Homelessness and Vagrancy. Homelessness first became a national issue in the latter half of the nineteenth century when western railroad construction, crop harvesting, and
mining and lumber camps created a huge market for casual, “moving” workers. Armies of transient laborers filled seasonal jobs throughout the country, creating the great era of tramps and hoboes, 1870 to 1920. The era faded as widespread mechanization radically changed the labor market. The Depression of the 1930s brought a brief resurgence of homelessness, which again increased in the early 1980s as high unemployment, deinstitutionalization of dysfunctional persons, and a decline in the dollar value of welfare programs all combined with the reduced number of single‐room‐occupancy (SRO) hotels to put more people on the street or in overnight shelters—perhaps 300,000 on a typical night in the mid‐1980s, a quarter of them women.
In the
Colonial Era, the homeless were the “strolling poor,” a mix of itinerant laborers, poor widows and their children, and the disabled. As transiency became tied more closely to the casual labor market in the nineteenth century, the homeless were typically unattached white males in their twenties and thirties, usually native‐born or immigrants from the British Isles. The social world of tramping was a robust bachelor subculture anchored in urban areas of cheap lodging houses and saloons known in hobo argot as “main stems.” The largest of these, in
New York City,
Chicago, and
San Francisco, might house forty thousand to fifty thousand transients on a given night. After 1920, homeless men were fewer, older, and less mobile. By the 1950s most Americans associated homelessness with the small groups of “derelicts” in squalid “skid row” districts of major cities.
Transients had simply been “warned out” of colonial era communities. By the mid‐nineteenth century, concerns about the urban poor prompted a debate among charity groups and public officials about “worthy” and “unworthy” indigents, and this informed the largely antagonistic response of communities to the surge of transients after 1870. Homeless men were arrested as vagrants or simply chased out of town. After 1890 the growth of organized charity work, epitomized by the National Conference of Charities and Correction, fostered explanations of homelessness that incorporated both class‐based prejudices and a recognition of the vicissitudes of economic development. Some charged that the free overnight lodgings offered in police stations or mission shelters—the latter an innovation of charitable and religious groups such as the Salvation Army—encouraged tramping. This led to a largely unsuccessful experiment with municipally run lodging houses until about 1930, mostly in the cities of the
Middle West and Northeast. As homelessness in the later twentieth century became, to a considerable extent, a by‐product of extreme
poverty, disability, alcoholism and drug abuse, and the shrinking SRO housing market, efforts to address it focused on government social welfare programs and on providing permanent, affordable lodging through a combination of private enterprise, public funding, and nonprofit organizations.
See also
Charity Organization Movement;
Immigrant Labor;
Labor Markets;
Mental Illness;
Migratory Agricultural Workers;
Railroads;
Welfare, Federal.
Bibliography
Eric H. Monkkonen, ed., Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790–1935, 1984.
Jeffrey S. Adler , A Historical Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy, Criminology 27 (1989): 209–29.
Christopher Jencks , The Homeless, 1994.
John C. Schneider
