STACY MCCAIN: Homelessness: Myth and Menace. “Back in the 1980s, this became an ‘issue’ because Democrats wanted to leverage homelessness as a way to impugn Ronald Reagan’s policies. But the problem had nothing to do with Reagan and everything to do with a series of court decisions that had made it more difficult to lock up insane people in lunatic asylums, and nearly impossible to enforce laws against vagrancy. The so-called ‘deinstitutionalization’ of the mentally ill was a policy that had been pursued by the American Civil Liberties Union and other liberals during the 1970s. This coincided with other trends — including rising rates of divorce and drug abuse — that had the combined effect of creating a population of dopeheads, alcoholics and crazies who had no families to take care of them, and no place to go.”