Not Gone, but Forgotten?

A few minutes into his Inaugural Address, on Jan. 20, 1989, George Bush--a Republican President often derided for his inattention to domestic problems--looked out at the crowd and declared, "My friends, we have work to do." The first task: helping "the homeless, lost and roaming." Ten years later, Bill Clinton--a Democratic President often praised for his acuity on social issues--delivered his seventh State of the Union address. In the course of 77 min. and 99 proposals, Clinton didn't offer any plans to combat homelessness. He never even brought it up.

What has become of this once pressing issue? In the 1980s homelessness was widely regarded as a national emergency, one that drew heavy media coverage and gave rise to mass demonstrations (in 1986, 5 million Americans joined hands along a 4,000-mile line across the country to raise money for the homeless). That kind of public outcry led to the passage of the first and only federal law to assist homeless Americans, the McKinney Act of 1987, which authorized millions of dollars in funding for housing and hunger relief. But today that spirit is gone. In 1987 the number of articles on homelessness that appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times totaled 847; in 1996 those four dailies ran just 200 stories on the subject. As recently as 1991, 8% of Americans said homelessness--more than crime, the budget deficit, education or the decline of American values--was "the main problem facing the country today." Only half as many people now believe that. "Most of the emphasis today is on the feel-good," says Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who founded a New York City homeless agency in 1986. "People don't want to focus on problems. But there's also the sense that the problem is apparently getting better."

But has it got better? Reliable estimates of the homeless population have always been hard to come by. In the early '80s Mitch Snyder, the late founder of the Center for Creative Non-Violence, an advocacy group in Washington, claimed that there were 3 million homeless in America on any given night. He later admitted that he'd made up the figure. A 1988 Urban Institute survey offered an estimate of 600,000 homeless; but after the 1990 Census, the General Accounting Office put the number at 300,000. A 1994 study examined computer data on shelter turnover rates from 1988 to 1992 and found that between 5 million and 7 million Americans had been homeless at one time or another during those years.