The Real Face Of Homelessness

The Liberals tried. They gave money. They watched boring news specials. They held hands all the way across America. They even pretended to laugh at sketches with Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg. But at some point in every one-way relationship, pity turns to resentment, and now even the liberals are turning on the homeless: San Francisco has voted to reduce their benefits 85%; Santa Monica, Calif., passed laws preventing them from sleeping in the doors of shops or receiving food from unlicensed providers; Madison, Wis., is handing them a record number of tickets; Seattle banned the sale of malt liquor and Thunderbird in Pioneer Square as its initiative to shoo away the alcoholics.

Sensing an opening, the Bush Administration has decided to make the homeless problem a target of compassionate conservatism, which got pushed back after Sept. 11, when conservatism was everywhere but compassion was available only for the attack victims. And it's putting its central domestic doctrine to the test on an issue on which the Democrats have been unable to show much progress. It's a good choice, not only because the expectations are so low after decades of failure but also because it is unassailable in its immediate need.

With a freak-show economy in which unemployment has reached 6%--a 50% increase since November 2000--but housing prices have stayed at or near historic highs, the number of homeless appears to be at its highest in at least a decade in a wide range of places across the U.S., according to Bush's own homelessness czar. "It's embarrassing to say that they're up," says czar Philip Mangano of the number, "but it's better to face the truth than to try to obfuscate."

You don't see homeless people as much as you did in the '80s because the one great policy initiative of the past 20 years has been to move them from grates into the newest form of the poorhouse, the shelter. Even though cities are building shelters as fast as they can, the homeless are pouring out of them again, returning to the grates. Homeless numbers are notoriously unreliable (many people may be counted twice or not at all, and some homeless advocates include people who move in with family members), but a TIME survey of the eight jurisdictions that have good statistics shows that this population has grown significantly and that its fastest-growing segment is composed of families. Homeless parents and their kids made up roughly 15% of the case load in 1999--or, if you count every head, about 35% of all homeless people, according to the Urban Institute, a liberal D.C. think tank. The TIME survey suggests that population has since increased--registering year-over-year jumps in either 2001 or 2002 (see graphic for individual cities). These families mainly consist of single women with kids, whose greater housing needs, compared with those of single people, make them more vulnerable to rental increases than are single people.