Making Sense of American Liberalism

5. New York Liberalism and the Fight against Homelessness

5 New York Liberalism and the Fight against Homelessness ella howard The modern American welfare system reflects its architects’ desires to assist the poor as well as their fear of fostering dependency on relief. Its programs, forged and expanded during periods of liberal political dominance, have shifted over time, as resource allocations and attitudes toward poverty have changed. The urban homeless have long slipped through the cracks of this system, struggling to navigate the complex terrain of overlapping and sometimes conflicting policies.1 Although charitable impulses are not confined to liberal politics, the expansion of the scope of the government in order to provide such charitable programs, whether at the municipal, state, or federal level, has been a core tenet of modern liberalism. As the meaning of the term liberalism in America shifted from its early-nineteenth-century orientation toward protecting the rights of the middle and upper classes to its twentieth-century focus on the expansion of the regulatory state, it represented a growing political consensus that individuals should be protected from the previously unchecked power of the business sector. At each juncture in the development of urban liberalism , the contemporaneous policies toward homelessness reflected political commitments to the equality of opportunity, belief in human potential for reform and rehabilitation, attitudes toward the poor, and definitions of the role of government itself. This essay explores the development of homeless policy in New York during two periods of liberal expansion of the welfare state. During the 1930s, in response to the crisis of the Great Depression, liberal politicians expanded the power and responsibility of the federal government, regulating the business sector and providing assistance to the nation’s needy. Most of the specialized New Deal programs faded as the U.S. entry into World War II restored the nation’s economic prosperity. But increased faith in the expanded role of the federal government continued, facilitating the unprecedented tactics adopted under President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s to end American poverty. Johnson’s philosophies and strategies were far from those adopted by Roosevelt; the Johnson administration was much more willing to make fairly radical, long-term interventions into the economic landscape. Although the poverty programs of the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations have been widely and cogently analyzed, relatively little attention has been paid to the treatment of the poorest of the poor during these periods. Studying the homeless offers a new perspective on the development of the nation’s welfare system. Utterly destitute, the urban homeless of the midcentury era were often male, unemployed, and sometimes heavy drinkers. As profoundly unsympathetic subjects to many Americans, they tested the limits of liberalism. Although neither vulnerable women, nor deserving children, most skid-row homeless were American citizens. As such, to what aid were they entitled and how must they behave in order to receive assistance? Focusing on New York City, one of the nation’s most politically liberal cities, this essay analyzes the changing experience of homelessness during these two pivotal eras in the development of urban liberalism. It examines the programs that were developed to aid the homeless while also exploring the effects on the indigent of other period interventions into the urban landscape , in order to clarify the attitudes of urban liberals toward the homeless and, ultimately, toward poverty. It argues that most lasting programs designed to combat urban poverty offered little aid to the poorest of the poor. This pattern of neglect reflected the political motivations and limitations that defined liberal programs, whose proponents routinely abandoned the urban homeless when supporting them might prove unpopular. While American liberalism achieved many laudable goals, including providing assistance to many impoverished individuals and families, it operated within the confines created by a voting public committed to specific visions of a work ethic and economic self-sufficiency. Early Welfare Systems and Homelessness The tumult of the nineteenth century had sparked new understandings of the role of government. As industrialization transformed the nation and cities rose alongside factories, the population faced a changing and unfamiliar 11 4 . ella howard world, in which industrial labor proved physically difficult, dangerous and repetitive, and often paid abysmally low wages. The existing system of poorhouses struggled to contain the indigent population. The facilities had been developed in the United States in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to aid as well as contain the poor. Yet as industrialization relied upon new labor supplies, temporary workers between jobs...