Homeless Families: A Growth Industry in a Jobless Recovery

The population of homeless families with children has surged, The New York Times reports, overwhelming schools and shelter systems. A number of recent studies have similarly observed that the homeless population is increasingly composed of families. They typically focus on the proximate cause - unemployment, foreclosures and evictions cause by the recession.
But this misses an important point. The recession simply provided a stressor that revealed underlying weaknesses in the paradigm that structures national policies toward the homeless.
The paradigm that had structured homeless policies since the passage of the McKinney-Vento Act incorporated a set of assumptions about homelessness. These policies focused on providing assistance to the "chronically homeless," who were defined as "unaccompanied single individuals". Further, they assumed that most of these individuals were homeless due to disability. Patterns of funding followed this paradigm. Since disability rather than poverty was taken to be the major cause of homelessness, and since the chronically homeless were taken to be single individuals, programs to house them became top priority. These "supportive housing" programs provided intensive services to relatively small numbers of individuals who were single and severely disabled. Even as Section 8 vouchers that provided rental assistance to individuals and families who were simply too poor to afford market-rate housing were cut, experimental "supportive housing" programs expanded.
Why did this occur? There are two major reasons. First, homeless disabled adults were more visible and more disruptive than homeless families. Homeless families, for instance, were rarely seen sleeping on steam grates or panhandling at intersections. Secondly, families- including minimum-wage working families- are more likely to be homeless simply because they are too poor to afford housing. Policies ignore the connection between poverty and family homelessness because this connection suggests that the economic arrangements that benefit some of us leave others- literally- out in the cold.
A perverse sort of efficiency is at work here. By prioritizing service to the most disruptive and visible group of homeless individuals, status quo housing policies purchase the appearance of progress. And by focusing attention on a group of individuals who have multiple problems, these policies also distract attention from the more disturbing fact that our economy is structured in ways that create families who are too poor to afford to keep a roof over their heads.
And the truth is that our economy, as it is currently structured, requires more and more economically marginalized workers to maintain the status quo. Beneath the abstract talk of underemployment and a jobless recovery are simple facts: if real estate prices recover while employment markets continue to shed jobs, then family homelessness is a growth industry.






For an article on the surge in homeless children, see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/education/06homeless.html?scp=1&sq=family%20homelessness&st=cse