Eighty Years of Homelessness Realism, 1914-1994
I’ve written in recent weeks about the non-sentimental view of homelessness that was common in the late nineteenth century. For much of the twentieth century, that realism carried over into academic work as well.
Alice Solenberger in 1914 wrote the century’s first sociological analysis of homelessness. Her One Thousand Homeless Men: A Study of Original Records (1914) defined homelessness in terms of disaffiliation: a “homeless man . . . has left one family group and not yet identified himself with another. [He lives] in cheap lodging houses in the congested part of any large city.” Among the homeless were “insane men, aged men, boys, beggars.”
The best work I’ve run across from the next decade was Nels Anderson’s The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (1923). Anderson was a hobo before gaining a master’s degree at the University of Chicago. He also emphasized the lack of affiliation that characterized the homeless: “The mobility and instability of the hobo or tramp, which is both cause and consequence of his migratory existence, unfits him for organized group life.”
Anderson picked up on a word apparently coined by novelist Sinclair Lewis in 1917: “Hobohemia,” a neighborhood opposed to bourgeois neighborliness. “Every large city has its district into which these homeless types gravitate,” Anderson wrote. “The wanderer finds friends here or enemies, but, and that is at once a characteristic and pathetic feature of Hobohemia, they are friends or enemies only for the day. They meet and pass on.”
It was a sad existence: Anderson wrote that although a homeless man was “a social outcast, he still wants the companionship which his mode of life denies him.” Thirty years later Mary Margaret Woods emphasized that theme in Paths of Loneliness (1953). Woods described poorly educated, unmarried men who were “largely deprived of the good times more fortunately placed young men and women have together. When they are older, the tragedy of homelessness is born upon them.”
Minister Frank Beck titled his 1956 book Hobohemia and also saw tragedy:
“The Hobohemian life begins by breaking ties. First with the family and then the community. It ends by severing all associations with static people and roving over the face of the earth. The hobo thus becomes not only a ‘homeless’ man but a man without a cause, without a country, without, in fact, any type of responsible association.”
Realism continued in Donald Bogue’s Skid Row in American Cities (1963). Bogue wrote that homeless men are homeless and poor but also “have acute personal problems. With respect to society at large and in their interpersonal relations, many are poorly adjusted. This maladjustment frequently finds expression in heavy daily drinking, and in withdrawal from conventional family living.”
A decade later, Howard Bahr and Theodore Caplow in Old Men Drunk and Sober (1973) saw the same problem: “Homelessness is a condition of detachment from society characterized by the absence or attenuation of the affiliative bonds that link settled persons to a network of interconnected social structures.” They also stated it more simply: “Homelessness is a condition of general disaffiliation from social organizations.”
Most of the scholars studied men, but Bahr’s Skid Row (1973) had a chapter on women who were homeless. He attributed their plight largely to alcoholism arising out of family disaffiliation which leads to more disaffiliation: “The family background of almost all female alcoholics can be seen in terms of a disorganization syndrome, which may include inadequate parental rearing practices, conflict in the home . . . and parental alcoholism.” Among those so raised, “deviant drinking occurs as a response to social isolation; excessive drinking increases social isolation, which in turn leads to heavier drinking.”
Homelessness gained greater national attention in the 1980s. The closing of insane asylums along with urban renewal that removed many dilapidated SRO (single room occupancy) hotels, led to increased homelessness and less hiding of problems. Politics also played a role as blaming the Reagan administration became more popular than “blaming the victims” — but as late as 1989, sociologist Peter Rossi wrote in Down and Out in America that “homelessness” depended less on where a person slept at night than the plight of being “without enduring and supporting ties to family, friends, and kin.”
In The Homeless (Harvard University Press, 1994), Christopher Jencks wrote, “Despite all the evidence that mental illness and substance abuse play a big role in homelessness, some knowledgeable people still insist that the homeless are mostly people ‘just like you and me’ who happen to be down on their luck.” More from Jencks in two weeks.