Sand Castles and Snake Pits: Homelessness, Public Policy, and the Law of Unintended Consequences

The walk from my home on top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill down to my studio at its bottom is a lesson in class and status in America. As each few blocks take me down another rung on the socioeconomic ladder, I move from the clean, well-tended streets at the summit through increasingly littered, ill-kept neighborhoods where property values decrease as the numbers of potholes and homeless people increase. At the bottom of the hill sits the notorious “Tenderloin,” a district that houses what the Victorians called “the lower orders,” where the desperate and the dangerous hang on every street corner waiting for the local food kitchen to open its doors.

Three blocks later, I’m downtown looking at the visible signs of gentrification—an upscale shopping mall featuring the recently opened Bloomingdale’s West Coast flagship store and an Intercontinental Hotel under construction next door. From there I pass into the more industrial parts of the city, where my studio sits in an old warehouse building, an entrance to the freeway on one corner and St. Vincent de Paul’s homeless shelter—the biggest in the city—on the other.

How did this, the richest nation in the world, give birth to an enormous population of people who live on the streets or in shelters—men, women, and children, impoverished, desperate, and very often mentally ill? Three-quarters of a million Americans in 2005, the most recent national estimate, without a place to call home—a reckoning that most experts agree is far too low because it includes only those they could find to count. How did homelessness become so pervasive that a college student in the class on poverty in America I taught a few years ago couldn’t conceive of a world without “the homeless”?

Lillian B. Rubin’s latest book is 60 On Up: The Truth About Aging in America (Beacon Press, 2007).