The manifestation of homelessness as a social problem has shown considerable variation across historical contexts. For example, homelessness was thought of as a minor problem, affecting only older alcoholic men in "skid row" neighborhoods in the early post-World War II period. However, by the early to mid-1980s, activists in urban communities were in an uproar about the increasing number of people fending for themselves on the streets and in emergency shelters.

What explains the shifts in prominence of homelessness as a social problem? Certainly increasing numbers and visibility of the homeless are critical. However, other factors are operative as well. First, who becomes homeless often affects the extent and nature of public reaction, as occurred when increasing numbers of women and children became homeless in the late 1980s and 1990s. The fact that many members of this new wave of homelessness were mentally ill, engaged in some form of substance abuse, or both, also affected how the public looked at the homeless.

The level and nature of attention that homelessness receives by the public is also influenced by the extent to which the public encounters homeless people in their daily lives, as well as the nature of the space in which the two groups confront one another. Some scholars have argued that public reaction to homelessness is influenced by the instrumental use and symbolic meaning of the space in which they negotiate their daily lives. When homeless persons eke out their subsistence mainly in "marginal spaces," which have little, if any, economic, political, or symbolic value, they are not very likely to provoke a response by authorities. However, they are more likely to provoke a response when they move into "prime spaces" that are used by the domiciled for residential, recreational, or commercial purposes, or "transitional spaces" that have ambiguous use or are in the process of being transformed into prime space. When homeless persons enter prime and transitional spaces, they are likely to provoke two different responses. Political officials and their agents often try to contain the homeless population or reduce their visibility through differentially monitoring the spaces where they hang out, enforcing anti-panhandling and other ordinances, and disrupting their daily routines. Private citizens and commercial establishments also often engage in exclusionary, NIMBY (not in my backyard) activities that prevent homeless populations, or facilities serving them, from entering and settling in prime and transitional spaces.

It has also been noted that more sympathetic responses to homelessness are not constant, but wax and wane over time. Research has shown that both media attention to homelessness and participation in volunteer efforts to aid homeless persons tend to surge around the holiday season, increasing around Thanksgiving and peaking at Christmas time. It has been noted as well that as mass homelessness has persisted in urban America, public concern about it as a pressing problem has faded due to "compassion fatigue." A slightly different take on this fading concern for homelessness is that it suffers a "liability of persistence." This argument holds that it is not necessarily that the public has tired of being sympathetic to the homeless, but that the duration of the problem has caused people to believe that homelessness is a fixed aspect of contemporary urban society rather than a solvable problem. However, the emergence of recent local and national campaigns to "end homelessness" suggests that at least some citizens have not succumbed to compassion fatigue or the sense of hopelessness that often accompanies the persistence of a social problem. . .

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