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Wednesday 7 November 2012

Down & out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History

The phenomenon of widespread homelessness is a discipline in point.

Contemporary homelessness surfaced as a significant disclose front in the 1980s, when a number of trends coalesced in a elan that gave the phenomenon critical mass. According to Barak, homelessness as a structural feature of society can be connect to transformation of government policy, housing trends, and shifting structures of employment that pitch global reach. He argues that before the 1980s homelessness could be attributed to cycles of gloomy in distributerial achievement and a species of employee inflation or surplusage labor, where too many workers were chasing too few jobs. Writing in 1992, Barak explains that after 1980 the very shape and content of industrial achievement radically shifted. There was a "transition from an industrial-based capitalist frugality to a postindustrial capitalist service economy inwardly the context of internationally developing global relations" (Barak, 1992, p. 24). shift: The economy of heavy industry declined or downsized or transferred production operations to lower-wage markets overseas. Real wages declined, and middle-class and working-class expectations for a stable life dwindled. According to statistics compiled by the Department of lodgement and Urban Development, the number of homeless in the US twofold between 1984 and 1987 (Barry, 2000).

Only during the Great Depression of the late mid-twenties and early 1930s was the homeless pheno


Two images of massive homelessness have been associated with the Great Depression, one country and one urban in character. The rural version of the phenomenon is associated with the spit Bowl, the name given to a widespread drought in the lower Midwest and upper South in the 1930s, which change hundreds of thousand of sharecroppers and other tenant farmers into migrant farmers, or more(prenominal) exactly farm laborers. Leuchtenburg cites the plight of "Arkies" and "Okies" who had lost their farms in dust storms.

Access to housing, indeed, was a vexed issue for the brand-new bang response to the Great Depression.
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The Public Works Administration (PWA), established, in 1933, was a federally budgeted program aimed at constructing "large-scale worldly concern works"--schools, hospitals, clinics, courthouses, sewage plants, etc., but housing projects were fewest in number. Also in 1933 was established the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, which would abet refinance millions of privately owned urban dwellings--but which would foreclose on more than 100,000 homes when workers who lost their jobs could not keep up the payments. "By the middle of 1937, it had acquired enough properties to house a quarter of a million people," but "gave no relief to homeowners who were unemployed" (Leuchtenburg 1963, p. 165). Further, HOLC evaluated borrowers concord to their soundness as a "moral risk"; Leuchtenburg says the New Deal repeatedly "deferred to business sensibilities."

Writing in 1992, Barak's analysis is that workers increasingly became rootless transients as they were obliged to follow (and conk to) work opportunities away from home, sometimes in the process losing a home base altogether and retreating in to a way of life characterized by subsistence rather than sustenance. Yet over the blood of the 1980s employment opportunities for the laboring classes dwindled, such that there was much no place for workers to travel to. In the 1980s, for example, major embrocate producers such as Exxon and Phi
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