The qualitative change in the 1980's was a deep recession that saw a drastic reduction in HUD funding, combined with a 20-30 year long defunding of long-term mental health institutions. The combination left the economically disenfranchised and mentally vulnerable with high rates of homelessness.

It's notable that neither of these factors that had been keeping homelessness rates low were the result of a hands-off free market, but instead the product of social safety nets that, when removed, simply didn't catch people.

I'm not sure if it's deliberate on your part, but there are also more categories to homelessness than crazy and indolent. A significant portion simply "fall on hard times". Take this article [0] about the causes of homelessness in Seattle. Between eviction & loss of job, about 35% of homeless are find themselves there through economic issues. The other causes are worth reviewing as well. Crazy & Lazy simply don't cover it.

[0]https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/why-are-p...

The “fall on hard times” crowd hasn’t always lost their homes. For instance, it doesn’t matter how bad the famine was in feudal times, the lord wasn’t going to kick you off the land. Losing your home to foreclosure requires a modern economy.

That isn't quite true. It was not uncommon for the British lords to kick Irish off their lands. I have a hard time believing that was a unique circumstance throughout the history of various forms of feudalism.

See also the practice of "Enclosure" for an additional example.

In addition, being a peasant often had some properties of slavery: no freedom of mobility or choice and sometimes lack of pay, with the express approval of the local lord required for many things. See the Revolt of 1381.

The Lord-Peasant relationship is really not a positive example of preventing homelessness, but either way, let's face it: It was the Government supporting those people. Arguing from the historic example of feudalism as a method that prevented homelessness would mean you're arguing that the government should be directly supporting the homeless.

1. “Enclosure” is the defining act of modernization, so it doesn’t really say anything about feudal times.

2. I’m not arguing that feudalism was good. I’m arguing that homelessness is a historically embedded phenomenon, and was essentially non-existent in pre-modern times and then it became markedly more prevalent in the last 40 years. I’m not sure about all the causes of or solutions to homelessness, but I do think if it were the priority, homelessness could be resolved at the price of imposing some other trade off problems (which might be worse on net).

Isn't this usually attributed to the Reagan administration's repeal of Mental Health Systems Act? Not that the situtation was necessarily all that great before it was repealed, but my understanding is that the federal government making this change ended up putting a lot of people on the street.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...

Yeah they did, we have had similar problems in Australia

The thing is, it's still a lot better than the mid-century horror stories of institutions; electrotherapy, lobotomy, people being drugged into a permanent fugue state, sexual abuse, etc. Those concerns are what drove these changes to the system.

> The thing is, it's still a lot better than the mid-century horror stories of institutions; electrotherapy, lobotomy

ECT[1] (Electroshock Therapy) has an extremely bad rap (One Flew over the Cukoo's Nest didn't help), but there's quite an important use for it in modern psychiatry.

Notably severe depression, where normal meds don't help, or where there's an urgency to do something immediately (psychiatric meds usually take a few weeks to work and finding the right medication and dosage can be very difficult) ECT may be the last viable option for a patient.

Nowadays an anesthetic is applied before the treatment and (except in very rare cases) informed consent by the patient is required.

There's no doubt that it was massively abused in the past (and let's not even get started on lobotomy) and I'm pretty sure it's still abused in countries run by totalitarian regimes.

But it can be really the last hope for a patient with severe depression, despite the fact that it still has a very bad image.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy

E: clarifications

The Carter Administration had funded a transition to community-based outpatient mental health. Then the Reagan administration proceeded to pull the rug out by repealing the MHSA and leaving it to the states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...

There was also a few court cases in the 70s and 80s that made it very difficult to involuntarily commit someone to a mental institution. Some of them are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas

If a mentally ill person doesn’t want to stay in a mental institution, authorities basically have to wait until they cause significant harm to be classified as dangerous before being able to do anything.