Media Deserves Blame for Homelessness

by Randy Shaw, 2007-09-04

While the traditional media’s role in promoting the Iraq War has become conventional wisdom, military invasions are not the only place where the press sells the public a false story. Consider homelessness. For two decades, the media has offered the public a “framing” of homelessness that focuses on problem individual behavior, rather than on the massive federal funding cuts that saw widespread visible homelessness remerge in 1982 after being nonexistent for over forty years. The San Francisco Chronicle still identifies the homeless problem as primarily caused by problem individuals such as campers in Golden Gate Park, and blames advocates, rather than the media and politicians, for the persistence of homelessness. C.W. Nevius’s August 28 Chronicle column perfectly captured how the media still “enables” the federal government’s abandonment of the unhoused, and shows why the Bush Administration - like its Reagan, Bush and Clinton predecessors - feels no pressure to act.

Even prior to the San Francisco Chronicle’s focus on Golden Gate Park, I had noticed a disturbing trend in papers across the country: a city’s “progress” on combating homelessness was being evaluated without regard to the Bush Administration’s refusal to provide the money to solve the problem.

I attributed this inaccurate reporting to two factors.

First, the traditional media is weary of pointing out Bush shortcomings. Having detailed the president’s abandonment of Katrina victims, the media does not feel the need to provide another major analysis of the “President ignores the poor” frame.

Second, the federal government’s blame for homelessness is ignored because many reporters covering homeless issues today either know little of the problem’s history, or are not given the space to include the root causes of the problem in their story. The result is that homeless stories are treated like the crime beat; just give the who, what, where, and why of what happened that day and forget about the broader context.

While I was pondering the media’s failure to link homelessness to Bush federal housing policies, Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius made it all perfectly clear in his August 28 column. In asking homeless advocates what their solution was to homeless people camping in the park, Nevius declared:

The “where do you want to put them?” argument leads down a familiar path of unaccountability. From there it is a short trip to the theory that our country is trapped in a cycle of homelessness, that the problem is so large and complicated that it will take eight hours to explain.

Before breaking down Nevius’s message, note that he spent many years as a sportswriter before becoming a columnist focusing on the East Bay. Now that he’s covering San Francisco, it is fair to conclude that much of Nevius’s own understanding of homelessness comes not from personally examining the problem for years and talking to service providers, but rather from reading the traditional media stories that have done more to confuse rather than educate the public.

In other words, Nevius may be as much a victim of bad journalism as a member of the general public.

Let’s begin with Nevius’s claim that homeless advocates preach “unaccountability.” What Nevius means is that some advocates do not want to hold people responsible for camping in the park, or for other “problem street behavior.”

I made this same point about advocates’ appearance of support for such behavior over a decade ago in The Activist’s Handbook. But Nevius confuses this point with the larger issue of “unaccountability.”

Homeless advocates have long sought to hold the federal government “accountable” for killing public housing funding in the 1970’s and then devastating the federal housing budget in 1981, but the media has instead allowed presidents, senators, and congressmembers to pass the buck.

The real “enabler” here is not homeless advocates condoning camping and drug abuse. It is reporters like Nevius who “enable” the Bush Administration and its predecessors to get away with not addressing the homeless problem.

In fact, I believe that the Chronicle has likely written more positive stories than any paper in the nation about the Bush Administration’s so-called “homeless plan.” Every time Bush Homeless czar Phil Mangano rolls into town, Chronicle reporters and editors are there to greet him with positive editorials and media spin.

Do they press Mangano on Bush’s draconian cuts to the Section 8 program? Or on the President’s opposition to a National Housing Trust Fund, which would have been passed in 2001 under a President Gore? Do they criticize Mangano for being the front man for an administration that allows millions to live without homes while granting tax breaks for billionaires?

Of course not. That’s what I call “unaccountability,” and it is the media, not homeless advocates, who are to blame.

(Paul Boden, who was quoted throughout Nevius’ column, authored a study earlier this year that highlighted the link between federal housing cuts and homelessness. Neither that study, nor its conclusions, was included in Nevius’ piece.)

What about Nevius’ claim that the notion that our nation is "trapped in a cycle" of homelessness is a “theory”?

Using the term “theory” does not mean something is subject to debate; after all, consider Einstein’s “theory” of relativity. But Nevius uses the term “theory” the way Oklahoma’s two United States Senators describe global warming or evolution, as if the notion that the persistence of widespread visible homelessness for 25 years constitutes being “trapped in a cycle” only raises a basis for conjecture.

I don’t have space in this piece to lay the facts out for Nevius, but the link between federal housing cuts and dramatically increased homelessness has long been beyond serious dispute. If he believes otherwise, I’ll look forward to his analysis in a future column.

But the worst message of Nevius’s column was still to come. That’s his idea, loved by conservatives, that homelessness is “so large and complicated” that it would “take eight hours to explain.”

No it wouldn’t. I can explain the causes of widespread visible homelessness in three short paragraphs:

After the Nixon Administration stopped the construction of new public housing in the United States, the country was left with fewer low-cost units for families than would be required to meet future demand. Within a decade, homeless families became visible on the nation’s streets. No subsequent President has addressed the shortage of low-cost housing for families by increasing the nation’s public housing supply, and the number of such units has steadily declined.

As young professionals returned to major cities in the late 1970’s, upward pressure on rents left urban areas increasingly unaffordable for low-income people. The Reagan Administration responded to this emerging affordability crisis by sharply cutting federal housing funding in 1981. This denied low-income residents the subsidies necessary for them to stay housed. Widespread homelessness resulted, and it was not until 1999--after Bill Clinton had eliminated any new Section 8 vouchers--- that the federal government began meaningfully increasing the numbers served by federal housing subsidies. Bush then stopped this progress in its tracks.

It’s no wonder the public feels hopeless about solving homelessness, and blames local mayors rather than the federal government. The same media that sold us the “certainty” of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has redefined homelessness so that low-income individuals, not powerful Presidents, Senators and Congresspersons, are to blame.

See The Activist's Handbook for a more complete analysis of the media’s framing of homelessness. Send feedback to rshaw@beyondchron.org