Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People

Kidder details the realities of houselessness: contributing factors, the rising rates across the US, and the demographics that make up the unhoused population in the US. Houselessness rose sharply in the 1980s. This happened for several reasons—veteran aid programs that didn’t provide sufficient support for men returning from Vietnam, the closure of affordable housing and asylums across the United States, complicated disability policies, and racist housing policies like redlining (See: Index of Terms).

Kidder reports how racist policies from the Reagan administration that targeted Black mothers on welfare contributed to the rise of houselessness. Kidder notes that Reagan placed the responsibility of houselessness on people who were unhoused in public interviews. Kidder details the practices and policies that contributed to the sharp rise of houselessness during Reagan’s presidency.

Kidder details the statistics currently available about the number of unhoused people—about 500,000 to 600,000 in the US—and why these figures are most likely inaccurate. Houselessness is complex with a range of circumstances. Kidder writes that statistics don’t capture people who are in detox, couch surfing, or in jail or the hospital. Houselessness, Kidder writes, is “much larger than usually asserted, and no one [knows] its real dimensions” (55).