Final-Term Paper

“American Homelessness: The Silent Crisis”

Part I: Background and History
This paper explores the depth of one of America’s most critical social issues – homelessness. We will examine this crisis as it affects towns and cities in the mainland United States and include Hawaii handling of its own homelessness issue.

By definition the Merriam-Webster dictionary, states that the term homelessness, is the state of “being without home or permanent place of residence”. Different situational forces help to describe this condition, i.e. a household who has been evicted from their home and accepts the help of a shelter, those experiencing tremendous poverty or is homelessness refer those “displaced temporarily because of work situations, e.g. migrant farm workers, fishermen”? (Social Issues in America )

According to Fantasia & Isserman in Homelessness: A Sourcebook, there are three very important issues to understand about the homelessness issue, The “who”, the “why” and “how they got to be homeless” and third, “the importance of why it is community that needs to awareness of the issue in order to be able to improve it”. Homelessness facts are startling and numbers are staggering of which this writer will go into depth. However, to appreciate the enormity and extent of the problem it is helpful to understand a bit of history.

Very little is documented about homelessness or at least it did not appear to be a predicament prior to the Colonial period in America in the early to mid-1700’s. Elizabethan laws at the time protected those settlers and if it was deemed necessary, they would be entitled to community housing aid. (Social Issues in America) As the country became more urbanized and commerce became a fabric of society, during the pre-industrial period of the 1790’s, municipalities no longer were responsible for aiding outsiders. By the end of the 18th century, America was experiencing a new phenomenon in the number of homeless people. The public now feared the mostly homeless and aggressive male.

The Great Depression became a massive national as a result an astounding 25% of the workforce left unemployed estimated at between 200,000 and 1.5 million people. Subsequently “Hoovervilles” , the “shantytowns” named after President Hoover, multiplied (Social Issues in America). Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the homeless situation improved with the infusion of new government programs under the New Deal administration to aid the destitute. By the beginning of World War II, however, homelessness became virtually non-existent except for skid rows. People enlisted in the war overseas and women went to work in the factories.