Worldwide trend in psychiatry for deinstitutionalisation, not Reagan, to blame here.
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I dunno when they started keeping stats on homelessness, but the words "hobo" and "drifter" from prior eras seem to describe the same idea, except jumping box cars is good for folk music and sleeping on benches not so much.
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They were always there. In the 1960s I was sitting on a bench by the UN eating my sandwich. A bag lady wearing a Pan Am bowler hat threw a liquid at me from a soda bottle or can. Hopefully soda. Never felt much sympathy for them. They pissed in the phone booths back then.
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Merriam-Webster says 1972 first usage of bag lady...
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That's because places likes Houston would put them on a bus to CA and make them somebody else's problem.
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Thomas Sowell talks a lot about this-when "bums" became "homeless" and "swamps" became protected "wetlands". Whoever owns the language owns the argument and the policy resultant.
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Reagan admin returned responsibility to cities so they could more cost- effectively care for their winos and schizos. Liberalism at city level failed the needy as liberals victim ideology allows no theoretical model that includes sanction- the sine qua non of moral seriousness
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Before 60s reforms we had mental institutions and skid row, and we liked it.
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50 years later they're still blaming Reagan. Of course there's never been a move to reinstitutionalize anyone. Only subsidize and therefore encourage vagrancy.
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The nature of homelessness was different at that time. SRO (Single-Room Occupancy apartments, e.g. men's hotels) were plentiful, and so were daily-pay labor pools (the forerunners of today's temp agencies). Homelessness was mainly an alcoholic/mentally ill phenomenon.
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Then in the 80s, the asylums were emptied onto the streets, deindustrialization shifted labor pools to skilled occupations, the SROs were rehabbed into tony studio apartments, new drugs (i.e. crack) became widespread, and entire families began living in cars.
End of conversation
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