Homelessness Worst Since Great Depression

“Our parents did not grow up with this problem. Homelessness hasn’t been this bad since the great depression,” Molly Turner of Haas Business and Public Policy Group at Berkeley said on the Conversations About Homelessness panel discussion at the Urban Land Institutes Fall Meeting. The conversation was led by moderator Carol Coletta of The Kresge Foundation, and included panelists George Scarola of the City of Seattle’s Office of the Mayor, Dhakshike Wickrema of Los Angeles County and Pam Wideman of the City of Charlotte, NC. The good news, said Tuner, is that we have had this severe homeless problem before and we have solved it.

Turner identified several reasons that have contributed to the rise in the homeless population. They include economic dislocation, shrinking social safety nets, failed housing policy, structural racism, mass incarceration and family instability. Wickrema added that funding cuts over the last several decades at both the federal and local level has significantly contributed to the problem. An anti-development movement began in the 1970s, leading to an end to federal funding for homeless housing in the mid-1980s and eventually the shuttering of local programs, like redevelopment agencies in California.