This must be kept in mind when hearing statistics about homelessness. Even so, it is still a major problem.
As mentioned above, homelessness has been a problem since the beginning of America. There are records that have been preserved from community relief institutions that tell of how the homeless were juggled around just as they are today. In Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness by Peter H. Rossi, you can read about a certain record, recounted by Michael B. Katz in his 1986 work In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, that tells of New York state officials debating over whether providing the homeless with small gifts of money or maintaining the poorhouses would be cheaper. In conjunction with this argument there was the timely debate of whether the outward giving of money to the homeless encouraged them to look to the state for support rather than trying to support themselves (Rossi 19). He says that this argument has been present since the beginning of homelessness and will continue to be. He defines it as, "the perennial issue of how best to help the "deserving" poor without subsidizing the undeserving" (19). .
The issue of defining deserving homeless from undeserving has forced certain homeless people to band together. The rise of Skid Row is a testimony to this. As the end of the nineteenth century approached, every major city had a Skid Row area established. These camps, if you will, consisted mainly of transient laboring men without refuge. The peak of skid row populations came in the first part of the twentieth century however with the Great Depression. Rossi reveals that the FERA, Federal Emergency Relief Administration, reported housing 125,000 people in 1933 and 200,000 in 1934. He also discovered that there were other estimates of the homeless population that were as high 1.5 million in the most dire years of the Great Depression (22). .
There was a transition period during the 60s and 70s among the homeless population.