The pictures are in textbooks and on the History Channel; tent cities, men cooking over open fires in rail yards and hitching rides on the trains to the next town in search of a job or a regular source of food. That was the Great Depression, and homelessness was widespread and visible. After World War II, the economy more or less stabilized and we pretended that homelessness had gone away. It hadn't, it had just assumed a different profile; it was less common and less apparent. There were scattered homeless panhandling on city streets or rifling through trash cans and sleeping on parks benches. They were predominantly adults, primarily male and they were notable mostly because there were so few - or at least so few that we could see - and we generally assumed they were lazy, substance abusers...(read more)

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