by Rael Jean Isaac and D.J. Jaffe

About the author: Rael Jean Isaac is the coauthor of Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill. D.J. Jaffe is on the board of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

When a bundled-up middle-aged homeless woman named Yetta Adams was found dead at a bus stop opposite the Department of Housing and Urban Development in November 1994, it was front-page news in papers from coast to coast. In the stories Miss Adams was cast as a victim of the nation’s callous housing policies—a martyr to affluent America’s indifference to the homeless. In the hours after her body was carted away, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros held a press conference to propose raising spending on...