The Street Lawyer

The 1980s and 1990s saw a drastic upturn in the amount of people without access to permanent housing, but the roots of that crisis began in the 1960s. In 1963, as part of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, Congress passed the Community Mental Health Act (CMHA), a program meant to provide federal funding for community mental health centers and research facilities in the United States. The goal was to stop warehousing psychiatric patients in institutions and mainstream them into the community, while providing existing mental health centers with significant financial support and funding the building of new centers. In turn, the centers could educate families about mental health. Unfortunately, only about half of the promised mental health centers were built, and because of the lack of funding, many social services and welfare programs suffered from budget cuts. Although the CMHA was well-intentioned, one of its main repercussions was the mass deinstitutionalization of patients from state psychiatric hospitals into the community. Because many communities did not have adequate or sustainable support systems, the people who had been released by institutions were forced to live on the streets. In addition, mental health issues still carried a stigma, and not everyone was willing or felt it was their responsibility to accept former psychiatric patients into their neighborhoods and lives.

Add to these factors the deteriorating economy and the result was that the number of people without homes soared in the 1980s and continued to rise in the 1990s. “In 1970 there were 300,000 more low-cost rental units (6.5 million) than low-income renter households (6.2 million). By 1985 the number of low-cost units had fallen to 5.6 million, and the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, a disparity of 3.3 million units” (Dreier, Peter. “Reagan’s Legacy: Homelessness in America.” Shelterforce, 01 May 2004). In response to this crisis, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, which would directly allocate significant federal funds to services for people without homes. The act still remains the only piece of federal legislation to do this. Following McKinney-Vento, many shelters, soup kitchens, and clinics opened in cities and towns across the United States. Despite these improvements and the dramatic economic growth of the 1990s, the numbers of unhoused people continued to rise throughout the decade. Due to neighborhood pressure and increasing real estate prices, many public housing units were demolished, pushing more people into the streets. Toward the end of the decade, people began to realize that relieving the symptoms of living without a home, although worthy and necessary, would not solve the root causes of the housing crisis.

Published in 1998, The Street Lawyer draws from the experiences of this upsurge of people without access to permanent housing but also grapples with the philosophical questions of its time—particularly the question of Personal Privilege and Responsibility. In addition to its depiction of homelessness in Washington, DC, as a microcosm of the United States, the book explores social questions about the collective versus the individual, who should be responsible for whom, and to what extent. More importantly, Grisham asks the reader to consider that humanity may lie at the intersection of rights and responsibility, justice and dignity.