Each day during the week from May 27 to June 1 there was at least one story in the Press Herald that covered social service issues from provision of homeless shelters in Portland and Westbrook, housing and services for the disabled in Scarborough, and child care statewide.

Some of these reports, like the housing stories, described projects that would fill an existing need even though we know that they barely scratch the surface of the need. According to a recent state study, Maine will need 84,000 new housing units by 2030 to address its affordability needs. Other articles, like the services for the disabled and childcare, were about service shortages. It’s easy to see these articles as separate when they appear on different days at different times but, in reality, they are connected. We’re just not seeing the forest for the trees. Unless we understand why we have these problems, we can’t effectively address them.

There is a reason for our constant need to fill social gaps and to see that reason – to see the connections between them – we have to take a broader historical view. We are living with the consequences of public policy decisions for which a majority of citizens voted. As a group, we chose this.

In the early 1980s, Americans were called upon to be patriots and restore the country to the promise of the Founding Fathers. Enough people were convinced that America was in decline and needed to be restored that they voted for a social revolution in which the market would be the guiding force. That revolution shifted funding away from the social safety net to the military and that defunding has never been fully restored. The problems we now face with housing, homelessness, education and all manner of social programs find their roots in this revolution.

Economists argue about whether or not this revolution solved any problems or maybe created more than it solved.

“Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession,” Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times in 2008. “But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before and the poverty rate had risen.” Who was right or why this was done is not the point here. What matters is that we are left with the consequences of that movement.

And what do those consequences look like? In its report on the closing of the Morrison Center in Scarborough, the Portland Press Herald introduced us to Rachel Williams, whose daughter is a student at the school. In the absence of services, Ms Williams has had to quit her job as a preschool teacher – a role we desperately need in Maine – so she can care for her daughter at home. Rather than Ms Williams and her daughter being in schools, one to teach and one to learn, both are isolated at home. The world we now have in many ways makes no sense.

The federal safety net that existed 40 years ago is gone, particularly when it comes to housing, social services and higher education. Any sort of restoration must begin at the state level.

To use the housing issue as an example: Random, small, selective projects, like the senior housing proposal in Kennebunk, are not going to be enough. Portland’s “ReCode” project, however, is based on a new vision for the city that, done correctly, would balance needs – at least as far as one city can control. Besides housing, this project takes education, transportation, economics, climate and open space into account.

But more is needed. One city is not a state solution. A realistic, comprehensive review of state values and priorities is needed and that review needs to be attached to implementation strategies – chiefly, funding. Society was restructured 40 years ago and we have to play the hand we were dealt. I don’t know whose job it is to undertake or initiate this project, but this is where the road begins.