Due to poverty, or different other factors, homelessness has been a part of American urban life for centuries. There is a whole subculture in the United States that revolves around homeless people and, especially, vagrant workers, the HOBO culture.
Can someone please point to the historical moment when that subculture began to arise from the general American homeless population and summarize the historical factors made it endure for so long as it is still alive?
The word “hobo” came in to use at the end of the 19th century; appropriately, nobody really knows its etymological derivation. Itinerant workers and the homeless have been around for all of recorded history, but the American “hobo” subculture — as a group of loosely affiliated itinerant laborers, with bohemian values and deep connections to radical politics — is mostly a product of the late 19th century, the 1870s to the 1890s. The social and economic conditions that drove the rise of this subculture — an economic recession which left large numbers of men, many of them veterans of the civil war, unemployed and homeless — were repeated during the Great Depression, which saw a resurgence of hobo culture.
I don’t know if the same culture exists today, or has existed unbroken since that time. The labor market is different; manufacturing and industry no longer have a such a high demand for workers, and — in no small part because of the hobos and their political activism — industrial labor is often unionized now, meaning workers have more secure and long-term positions, which usually pay enough for people to afford a home.
A good book on the history of hobos is Citizen Hobo by Todd DePastino
The train riding hobo culture came out of the great depression and the need to cross the country with no money. A lot of was motivated by jobs offered for fruit pickers. The Hobo culture still exists but has undergone some big changes - but that is another topic.
Hope this was some help