ABSTRACT
As family life has unraveled in America, social crises have multiplied so rapidly that they must compete with one another for public attention. Those raising warnings about—for instance—the crisis in foster care discussed in the preceding chapter must sometimes shout over the voices of those exercised over the looming crises in child poverty or homelessness. In the holiday season of 2002, it was the crisis in homelessness that captured the headlines. Officials in New York City reported in late November that over 37,000 were spending their nights in the city’s homeless shelters, an unprecedented number, sharply higher than the 21,000 seen just four years earlier. Moreover, these numbers did not include the hundreds sleeping on the streets, on subway platforms, or cathedral steps. Nor was the problem peculiar to New York City: according to Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), “the struggling economy and rising rents have combined to produce higher homeless rates across the country.” NAEH, which put the number of American homeless at 735,000 in 1984, put the number of homeless people nationwide in 2002 at one million. 1
