Posted by:
Lot's Wife
(
)
Date: August 22, 2019 02:12PM
Wow. There are some great questions in this thread. I'm going to take a stab at answering them.
First, Dr. No on the history of homelessness in the last several decades. There was always some homelessness in the US--spectacularly so in the Great Depression--but it is a lot worse now than in the 1950s and 1960s. In part this was because the rate of economic growth was higher and demand for labor stronger, so good jobs were easier to obtain. Also, large companies were more generous in offering healthcare, pensions, etc., so when workers fell on hard times they had more resources to keep themselves afloat. There is much less support available today.
Also very important, however, was a change in policy towards the mentally ill. In the 1960s a large proportion of those people were institutionalized. But the US grew uncomfortable with that (see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), thinking that locking people away was evil and, naively, that if the mentally ill were released into the community they would be nurtured and supported. So laws were changed, institutions closed, and people released. But it turned out that communities weren't interested in letting the ill into their homes and civic centers--and, equally important, a lot of the newly homeless didn't want to return to shelters or halfway houses anyway. So they stayed on the streets even as the US grew more parsimonious politically, which meant that going back to the old system of state institutionalization was off the table.
Now Dr. No and tumwater on the international comparison. The situation overseas differs widely from country to country. There is a lot of homelessness in poor countries like Indonesia or Malaysia or India or Nigeria or Egypt or South Africa. But where economic growth is really strong the problem is smaller, and in countries that have a strong family structure the jobless and mentally ill are generally cared for by their families.
In the rich world, the US represents the extreme case. Virtually all wealthy countries spend more on the homeless and the mentally ill as a proportion of per capital GDP. That stems largely from cultural differences: the Scandinavian countries, Japan, etc., emphasize community more and hence feel a stronger obligation to the downtrodden whereas the US places greater value on individual responsibility--which, of course, many homeless are incapable of exercising. (It is of naturally easier to feel empathy for people with the same ethnic and cultural background, which facilitates better care in Japan and the Scandinavian countries than in a melting pot like the United States.)
So individualism, weaker family structures, tight-fisted government policy, and cultural complexity combine to produce a Third World level of homelessness in the United States. Europeans and people from rich Asian countries view the situation here as morally intolerable.