"Shelter is Only a First Step": Housing the Homeless in 1980s New York City

The rapid growth in homelessness beginning in the late 1970s posed one of the greatest social and political challenges for metropolitan America in the 1980s. This was especially the case in New York City, which had the largest homeless population of any city in the country. This article examines how a fledgling advocacy movement in New York pushed local policymakers to respond to this new urban crisis. It focuses especially on the efforts by grassroots activists to secure housing for those without homes. The campaign was led by the Coalition for the Homeless, which formed in 1980 and quickly became the most prominent homeless advocacy group in the city and arguably the country. Yet the success of the coalition's campaign ultimately depended on the support of grassroots organizations from the city's low-income housing movement and from homeless individuals themselves, who also began to organize collectively to champion the need for housing. Though historians of the late twentieth-century United States have overwhelmingly focused on the post-1960s resurgence of political conservatism, this article turns to the local level to illustrate the persistence of leftist social justice organizing during this period. As the coalition-led initiative grew into a broader alliance of homeless individuals and housing activists, the campaign achieved considerable victories, including an unprecedented municipal commitment to housing the homeless. The campaign for housing thus illustrates not just the perseverance of left-wing organizers but also their successes in securing government resources for the city's most vulnerable citizens.