I know that there have always been homeless people, but I don’t remember seeing any when I was growing up in Seattle during the 1970s. In fact, Google AI says that homelessness was such a small issue back then that it was not very well tracked. I could not even find a decent graph that went back further than 2007. But today, you see homeless people almost everywhere. Why is that?

My Dad’s story

First, let me tell you about my own family. My father dropped out of high school and did a 4-year enlistment in the military in the late 1940s (where he earned his GED). By 1953, he was married and renting an inexpensive house boat on Lake Union. He took a job working for Seattle City Light, and they moved him to the small town of Diablo, Washington so he could work at Ross Dam in the North Cascades. They provided a house for him and his family. In 1957 he transferred back to Seattle and he bought this house in the (now) Shoreline area.

I’m not sure if we were upper-lower class or lower-middle class, but my dad had a job where he worked 40 hours a week, got paid occasional overtime, and we always had a house. In 1975, he went to work for the Bonneville Power Administration and retired around 1988. His job was a lot like Homer Simpson’s – he sat behind a console and looked at dials all day.

I mention this bit of family history because it simply would not happen today for several reasons:

• It is rare that a person with a GED would find a job on which they could support a family.
• No young person starting out can buy a house.
• The job he did no longer exists – it was replaced by automation around the time that he retired.

Housing prices outpaces salaries

My point is that there are not many jobs left that don’t require significant education, specialization and skill. For better or for worse, technology keeps changing the rules – people either keep ahead of it or they get run over by it. But keeping ahead of it is hard and not everybody can do it.

Meanwhile, the few people who can keep ahead of the technology are very handsomely rewarded. Microsoft created 12,000 employee millionaires. I don’t the exact numbers for Amazon employees, but their stock has risen 1000% in the past decade (so ostensibly they have produced more than a few millionaires). Both companies have brought a lot of people to the area, and these people have high incomes and compete for limited housing. The result drives up housing prices.

Housing prices doubled between 2014 and 2022. Meanwhile, this is how the incomes have fared:

If the median household income is 115k, clearly not everybody in Seattle is able to buy an $800,000 house. The average American has $65,000 in savings, but 28% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings. It is simply harder for the average household to make ends meet.

But why did homelessness suddenly become a problem in the 1980s?

The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 caused long-term psychiatric patients to be released from state hospitals and to be cared for by community mental health systems. As these were never properly funded, many of these patients ended up living on the streets during the late 1970s.

The number of homeless people nearly doubled between 1984 and 1987. This was primarily due to two issues:

• Huge cuts to government housing and social services were made between 1980 and 1989:
  • Federal contributions to city budgets dropped from 22% to 6%.
  • HUD’s budget (which subsidized housing) was reduced from $74 billion to $19 billion.
• The recession that occurred in the early 1980s.

It was during the 1980s that tent cities started showing up again (not seen since the great depression). Today, it is estimated that 16,385 are homeless in Seattle and King County (a 23% increase from 2022). 60% of those people are unsheltered.