the largest state-federal public assistance program, AFDC, the average monthly stipend per person was $72.40 in 1975 (adjusted to 1967 figures, $44.89). In 1982 it was $102.80 (in 1967 values $35.67). Industry average weekly gross earnings, by comparison, rose from $190.79 in 1975 to $330.65 in 1982—nearly keeping up with inflation. Clearly, the poor have been the real victims. The National Low Income Housing Coalition points out that if we adjust for inflation, since 1980, for each dollar cut from low-income programs (housing and other programs) $4.15 has been added to the military budget and $2.26 to interest on the public debt. 

Statistics are telling, but they don’t tell the whole story. Bureaucrats in their office towers tend to assume that human needs are neatly segregated. Hence, if we have a food stamp program and some people are able to get along on that, then anyone who is hungry must be a poor manager, or a glutton, or a cheat. Or, in presidential confidant Edwin Meese’s view, a lazylegs who finds standing in a line for food “easier than paying for it.” 

Real life isn’t like that. Unemployment, lack of low-income housing, eroding welfare benefits, and lack of resources for the mentally disabled often converge to produce homelessless. And in real life, hunger and homelessness are two dimensions of the same problem. Let’s look at a real case—in Washington, the president’s own backyard. 

Bill (a few details of Bill’s life have been altered to conceal his identity; the figures and circumstances are nevertheless real) is twenty-five, unemployed, black, and mentally ill although he has never been hospitalized. He has an engaging smile and a playful manner; he likes to play hopscotch with imaginary companions. 

For nearly a year Bill received General Public Assistance, $189 a month. To qualify for this he had to be judged temporarily disabled by District of Columbia doctors. (Doctors for the Supplemental Security Income program, which would have paid him up to $304 a month, turned him down as not sufficiently disabled.) For a run-down hotel room Bill paid $50 a week, leaving him with less than nothing to pay for all other expenses except those covered by food stamps and a medical card—i.e., clothing, transportation, non-prescription medications, tobacco, repairs, telephone calls, laundry, soap, toilet paper, and the like. How was he to survive? Bill had little choice. Sometimes he hustled; other men on the street persuaded him to be a runner in the numbers game. Sometimes he soM his food stamps—at about half their net worth. Since this left him quite hungry, he spent the last half of each month standing in line—often for one or two hours, sometimes in rain or snow— for a bowl of soup or spaghetti, dry bread, coffee, or Kool-Aid, and perhaps an apple. Some weeks he could not afford to pay the rent; then he was homeless and hungry. 

Recently the D.C. doctors determined that because Bill had failed to fill out recertification papers that had come to him in the mail—papers that mystified and frightened him—he was no longer qualified as disabled. In D.C. an unemployed but “able-bodied” person is eligible for food stamps and some medical aid, but no cash assistance whatsoever. Today Bill lives on zero income—hustling when he can, eating where he can, alternating between sleeping on park benches and bedding down in barn-like public shelters. He has not taken his psychotropic medications in months, for no one is supervising them. He has lost weight, and developed a chronic cough and ulcerated legs. 

As hunger and homelessness take on stronger dimensions in this election year, there is growing talk of solutions —short-term ones. The food stamp program can be expanded. City and state governments, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, can provide more assistance for emergency shelters. Churches can make more pleas for funds, material, and volunteers. 

Some advocates and workers in the field, notably those who belong to the National Coalition for the Homeless, are pushing for a three-tiered approach: basic emergency shelter; transitional accommodations where clients would receive intensive help in obtaining social and health services; and permanent housing (which can include, for the chronically mentally dis- abled, supportive residences where services are built into structures of everyday life). 

In all three tiers of housing, religious groups have had the most humane—and most economical—approach. As one worker put it: “The church brings a compassionate, caring dimension that you don’t find in big bureaucratic city-run shelters.” The churches have also pioneered with new efforts. For example, Saint Francis Residence in New York offers its mentally disabled residents a variety of social services, comparative privacy, and opportunities to work out long-range individualized plans. Yet even Saint Francis cannot exist without considerable government support. 

Almost no politicians are talking about preventive measures. Yet the homeless promise to be a long-term problem. 

While those of the “new poor” whose jobs have not disappeared forever may be reabsorbed into the economy, the chronically homeless form a new class, or underclass. They are here to stay, unless Americans change their basic social philosophy from making it up by their bootstraps to one based on fair shares. 

We should hardly be surprised by the number who have been sinking into homelessness during the last decade. It was predictable. In the past five years growing numbers of critics have pointed out that decarcerating mental patients into an uncoordinated, ill-funded community-based “system” was not working. For years we have talked anxiously about technological unemployment, yet never has government provided meaningful training or jobs programs, as many European nations have done. As for housing, clearly only the federal government can finance low-income housing on the scale needed. Yet the National Low Income Housing Coalition points out that only 19 percent of the renter households with incomes below $3,000 lived in subsidized units in 1980. Less than one American household in sixteen is living in such units. This is the lowest proportion among the so-called civilized countries. 

Although most European countries have been struggling with high inflation and high unemployment, they do provide social supports. For example, in 1982 unemployment reached nearly 14 percent in Britain, yet few families were known to have been turned out of their homes or to have had to sell their possessions. (The government owns 60 percent of the rental housing stock, which makes eviction more unlikely, and also assures a more manageable waiting list.) In the same year, jobless Americans who did receive compensation got only an average of 63 percent of previous earnings; in West European countries the average was 85 percent. Family allowances have never been adopted here. The United States has the distinction of being the only industrialized country in the world without such allowances; sixty-one others, including many that are poor, find this an effective way to help keep families together and off welfare rolls. Because all European countries have some form of national health care, unemployed persons have not had to choose between food, shelter, and medical treatment, as thousands have had to do here. Moreover, deinstitutionalization has been carried at a slower, more con- trolled pace. It is no coincidence that in European countries, where real safety nets persist even in hard times, homelessness is a comparatively rare phenomenon. 

Emergency shelters and breadlines are not the answer to homelessness in the richest and most powerful country in the world. We do have three major choices. We can decide that the homeless are redundant, non-productive casualties of today’s society, and simply write them off or hope against hope that somehow the overburdened churches will fill the gap.We can, if we consider them to be nonproductive, provide supportive services and some sort of guaranteed annual income. Or, if we still believe in liberty and justice for all, government, churches, and individuals can make concerted efforts to pre-vent homelessness.