Ronald Reagan and homelessness. The connection?

[Eric J in MN]

The number of homeless people skyrocketing during the Reagn years.

One factor was single-room residential hotels being replaced.

Can anyone connect that to Reagan or comment on other ways he is responsible for homelessness?

[DenverDem]

1. He shut down the insane asylums in a compasionate con move.

So they could drift our of their half way houses into the streets.

[Arbustosux]

13. De-institutionalised

very compassionate

[Zen Democrat]

2. Started when he was Governor of California ..

by closing down all the mental institutions. Mentally ill were just turned out on the streets. Saving tax money and all, you know.

He nationalized this concept of not keeping the mentally ill in state institutions and so from coast to coast the mentally ill were roaming the streets. Many still are.

Also, there was a huge economic downturn while Reagan was president (i.e., layoffs and loss of jobs across the board). The stock market was booming, but people with families were living in tents under bridges. Then there was the BIG stock market crash in 1987. Biggest since 1929. Rich people lost fortunes. There was an oil price crash and oil people went bust (boo-hoo). There was a real estate depression. Still, the realtors, and oil people and Wall Street types and rich people LOVED THEIR RONNIE! Go figure. Oh yeah, he was upbeat and had a great smile.

[kerry-is-my-prez]

11. Yep -he did that all over. I was a social worker in Illinois and he did it

there when he was President.

[diamond14]

3. reaguns closed down most of the mental institutions in America...

so that people like hinkley could come and shoot him....

there were millions of brain-damaged and mentally ill people who were THROWN OUT INTO THE STREETS, and cut off their medications....they are still with us...many are wandering around cities all across America....so when you see a homeless person, just bumbling around and speaking to no one...sit down and talk to them for a while, and it won't take you long to realize that reaguns was a major criminal, and that these people deserve OUR help and compassion, rather than so much compassion for reaguns dead body...

[stavka]

4. It was a huge thing in Michigan

When country bumpkin Engler was elected a few years later.

Closed every state mental health facility except those mandated by the courts for the criminally insane.

Don't fret though, most who were released are either dead or in prison.

There is that one guy who talks to and feeds the chipmunks though, he seems pretty harmless.

[Sporadicus]

5. I Recall a Reagan Remark About the Homeless

something about it being a 'lifestyle choice' or some such clueless tripe.

[shraby]

6. There were also whole families

living in their cars. I guess you could call them "mobile homes".

[Cleita]

7. He also tried to push proposition 13 when he was

Governor of California. He wasn't successful but it was pushed through during the Jerry Brown governorship by Howard Jarvis. Within California, the basic outline of the Jarvis plan — a restriction of property taxes to one per cent of value — appeared on the ballot on two earlier occasions, under the sponsorship of Phil Watson, then-assessor of Los Angeles County. Watson, not Jarvis, is the true father of Proposition 13.

Just five years ago, California voters rejected a spending-limitation initiative sponsored by then-Governor Ronald Reagan. . This rolled back property taxes, which not only unraveled a dozen social programs for the mentally insane and the retarded, causing them to be thrown out in the street, but it started a frenzy of real estate speculation that literally wiped most cheap housing out. Cheap hotels were bought out, rents skyrocketed and many low income people were forced onto the streets.

Funding was cut to old vets housing throwing them into the streets. So you had the mentally ill, the old vets, the retarded and the working poor thrown out in the streets in a matter of a year or two. This snowballed from state to state with the same effect. When Reagan became President, his tax cuts as well as budgeting more money for the military caused more cuts in federal programs and vets benefits.

It was then that the phenomena of homelessness was seen nationwide. We had seen it a few years earlier in California.

[diamond14]

8. I lived in Denver, when under reaguns, the city mowed down a whole

block of aging single room hotels...and built the current performing arts center and associated parking garages along Speer Blvd., near U of Colorado/Metro/Community College Campus...the result was that the POOR people were just thrown out into the street, and often slept during the day in the LIBRARY on the Campus and begged food at the Franciscan Church nearby, and slept under the bridges along the river....

so what good is that?


there was also the Vietnam Veterans...coming home from war all the way through 1975...and by 1980, they were discharged from minimal care hospitals....and onto the streets...shell-shocked, agent-oranged, amputees, shot in the face soldiers with NO JOBS, no job training programs, no counseling, abandoned by their families...many of these soldiers remain alive on the streets, damaged and homeless and peeing in their pants...you'll see them all over America too...that's reaguns legacy of misery...

reaguns refused to even acknowledge that issue or care for OUR Veterans, because cheap-labor-conservatives just want to shift the cost of their WARS onto poor taxpayers, while giving huge and obscene tax-cuts to the very very rich....some Vietnam Vets got angry at their abysmal situation...and lashed out..going postal, shooting people...

same with recent Gulf War I Veterans...the Oklahoma City bomber, and the DC sniper were GWI Vets....no job training, no mental and medical care, no counseling, no Veterans benefits and housing and job couseling and schooling...and that's what you get...but neither reaguns, nor bushI or bushII care about that...it's no problem for them, doesn't affect them at all...

[BillZBubb]

9. Trickle down didn't happen.

The poverty rate soared in Reagan's first term. There were record bankruptcies. A lot of these people ended up homeless.

He economic moves benefitted the very wealthy at the expense of government action to lessen the impact of the recession on the poor. Reagan and like-minded idiots said the tax cuts lavished on the rich would quickly seep down through the economy and create a robust economic picture for the non-rich. It didn't happen.

[Cleita]

10. Actually it's the opposite that works.

Give Joe Sixpack a decent salary and benefits and he spends his money in the stores, real estate, and other assets. Those businesses post rosy profits and the stock goes up making the stockholders who are usually rich, richer. I just don't understand why the greedy conservatives don't get it.

[mitchum]

12. His disdain for the mentally ill is why I had no pity for his "suffering"

That bastard's legacy is urine-soaked sidewalk

[Forkboy]

14. Kick for the jackasses calling for "decency"