The causes of homelessness vary​—loss of a job, breakup of a marriage, an encounter with alcoholism or drug addiction, followed by an eviction from house or apartment, and family and friends refusing to take in the now down-and-out.

Many of the street people lived in flophouse-type buildings, known as single-room occupancies. But with the urban renewal programs undertaken in many cities, these buildings were the first to be destroyed or remodeled and converted into condominiums. Many of their occupants were forced out onto the streets. From 1970 to 1980 a million such rooms were destroyed or converted in the United States alone. For some cities it meant a more than 50-percent loss of single-room occupancies. For New York it was an 87-percent loss.

Consider, now, the street people’s double jeopardy situation: Because they live without addresses, the homeless are unable to receive food stamps and welfare in most states. “Some of these people might qualify, but first they need a fixed address, and they don’t have one,” said a Chicago volunteer worker. Moreover, many are mentally incapable of coping with the red tape of the bureaucracy to seek welfare or governmental subsistence.

There is a sad note that fills all the published data that describes these urban nomads​—it is no longer true that the homeless are primarily age 60 and above. There is a fast-growing population of young, chronically mentally ill persons. They have never been admitted to institutions but have joined the ranks of the homeless. Both boys and girls sell themselves as prostitutes to get the price of a meal, teenage girls sleeping with hotel managers just to have a room for the night. Not all of these, however, are mentally ill. They are the children that nobody wants​—not even their parents. Often they are the abused children. Many know the meaning of the word “incest” all too well. Can you imagine that in New York City alone, half of the estimated 40,000 homeless are under the age 21​—20,000 of them! And these are the ones that the older homeless fear the most, the ones who beat and rob them of their meager goods.

In city after city, where there is a homeless problem, the young ones are there and their numbers are increasing yearly. Are yours there? Would you go looking for them if you did not know where they were, where they were sleeping during the cold nights while you were warm, what they were eating while you had plenty? Or would your child be like the homeless man who said: “I been missing twenty years, and no one come looking for me.”

In 1971, in the state of Alabama, a class action suit was instituted on behalf of patients involuntarily confined for mental-treatment purposes. The court ruled that for a patient to be institutionalized the institution must meet certain rigid requirements. The court also ruled that “no later than 15 days after a patient is committed to the hospital, the superintendent of the hospital or his appointed, professionally qualified agent shall examine the committed patient and shall determine whether the patient continues to require hospitalization. . . . If the patient no longer requires hospitalization in accordance with the standards for commitment, or if a treatment plan has not been implemented, he must be released immediately unless he agrees to continue with treatment on a voluntary basis.”

With this legal decision, mental hospitals began releasing inmates in unprecedented numbers. By 1982 mental institutions dwindled in inmate population from 558,922 to 125,200.

Good intentions, however, backfired. The proposed community treatment centers failed to show up. The outpatients ultimately became wards of the city. “Many former patients, because of their condition, did not know how to get to community centers,” said one Washington mental-health administrator. “So after they were released from hospitals, that’s the last anyone saw of them until they showed up in doorways.” “Approximately one-third to one-half of the homeless,” writes Psychology Today of February 1984, “are believed to be mentally ill and on the streets primarily because of a process known as deinstitutionalization.”

In some large cities the percentage rate is higher, up to 60 percent. For example, in an interview with 450 homeless seeking refuge in three New York shelters, it was revealed “that 54 percent of the patients had been in a state hospital and 75 percent had a history of psychiatric hospitalization. A very high percentage (53 percent) of patients were diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia . . . Many of these patients had been discharged into the community to fend for themselves without adequate community services or support systems to assist them in making the adaptation from institutional to community living.”​—Hospital & Community Psychiatry, September 1983.

That journal reported a similar study conducted in London with 123 homeless men. The data compiled showed that 15 percent were diagnosed as schizophrenic, 8 percent suffered from affective disorders, and 29 percent had a history of psychiatric hospitalization.