Unhousing the Urban Poor: The Reagan Legacy

Abstract

The Reagan era was characterized by the popularity of individual level explanations and market based solutions for a range of social problems, including homelessness. The authors argue that such an approach was inadequate and may, in fact, have worsened the housing situation. Theauthors also claim that homelessness is fundamentally a housing problem linked to two key trends of the 1980s: the increasing rate of poverty and the declining supply of low-income housing. Market approaches to housing policy have resulted in housing policies by default: gentrification, condoconversion, and displacement as well as tax policies that explicitly favor the nonpoor. Those policies geared toward the poor, vouchers, and subsidies, were inadequate responses to increasing need. In sum, the Reagan years witnessed dramatic declines in the supply of low-cost housing, substantialincreases in the poverty rate, and drastic shifts in federal policy toward housing the poor. (Journal abstract, edited.)