Refresher Course: Ronald Reagan, Father of American Homelessness

[swag]

Refresher Course: Ronald Reagan, Father of American Homelessness

Many of us are old enough to remember when homelessness was a rarity in America. Many of us also remember when the the exodus of Americans from homes into streets, parks, makeshift camps, and shelters began - the 1980s of Ronald Reagan.

Professor Peter Dreier provides a concise narrative of Reagan's creation of widespread homelessness in America, and notes that the policies of George W. Bush are bent on extending and expanding this shameful legacy.

Some excerpts from Dreier's narrative are below.

http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/135/reagan.html
. . .

Reagan’s fans give him credit for restoring the nation’s prosperity. But whatever economic growth occurred during the Reagan years only benefited those already well off. The income gap between the rich and everyone else in America widened. Wages for the average worker declined and the nation’s homeownership rate fell. During Reagan’s two terms in the White House, which were boon times for the rich, the poverty rate in cities grew.

His indifference to urban problems was legendary. . .

By the end of Reagan’s term in office federal assistance to local governments was cut 60 percent. Reagan eliminated general revenue sharing to cities, slashed funding for public service jobs and job training, almost dismantled federally funded legal services for the poor, cut the anti-poverty Community Development Block Grant program and reduced funds for public transit. The only “urban” program that survived the cuts was federal aid for highways – which primarily benefited suburbs, not cities.
. . .
Another of Reagan’s enduring legacies is the steep increase in the number of homeless people, which by the late 1980s had swollen to 600,000 on any given night – and 1.2 million over the course of a year. Many were Vietnam veterans, children and laid-off workers.

. . .

We’ve already named a major airport, schools and streets after Ronald Reagan, and since his death some people have suggested other ways to celebrate his memory. Perhaps a more fitting tribute to his legacy would be for each American city to name a park bench – where at least one homeless person sleeps every night – in honor of our 40th president.

(Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban and Environmental Policy program at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He has co-authored two books, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next LA: The Struggle for a Livable City.)

[Cyrano]

1. I'll never understand why so many people thought this amiable imbecile

was a "Great Man."

He was as clueless as Junior and his policies hurt the vast majority of people in this country. Nonetheless, I suppose it's possible to screw the many, as long as you do it with a smile and humble tone.

[Lindacooks]

2. Me either.

That effer was a mean old man, plain and simple.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. The macho idiots who want America to "kick ass," without regard for

whose ass is getting kicked, absolutely loved him for invading Grenada, supporting the Contras, and building up the nuclear arsenal. Never mind that Grenada was an undefended island thirty miles long whose only sin was getting Cuban help to build an airport for its tourism industry. Never mind that the Contras were Anastacio Somoza's death squads under a different name. Never mind that the U.S. already had so many nuclear weapons that every community in the USSR with a population of over 15,000 was specifically targeted.

Reagan "kicked ass." And that was enough for the guys who spend their lives sitting in the Barcalounger clicking the remote from one football game to another.

[Dr.Phool]

3. Same guy who cut out funding for mental hospitals

And after they were tossed out on the street, with no support, a whole shitload of them wound up in prison. And they're still going there.

[swag]

5. Exactly. I lived in DC when St. Elizabeth's was purged by Reagan.

Almost over night the city streets became the nightmare wards of untreated mental illness.

[livetohike]

4. Mortgage rates in 1980 were about 11%!

Many people could not afford their own home due to the mortgage rates. The middle class was hurt as well as lower income people. Still people look at Reagan as if he was a saint. Memories are short I guess.


Check this out:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908373.html

[swag]

8. Good point. Imagine what will become of today's highly leveraged

homeowners when long-term rates rise and their ARMs follow suit.

Oh, but I forgot: Reagan proved that deficits don't matter.

[livetohike]

9. You are right

Just keep printing money.......

Edit: can't spell

[htuttle]

6. Old Mother Reagan

Old Mother Reagan
And her crew
Took away
From me and you
I hope she goes far away
She better go far away
Y'know it ain't right
When it's all wrong
This is the Old Mother Reagan
Protest song
Old Mother Reagan
She's so dumb
She's so dangerous
How come...
Old Mother Reagan went to heaven
But at the pearly gates
She was stopped!
-- Violent Femmes, 1986

[Child_Of_Isis]

10. And don't forget the term "welfare queen"

Even though our tax money has been supporting his wife for eons.

[swag]

11. Right. And Dreier's article points out that that was based on a lie.

on edit - to wit:

Reagan is lauded as “the great communicator,” but he sometimes used his rhetorical skills to stigmatize the poor. During his stump speeches while dutifully promising to roll back welfare, Reagan often told the story of a so-called “welfare queen” in Chicago who drove a Cadillac and had ripped off $150,000 from the government using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen social security cards and four fictional dead husbands. Journalists searched for this “welfare cheat” in the hopes of interviewing her and discovered that she didn’t exist.

[maxsolomon]

12. Not just Reagan

Please read "New Homeless & Old", by Charles Hoch and Robert A. Slayton. A study of how america housed its transient poor prior to the post-war urban renewal program.

American cities had multiple levels of low income housing. Where you stayed depended on just how destitute you were: SRO's, Flops, Etc. It wasn't pretty, but people had a place to go. It was called Skid Row. Here in Seattle, home of the original Skid Road (I walked on it this morning), nothing remains of that infrastructure - and our homeless population is legion.

Reagan sure didn't help, but the problem only mushroomed under him - it started earlier.

[swag]

14. Interesting, and I will look into that book, but I would also suggest

that it is very difficult to give Reagan enough credit for America's current homelessness epidemic.

But here is another writer's attempt to give Reagan proper due:

In fact many homeless rights activists say the single most devastating thing Reagan did to create homelessness was when he cut the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development by three-quarters, from $32 billion in 1981 to $7.5 billion by 1988. The department was the main governmental supporter of subsidized housing for the poor. Add this to Reagan's overhaul of tax codes to reduce incentives for private developers to create low-income homes and you had a major crisis for low-income families and individuals. Under Reagan, the number of people living beneath the federal poverty line rose from 24.5 million in 1978 to 32.5 million in 1988.

And the number of homeless people went from something so little it wasn't even written about widely in the late 1970s to more than 2 million when Reagan left office. But as Reagan proudly declared that the number of homeless shelters had increased significantly during his presidency, the homeless epidemic did not go ignored by everyone, especially not in Reagan's back yard in Washington DC.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/11/1431244

[Jade Fox]

13. Reagan: Father of unsafe air travel.

Thanks to Saint Ronnie (who destroyed that Air Traffic Controllers Union
and de-regulated the Airline Industry) you have a much better chance
of dying in an airplane crash.

Have a nice day!

[swag]

15. Gore Vidal pointed out the Senate's rich sense of irony when

it voted to name the notoriously unsafe Washington National Airport after the man who fired the air traffic controllers.

[Jade Fox]

16. There should be memorials erected to Reagan....

at the sites of air disasters.