but others on the list did not attract much attention. There are two possible explanations for such differences. One is that social problems change If in the late nineteenth century there were no homeless people, then we would not expect homelessness to have been discussed as a social problem. The second reason is that what is perceived as a social problem may change. Thus there may indeed have been people who were homeless in the late nineteenth century, but their situation was perceived not as a social problem, but rather as a "fact of life' or as the consequence of mere individual misfortune neither of which would make it a social problem.