Media Deserves Blame for Homelessness

by Randy Shaw‚ Sep. 04‚ 2007

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