New Histories of Homelessness

In the early 1980s, Americans invented a new demographic category: "The homeless." Un-housed and tenuously housed people have existed in virtually every period of history: Refugees and exiles, impoverished city dwellers, vagrants and hobos and drifters and bums populate the historical record. But "the homeless" was a new and different group, characterized by a dramatic rise in the number of un-housed people, and also by the conceptual unification of previously disparate groups. These included single mothers with children, veterans, mentally ill and disabled people, LGBTQ youths, and single men who in previous eras might have been called "disaffiliated" by charity workers.¹ Alarmingly visible in public places, and covered with increasing frequency by the news media, "the homeless" also motivated a growing body of scholarship. Social scientists and journalists were especially productive in documenting this new phenomenon, studying homeless people's social worlds and geographical pathways and the effects of ascendant neoliberalism on everything from government aid and shelter provision to the regulation of urban space through anti-sleeping and anti-panhandling ordinances. The best resulting works, like Jonathan Kozol's Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America (1989), have had a lasting impact on popular understandings of poverty and homelessness in the United States.

Historians have thus far played a quieter role in this field. Their works—while clearly motivated by this newest homelessness crisis—generally addressed earlier eras and only briefly considered the most recent homelessness crisis [Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road (2003); DePastino, Citizen Hobo (2005); Howard, Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America (2013)]. Two new books demonstrate that there is still much to examine about the history of homelessness, and particularly its most recent iteration beginning in the late twentieth century. Thomas J. Main's Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de Blasio and Ralph da Costa Nunez and Ethan G. Sribnick's Family Poverty and Homelessness in New York City: The Poor Among Us delve into previously under-examined realms of homelessness history. Main, a professor of Public Policy at Baruch College who formerly worked at the Manhattan Institute and the Smith Richardson Foundation, provides a detailed account of municipal policy decisions and judicial rulings on the shelter and aid of the homeless in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Nunez, the current president of the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness (ICPH), and Sribnick, who holds a PhD in History and who previously worked at ICPH, examine the long history of poverty and homelessness among families with children. All three authors bring their deep knowledge of homelessness and public policy to their writing, providing new insights that will allow subsequent historians to tell more specific stories about homeless communities whose experiences have not yet been explored.

The authors of both books make New York City their focus, and for good reason. New York has long had the highest concentration of homeless people in the United States, and has also allocated more funds to sheltering and aiding the homeless than any other U.S. city. In addition, private and public relief providers in New York have often been at the forefront of new theories and practices. As Nunez and Sribnick state in their introduction, "Many of the ideas for fighting family poverty either originated in New York City or reached their fullest expression in this great metropolis" (p. 2). The same could be said for homelessness policy more broadly. As Main addresses, the landmark New York State Supreme Court ruling in Callahan v. Carey (1979) established that homeless men had a legal right to shelter. (Similar cases later ruled in favor of single women and families.) The subsequent consent decree signed by the city and state of New...