Amid Tributes, Activists Lament Reagan's Failure on Homelessness

Published on Thursday, June 10, 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle by Kevin Fagan

Praise for the late President Ronald Reagan's sunny resonance with the common man has been rasping all week on the ears of many activists and social workers who watched in vain as homelessness exploded under his watch -- and they hope the history books remember one thing:

Before Reagan, people sleeping in the street were so rare that, outside of skid rows, they were almost a curiosity. After eight years of Reaganomics - - and the slashes in low-income housing and social welfare programs that went along with it -- they were seemingly everywhere.

And America had a new household term: "The homeless."

"I don't think he was a bad guy, but I think he thought the private charity system could address homelessness. And he was wrong," said Michael Stoops, co-founder in 1981 of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C., which he still helps direct. "He was a Robin Hood in reverse, who took from the poor and gave to the rich, and I think Americans have such short attention spans they forget this."

Reagan's supporters don't quite see it this way, of course, but his critics say the single most powerful thing Reagan did to create homelessness was to cut the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development by three-quarters, from $32.2 billion in 1981 to $7.5 billion by 1988. The department was the main governmental supporter of subsidized housing for the poor and, combined with the administration's overhaul of tax codes to reduce incentives for private developers to create low-income homes, the nation took a hit to its stock of affordable housing from which it has yet to recover, they contend.

During the same period, the average family income of the poorest fifth of the American population dropped by 6.1 percent, and rose 11.1 percent for the top fifth, according to "Sleepwalking Through History," the best-selling assessment of the Reagan years by Haynes Johnson. 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.

"His HUD cuts were the main factor in creating homelessness, and we said that throughout the 1980s, but Reagan and his people never listened," said Stoops. "Reagan, very similar to Herbert Hoover, did not believe the federal government had a role in addressing poverty, so he resisted any legislation or programs that did that.

"Besides, how could he help the poor when he didn't even know who they were?"

Stoops and his close friend, the late Mitch Snyder -- the foremost leader in activism for homeless people in the 1980s -- slept on heating grates outside the White House in protest throughout 1986 and 1987 to push Reagan to fund programs for homeless people. When Reagan finally signed the Stewart McKinney Homeless Assistance Act in 1987, Stoops was sure he did so only because Congress had enough votes to override a veto, though the ex- president's supporters pointed to it as a positive sign that Reagan cared.

The gesture was more than counterweighed by Reagan's cuts in unemployment, disability, food stamp and family welfare programs, Stoops said -- not to mention the president's vilification of "welfare queens" as cheats in an effort to justify cuts.

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