What effect did World War II have on homelessness?
What we saw through the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s was the country went to war and back to work, often building things like airplanes and tanks. The country essentially pulled itself out of the Great Depression with a huge economic rebound. So from the ’40s through the ’60s poverty decreased? But not everybody felt that-some people were still very poor, very much on the edge. What we saw then in the ’60s and ’70s was the groundwork for the current wave of homelessness: the Vietnam War. People were coming back devastated, both physically and mentally. Plus, we were closing down . . . mental hospitals without offering enough effective community response to catch all of the people who were leaving. Wasn’t there policy in place to counter this trend? Compounding the current situation was cuts in federal funding to affordable housing in the ’80s and ’90s. The current homelessness wave is absolutely a result of the fact that we don’t do a good job taking care of people with mental and substance-ab
