ABSTRACT
The political debate about homelessness raises a number of serious public policy issues. The confusion continues in James D. Wright's discussion of the causes of homelessness. The most serious and dangerous consequence of various kind of denial, characteristic of so much of the research on homelessness and of the homelessness movement, is to promote solutions that ignore the problems of the vast majority of the homeless. If the strategy of the homelessness movement was to play upon the fears of the many Americans confronted by rising housing costs, its success derived not from the public's gullibility but from the sheer complexity of the issue of affordable housing. Another familiar theme in the literature on homelessness is that the widespread destruction of single-room occupancy hotels caused the homelessness of the 1980s. Empowered by the homelessness movement, Gregg Barak articulated a more ambitious goal: a radical overhaul of American and international economic, political, and social systems.
