In 1980, I reported on “public drunkenness” in Sacramento. Most of them, a few hundred, were living in failed hotels. But some slept “in the weeds.”
I walked along the wooded banks of the rivers that meet in the capital and found a few dozen spots where men were lying on simple cardboard or newspaper mats. There were no tents or camps.
The word “homeless” was rarely used at that time. It did not appear in my article for the Sacramento Bee.
By 1982, amid the recession, newcomers who had lost their jobs began to appear in the weeds. In 1985, after three years of reporting on the subject, I co-authored one of the first books on contemporary homelessness. In 1988, I spent a week walking 10 miles along the Sacramento River and found 125 elaborate campsites. This was new.
I recently returned to Sacramento amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now tent cities stretched in the forests along rivers as far as the eye could see, rivaling those photographed by Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression. The most recent federally commissioned survey found that more than 5,000 people are homeless in the city.
I can trace several recent “doom episodes” back to the 1980s. The roots of our ongoing struggles with police brutality and sexual violence were present in the stories I covered at the time. Meaningful gun control measures could have prevented the spread of mass shootings over the past four decades. Pro-housing policies would have eliminated today's tent cities.
I have long felt hopeless about the homelessness crisis in particular. In the wake of Ronald Reagan's election, conservatives were blamed for abandoning the poor. I believed that my and other newspapers could change policy, perhaps even inspire a New Deal-style response equivalent to defiance. This was my naivety.
I eventually realized that the blame also fell on the shoulders of people we might call “good liberals.”
By 1980, baby boomers were in their first decade of homeownership in places like Silicon Valley and the Westchester County suburbs of New York City. They quickly became NIMBYs, vehemently opposing affordable housing in their neighborhoods. Many of them were Clinton Democrats. They continued to plant Black Lives Matter signs on their lawns. The message was hollow: We support you; Just don't live near us.
Boomers, especially if they were white, had to buy houses, and then they zoned everyone out. They have watched their lawns and their homesteads grow. I was one of them.
In 1981, when I was 24, I bought my first home. At $70,000, it cost less than three times my $25,000 annual salary, which was roughly the median income in Sacramento County. Adjusted for inflation alone, the house would be worth $218,000 after four decades, and my salary would be $78,000.
The county's median household income today is about $84,000, not far from what inflation expects. But Zillow estimates that my former home is now worth $578,000, more than double what can be attributed to inflation. My annual salary would have to be more than $190,000 so I could afford the house as easily as I did at the time. This is what the children and grandchildren of the boomer generation face.
Much has been done of the more than 60 housing bills passed by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year. The legislation would streamline housing approval in cities that don't meet their goals, limit the use of environmental laws to block affordable housing, allow developers to build more densely when they include affordable units, and allow religious organizations to build housing on their land. , among other measures.
But this is not nearly enough. Politicians have to become more aggressive in wresting zoning control from cities.
Starting in 2018, State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) repeatedly tried to introduce bills that would bypass local zoning to allow taller, denser apartment buildings near public transportation and job centers. His fellow Democrats blocked them.
Even less ambitious housing-friendly bills often face a similar fate in Sacramento. Last year, state Sen. Anna Caballero (D-Salinas) proposed legislation that would have made it easier to approve small “starter homes” in areas restricted to single-family housing. This provision has been deleted from the draft law.
It's the same story on the East Coast. Last year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed legislation to override local opposition to housing. The backlash came from relatively wealthy white “good liberals” in places like Westchester County, where Joe Biden received 67.6% of the vote in 2020. As in California, Democrats opposed to the plan used code language: “local control,” Overcrowding and traffic.
New York State Assemblyman Phil Ramos cut through the euphemisms: “It doesn't matter what kind of incentive you give them,” he said at a rally. “An affluent community, before they let black and colored people in, will walk away for any amount of money.” Hochul's plan was defeated in the Democratic-dominated legislature.
For their part, Republicans have not done much better on these issues. A podcast conducted by the right-wing Cicero Institute suggested that instead of describing people as “homeless”, we are returning to words like “vagrants”, “tramps” and “vagrants”.
This slander has been proven untrue by the fact that poor Mississippi has relatively few homeless people. The number of unhoused people in Los Angeles County is six times the population per capita of metropolitan Jackson. Why? The average rent for a median apartment in Mississippi's capital is about $900, compared to $2,750 in Los Angeles.
The Biden administration recently released a report calling for more housing, but federal authorities have limited authority here. “Ultimately, meaningful change will require state and local governments to reevaluate land use rules that reduce housing supply,” the report said. This largely means backing away from single-family zoning.
Senator Wiener's push for residential buildings in transit corridors was right. Will this make parts of Los Angeles look a little like Manhattan? We can only hope so. If New York City is any guide, it means more vibrant neighborhoods and higher property values.
As the housing struggle continues, tent cities are returning to normal in California and beyond. Last year, one of my students seemed puzzled when I explained to him that homelessness of this kind didn't always exist. Still, I couldn't help but get frustrated with her: this crisis had lasted—and worsened—for more than twice as long as she had been alive. It wasn't necessary.
Dale Maharidge is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of American Doom Loop: Dispatches from a Troubled Nation, 1980s–2020s, from which the book is adapted.
