The Roots of Contemporary Homelessness

Following the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society programs in the 1960s, homelessness was considered to be history in America. In the 1980s, however, the number of homeless people in America surged to levels not seen since the Great Depression. What caused homelessness to go from practically a non-issue to a population that today is more than one percent of the nation and growing?

There is no simple, concrete answer. The Western Regional Advocacy Project, for example, attributes the rise to "everything from economic downshifts, to high unemployment, to deindustrialization, to global outsourcing of jobs, to the rollback of social programs, to disruptions of familial networks, to urban renewal, to the reduction in open-market low end housing, to racial discrimination, to gentrification, to the near elimination of federally supported affordable housing." Phew.

The Next Depression?

As the economic crisis continues to deepen, many are wondering if this recession will turn into a depression. Unemployment is up, the dollar is down, and US markets have lost nearly half their share values over the past year. The Real News spoke to economist Peter Schiff.



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Girl from iconic Great Depression photo: 'We were ashamed'

The photograph became an icon of the Great Depression: a migrant mother with her children burying their faces in her shoulder. Katherine McIntosh was 4 years old when the photo was snapped. She said it brought shame -- and determination -- to her family.

"I wanted to make sure I never lived like that again," says McIntosh, who turns 77 on Saturday. "We all worked hard and we all had good jobs and we all stayed with it. When we got a home, we stayed with it."
McIntosh is the girl to the left of her mother when you look at the photograph. The picture is best known as "Migrant Mother," a black-and-white photo taken in February or March 1936 by Dorothea Lange of Florence Owens Thompson, then 32, and her children.
Lange was traveling through Nipomo, California, taking photographs of migrant farm workers for the Resettlement Administration. At the time, Thompson had seven children who worked with her in the fields.

See Lange's photos of the migrant family »
"She asked my mother if she could take her picture -- that ... her name would never be published, but it was to help the people in the plight that we were all in, the hard times," McIntosh says.
"So mother let her take the picture, because she thought it would help."

Watch a Depression-era daughter's recollections »
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