Last week my column demonstrated how the high cost of housing helped create the problem of homelessness (“Why is homelessness so bad? Blame the Great Recession,” published April 24). This week we’ll examine how the actions of government officials forty and fifty years ago laid the groundwork for our current plague.

Ronald Reagan’s libertarian attitudes as Governor in 1967 set the precedent in California by emptying state mental hospital of their patients. Here’s a quote from the San Diego Tribune:

“After the deinstitutionalization movement began in California in the 1960s, many state mental health hospitals closed, forcing many folks who needed a lot of care onto the streets. Without those facilities, many mentally ill people ended up in jails and prisons which are not set up to provide safe, compassionate care for brain illnesses.”

Reagan didn’t understand the mentally ill, even though he was almost assassinated by a mentally ill young man. His small-government libertarian views saw the solution to high taxes as coming from making government smaller. Both Congressional Democrats and Republicans agreed when they passed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of August 1981. This act repealed most of Jimmy Carter’s Mental Health Systems Act.

“…When President Ronald Reagan deinstitutionalized the mentally ill and emptied the psychiatric hospitals into so-called “community” clinics, the problem got worse” (S.D.T.).

Financing for funding community mental health facilities dried up across the nation, including in Washington state. Big mental institutions were out, but funding to build community clinics never appeared in adequate amounts.

Locally in 2010, Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire tried to close down Rainier School as a budget-cutting measure, but residents of Buckley and neighboring communities with the help of their legislative representatives successfully resisted the move. Rainier School remains to this day with a fraction of its original “clients”. There are now only 134 or so developmentally disabled housed there. That’s a far cry from 1958 when the number peaked at 1918. (dshs.wa.gov)

While mental health facilities were needed, the level of care in these places took some hits over the years. According to a Courier-Herald article published on Jan. 20, 2023: “Disability Rights Washington, a state nonprofit that investigates allegations of abuse and neglect at care facilities around the state, filed a lawsuit in September alleging the state facility is ‘a dangerous place to live’ as its ‘mistreatment and neglect within its walls have maimed, hospitalized, and killed residents’, violating several federal and state statutes.”

Here’s an observation from a recent U.W. Magazine article about the causes for homelessness in Washington state:

“In the 1970s, Northern State Hospital, which cared for hundreds of individuals living with severe mental-health problems on a beautiful 1,086-acre campus with sweeping mountain views and a working farm, was closed as part of a nationwide trend of deinstitutionalization.” [Rainier School is also located on a beautiful campus with sweeping views of the Cascades and Mount Rainier. It used to be a working farm.]

“That was followed by more closures of residential-care facilities through the 1980s, putting thousands of people with severe mental illnesses on the streets or in smaller, inadequate facilities. Today, those with persistent or severe mental illnesses often end up homeless or in nursing homes, medical hospitals, jails and prisons.”

This is the often-untold story that gives a fuller picture of the causes of homelessness in America than what the Jan. 31, 2023 federal Housing and Urban Development Assessment detailed. In its report, the three causes of homelessness were the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the opioid epidemic, and the housing crisis with its high rents and rising value of homes. Certainly, all these causes play a major part in our current homelessness crisis, but bad decisions of past governors, presidents, and members of Congress and state legislatures also contributed.

H.U.D. avoided speaking about the federal and state governmental decisions made in the 1970s and 1980s that have come to roost in the vacant lots, under overpasses, and in the big cities and small towns of the nation, including Washington state.

It’s another example of a perfect storm that has torn through the nation like the hurricanes that have hit the South and Northeast in recent years. Both parties are to blame for exacerbating what might be an unsolvable dilemma.

It’s the law of unintended consequences seen in real-time detail.