Inventing homelessness. (contributions of Ronald Reagan's economic policies to increased housing in the 1980s) (The Real Reagan Record; includes related article on home ownership in the 1980s) (Cover Story)

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"MR. REAGAN and Congress's housing cutbacks are directly responsible for the homeless problem," announced the late grand provocateur Mitch Snyder on the eve of the October 1989 Housing Now! march. Representative Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) was also getting in his licks: "The Reagan Administration systematically decimated the nation's [low-income] housing supply." Homelessness, as much as AIDS, became during the Eighties an issue fully engaging Left-collectivism's passions for attaching guilt to the accumulation of wealth, rejecting empiricism, and projecting political…