It's Not a Housing Problem - Washington Free Beacon

To the substance: Eide first adds some important historical context to the debate. The homeless population has always been predominantly men as it is today, but other aspects of it were different. It used to be much larger, for instance. Nationwide estimates in the early 20th century ranged from 500,000 to 5 million. As Eide notes, "adjusted for population, any of those estimates would dwarf the current count of around 580,000." A researcher in the 1920s noted that the homeless population in Chicago alone was 30,000 in good times and 75,000 in hard times. In the late 19th century one historian estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of the populations had a family member who had used a homeless shelter.
So what has changed? The first is the prevalence of serious mental illness among the homeless due in large part to the widespread deinstitutionalization of the 1960s and '70s.
A second change has been the lack of cheap single-room occupancy housing. While these kind of residences that were once found on Skid Row or in the Tenderloin District were hardly great places to live, they did provide a way for people who engaged in only casual labor or on subsistence level wages to find shelter.
The final change has been that a larger percentage of the homeless today are families. One reason for this is that women are more willing and legally able to leave abusive relationships. Unfortunately, they often don't have the financial wherewithal to set up their own household right away. Families are still not a large portion of the homeless population and Eide is right to point out that the stories reporting thousands of homeless children are including children whose families are "doubling up," that is, they are living with relatives.