Sure. The question is why they didn't do that until ~1970, which is when I think that era started.

It sounds crazy today, but the vastly poorer US society of 1960 supplied pretty everyone with an indoor place to sleep and call home.

>Sure. The question is why they didn't do that until ~1970, which is when I think that era started.

I'm American so I can't speak to the specifics of what happened in Canada, but I imagine it is similar to what happened in the US.

It is all related to the post-war suburbanization of the population. In the early part of the 20th century, homeownership rates in the US were in the 40% range. By the 70s it jumped to roughly 65%. Large swaths of the population went from being lifelong renters in cities to buying single family homes in the suburbs. Owning a home became a symbol of American middle-class life and the government both supported and encouraged this transition. Obviously a constituency that makes up 65% of the population is going to see more political power than one that only makes up 45% of the population.

Actually, Germany ran a very successful public housing program after the 70s. It's pretty recent that the government basically sold their properties for pennies and now everything is getting more expensive because nobody is building anymore.

Population has more than doubled and the proportion of urban population has increased by more than 50%.

  1960:
    Pop: 3,034,949,748
    %Urban:  34%

  2020
    Pop: 7,794,798,739
    % Urban: 56%

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...

That isn't true. The housing projects of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society poverty reduction efforts didn't start until mid decade. Before that, you could infer that there was an actual need for it (even though it ultimately failed).

I don't think the people who moved to the housing projects were typically sleeping on the streets.

I think it was more a case of upgrading to modern sanitation standards etc.

That said, I have no real detailed knowledge, and would be happy to learn how wrong I am about this :)

Bottom living standards were a lot lower back then: people could live in shacks without plumbing, flop houses were plentiful. These days none of that is legally allowed, so people would have fallen into that housing 50-80 years ago are homeless today. That being said, poverty reductions between then and now are real, it’s only that our standards keep getting higher (as they should).

I would 100% bring back flop houses. They're much better than sleeping in the street.

The insanity of "we can't let you have a bad X, so you get no X!" is one of my least favorite things in this era...

I agree. I remember the flop house my grandpa ran in Spokane fondly. We cousins called it the empty arms.

On the other hand, flop houses aren’t economical to run anymore, and the drug problems (especially with decriminalization) have gotten much worse. It’s not clear they can work like they did in the past.