Back in 1983, when a recession and horrible rainstorms thrust homelessness in the political spotlight in San Francisco, Paul Boden was already familiar with life on the streets.

Then 23, he had been squatting, couch-surfing and staying at hostels since he was 16. When he saw people lining up to get spots in San Francisco’s first temporary emergency shelters, Boden volunteered to help out.

Women were sleeping on the cafeteria floors of St Anthony’s food kitchen. While men, with their sleeping bags and clothes in tow, were crashing in the chairs and on the rug at nearby Hospitality House.

Four decades later, Boden is still a leading voice in demanding rights for the unhoused.

He served as the director of San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness, a non-profit organization fighting to empower those without homes, for 16 years, and now serves as the executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (Wrap), which works to eliminate the root causes of homelessness and demand protection of human rights.

Along the way, he and his colleagues have been documenting the path that led to the devastating problem of homelessness that the US faces today.

There were 582,500 people counted as being homeless in the national one-night head count in January 2022, which Boden says counts only the most obvious cases of homelessness and misses many others. Across the US, only 33 affordable homes are available for every 100 extremely low-income renter households.

The Guardian spoke with Boden about the history of homelessness in the US and what he sees as meaningful solutions. The conversation is edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start at the beginning. You’ve argued that the homelessness emergency the US is facing today is rooted in actions that began in the 1980s. How did it all begin?

It was massive cuts to federal affordable housing programs, part of the Reagan Revolution. By 1983, affordable housing funding had basically bottomed out.

WRAP just finished research that shows that there are 438,289 fewer units of public housing available today than there were in 1994. Betty Crocker couldn’t give you a better recipe for how to end up in a situation where people are living out in your streets.

What did public housing look like before the 1980s and what happened to change the direction?

The federal department that we now call Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was created in 1937 in response to massive homelessness (following the Great Depression). The enabling legislation said the government has the responsibility to ensure that all of its citizens have a clean, safe, decent place to live that they can afford.

But in 1998, the legislation was changed to say the federal government cannot be held accountable to ensure that even a majority of its citizens have a place to live. The federal government said: “Oh, no, no, we’re not responsible. We’ve relieved ourselves of this responsibility.”

In 1994 and 95, the Hope VI program under Bill Clinton that aimed to rebuild public housing tore down a lot of public housing and made it mixed income.

California senator and former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation that overturned the law that said that if the government destroys a unit of federal housing, it is legally required to replace that unit.

Then, in the late 90s came welfare reform, imposing all kinds of caps and limits [on aid to poor families]. Three hundred thousand people were cut off from social security benefits in a single day because they were labeled as “dual diagnosed” (having mental illness coupled with drug dependency). And you could no longer get social security if part of your disability was a drug addiction.

So it was the dismantling of all these different systems: your housing system, your welfare system, your disability systems. At the time we were also wiping out halfway houses and lodges for mentally ill people. Then you wonder why all of these different folks, whose main thing in common is living in poverty, ended up out on your streets.

Weren’t there a lot of problems with public housing basically ghettoizing people of color?

Oh yes, there were all kinds of problems, including redlining. Don’t by any stretch of the imagination think that I’m saying everything was so perfect back in the day. But the current approach is not fixing it.

What has our response been these last 40 years?

In the 1980s, the Federal Emergency Management Agency started funding emergency shelters. These were supposed to be temporary facilities at the time of a crisis. The mantra at the time was basically: we’re in a recession and times are tough for everybody, so people are homeless, but as soon as the recession is over, they’re all gonna go back home. The reality was, there were no homes for them to go back to.

We’ve never gone back to a safety-net program structure or a housing program structure. Today we have program after program, sweep after sweep, security ambassadors, business improvement districts, all of these efforts to mitigate the presence of homelessness without doing a damn thing about what caused the advent of contemporary homelessness in the early 1980s.

Political leaders would say: we have to do something right away. Well, now it’s 40 years later, and the San Francisco board of supervisors just passed a resolution to open up 2,000 more shelter beds.

The old system wasn’t perfect by any means. But when it existed, you didn’t have millions of people living out in your streets.

Instead, they chose the cheapest way that they could show a pretense of caring at all about the human beings that are living out in the street.

But we are still funding subsidized housing, right?

Yes, there are low-income housing vouchers that are privatizing accommodation of affordable housing, so that a private landlord can make a profit off of it. That basically means you have an incredibly poor person who’s homeless and you’re sending them out into the open market to find private landlords that will accept a HUD voucher, and all the bureaucracy that comes with it. If you’ve got a disability, if you’re a person of color, well then good luck! You think racism and classism don’t exist in America anymore, just because someone has a voucher?

What are the current trends you’re seeing in working with the unhoused population?

In the 40 years I’ve been doing this in 13 cities that we work in, I have never seen so much vitriol coming from neighborhood associations, business groups, civic groups and tech groups, saying these people need to go. Those groups are saying: “we’ve been looking at this homelessness for 40 years, and we’re sick of it. We don’t want to see it anymore.”

We’ve had non-profits telling us that they’re gonna fix it. We’ve had people running for mayor saying they’re gonna make it disappear. And we have a federal government that says you can’t hold us accountable for the fact that it homelessness even exists anymore.

People seem to be saying: “if I don’t see poor people, then I don’t have to worry that there’s too much poverty in America. If I don’t see homeless people, I don’t have to worry that we have a homeless problem. Because if I don’t see it, it’s not a problem.”

How have the numbers of unhoused people changed?

The number of people who are homeless has gone up, yes. But the real change is that the longevity of homelessness and the difficulty of getting through the system is off the hook.

In the early 80s, when senior citizens would come to me, it might take me two weeks to find them a place to live. Now it’s next to impossible. It might take five years. Now you have to be finger imaged to get into the shelter system. You have to call a hotline number and get on a waiting list that has 1,400 names on it.

And then local officials turn around and argue that the homeless people are “service resistant”.

It’s unconscionable. After 40 years, it’s so hard to get our leaders to even admit that what they’ve been doing is never gonna work.

It seems like the government, at least in San Francisco and Los Angeles, has been spending a lot of money building new housing or converting hotels to housing for the homeless. If we are creating all this housing, what’s going wrong?

First, taking a single-room occupancy hotel off the open market and converting it to a homeless program is not creating anything. It’s changing who’s able to live in the hotel. And it’s changing the management of the hotel. They rob Peter to pay Paul. But it’s a lot cheaper than actually building housing.

And mostly, when you hear about new affordable housing that’s being built, if you look at the affordability requirements to live there … it can be people with incomes of like $90,000.

What would you propose as a good way to actually provide deeply subsidized housing?

I would go back to the original legislation from 1937. And I would say the federal government needs to be held accountable to find affordable housing for the poorest people in this country. No waiting list, no intakes. We don’t care where you were born. We don’t care if you’ve ever gone to jail. We don’t care who lives in your house – you’re eligible! You’ve just gotta fund it.

The idea is to create units that are mixed income that are spread across the city that are habitable and that poor people can afford to live in.

That’s a tall order!

Yeah, it’s a tall order. It’s a restructuring of a society that has gone so far off kilter. That the idea that people even merit a decent place to live regardless of their income is more foreign to us now than it was in 1937.

It’s like, you’re still trying to rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic and you hit the iceberg 40 years ago.