Shelter in Place

A Dust Bowl migrant may be the figure who most Americans would imagine when they think of Depression-era homelessness, and Dorothea Lange’s 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, sometimes called Migrant Mother, is easily the most famous depiction. Lange, a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, came across Thompson in Nipomo, California, where the latter was a 32-year-old migrant farmworker, traveling with her seven children to wherever she could find work. The images Lange shot were used to illustrate a wire-service story about hungry workers in the frost-ravaged pea fields. Roy Stryker, head of the FSA photo unit, declared the photograph to be the “ultimate” image produced by his organization.

But Migrant Mother’s iconic status could overshadow the fact that homelessness was also a major problem in American cities during the Depression, both for locals and for the unemployed people from out of town who had hoped to find relief in industrial centers. It’s difficult to determine exactly how many city-dwellers were homeless, but a national survey from 1933 estimated the number at 1.5 million people, half of whom were transients without a permanent address in any state.

Most homeless people were unskilled laborers, but factory workers and domestic employees were also vulnerable to losing their jobs, and their homes. Perhaps most alarming to the American imagination was the plight of the white-collar workers—those who had seemingly achieved a level of security that should have kept them from the bread lines, but found themselves on the streets. Housing relief favored families, so many of the homeless were singles, or “unattached.”

Cities were overwhelmed by the newly homeless masses. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president, and the federal government stepped in to help with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), which devoted an initial fund of $500 million to relief efforts. This included the Federal Transient Program, which helped create a network of shelters around the United States for the homeless, many of whom were barred from receiving assistance from municipalities because they could not prove they once had a local address. Warehouses, offices, stores, garages, schoolhouses, and hotels were converted to homeless lodgings. Separate from these efforts, some people congregated in shanty towns that came to be called “Hoovervilles,” after the president on whom many blamed for their misfortune. One of the largest, in Seattle, sprawled over nine acres of public land and housed up to 1,200 people. Hoovervilles clustered around every major city in New York during the Great Depression; from 1931 to 1933, a Hooverville occupied what is now Central Park’s Great Lawn.

Urban homeless shelters tended to be overcrowded, and of variable cleanliness. In Chicago, 43,000 men filtered through the city’s shelters between October 1930 and June 1931; shelter-dwellers in that city complained of dirty lodgings, with beds crammed together that smelled of urine and overflowing garbage. In New York, thousands streamed through the Municipal Lodging House, which had opened in 1886, and its two annexes, which were created to handle the swell of Great Depression homeless. Together, these three facilities provided 5,856 beds nightly, predominantly for men. Lodgers slept in bunk beds and received meals that consisted of—according to a 1933 article in The New Republic—vegetable stew that occasionally had beef in it, accompanied by stale bread and watery coffee.

The Roosevelt administration put an end to FERA after just two years, in 1935; the president was loath to provide handouts, favoring the creation of jobs. He replaced FERA with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which focused on providing work. Nearly 600 federally run shelters were shut down, with the goal of transferring those who could work into WPA programs. Others would have to rely on the hodgepodge of aid that had existed before: state and city-run relief efforts propped up by charities such as the Salvation Army.

The effect was immediate and large, particularly in urban hubs which could no longer rely on federally funded centers to house their transient populations. San Francisco’s skid row—Howard Street, between Third and Fourth Streets—became a hub of activity for the homeless and jobless because of the presence of employment agencies. In 1937, Dorothea Lange captured the men who gathered there as they looked at the job boards, gambled with pennies in the street, drank, and slept on the sidewalks.

“In New York City, private agencies, straining to take care of their own, could not absorb the transient,” writes Joan M. Crouse in her 1986 book The Homeless Transient in the Great Depression. “A one-night census of the city conducted by the Emergency Relief Bureau found 6,000 men sleeping in subways, parks, abandoned buildings, terminals, and similar makeshift shelters.” Roosevelt’s rejection of direct relief would have a lasting effect on the way homelessness was dealt with in the United States, right up to present day.