ABC.com-U.S. New Report: Child Homelessness on the Rise in US

[Lady Freedom Returns]

LFR NOTE: O.K. Repuke jerks! Now that you have control of Congress, what are you numbwits going to do to HELP? And I mean H-E-L-P, not hurt, H-U-R-T (I know you Dumb-Dumbs have a hard time with the difference in those two words) this problem????

SAN FRANCISCO — Nov 17, 2014, 12:37 AM ET
By DAVID CRARY and LISA LEFF Associated Press
he number of homeless children in the U.S. has surged in recent years to an all-time high, amounting to one child in every 30, according to a comprehensive state-by-state report that blames the nation's high poverty rate, the lack of affordable housing and the impacts of pervasive domestic violence.

Titled "America's Youngest Outcasts," the report being issued Monday by the National Center on Family Homelessness calculates that nearly 2.5 million American children were homeless at some point in 2013. The number is based on the Department of Education's latest count of 1.3 million homeless children in public schools, supplemented by estimates of homeless pre-school children not counted by the DOE.

The problem is particularly severe in California, which has one-eighth of the U.S. population but accounts for more than one-fifth of the homeless children with a tally of nearly 527,000.

Carmela DeCandia, director of the national center and a co-author of the report, noted that the federal government has made progress in reducing homelessness among veterans and chronically homeless adults.

Read more @ http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/report-child-homelessness-rise-us-26960391

[badtoworse]

1. Homelessness is really a state and local issue.

[yeoman6987]

2. So true. Mayors need to be doing something

yesturday about this.

[haele]

3. It's a growing problem because of state and local attitudes.

So long as the homeless are "those others" or "stupid, worthless people who made mistakes", there is not going to be any effort by the state or local government to fix the problems that cause homelessness.
The crux of the problem is that by the time someone become homeless, it's usually too late for intervention. We treat homelessness like The Problem, rather than the symptom of various problems.

Let's start with the first issue - affordable housing. And by that, I mean housing that will cost the average resident no more than 1/3 of a month's worth of minimum wage work or the average Social Security check.
Affordable housing isn't cost effective to a "businessman", and doesn't provide as high a revenue stream to local governments as would a "luxury" development or housing. Plus, it's usually subsidized, which will usually eat up whatever revenue they get from the property taxes. And housing has to be maintained whether the resident owns or rents; if the cost of retail commodities is high in the area, it's more difficult to keep the property up to code. If local charities or groups like Habitat don't step in, the local government is out sending crews out for maintenance or in policing and other situations when a resident can't manage and ends up turning the property into a major health and welfare trap. In the bad old 1960's and 1970's, affordable housing was provided by "slum lords". And frankly, those shelters were only slightly better than living in a tent or in a van down by the river.

Second issue - sustainable wages for the majority of people who are willing and able to work so that they can pay for rent or for a small mortgage as well as everything else they need to purchase to survive. That isn't do-able in our culture. Pretty much everything and everywhere is monitized, so there is no mystical homestead someone could just run off to when there's no jobs to be had; someplace where the infrastructure is already in place, and just getting up early in the morning and "working hard" is enough live comfortably off the land.
The whole country runs on "you only get as much as you can pay for". Not enough jobs, wages get pushed down as people will take less - and it's only going to get worse. But hey, blaming the homeless and the poor because resources are being hoarded by those who can afford to buy them all up is a whole lot easier than figuring out how to share resources equitably so everyone has a measure of dignity and comfort...and opprotunity to succeed.

Third issue - health. Health costs drive the majority of bankruptcies in this country. Health concerns are a major issue behind "productivity losses", (i.e. days off, poor performance, increased costs to employers in health premiums) that get people laid off. Mental health issues will drive people to the street, because there are fewer and fewer resources available just to keep the mentally ill functional and to ensure the safety of them and the people around them. I'm including functional people who might at most need a therapist or something that gives them a sense of meaning (a study, or hobby, or recreation) to get themselves calibrated. People whose world is very, very small, and don't understand how to live around other people, so they keep doing what makes them miserable and make others miserable.
Public Health and other services that promote mental growth and physical well-being costs money, and again...local and state governments have little to spare.

Everyone likes to pretend that they can make it on their own. That they need only their "hard work and focus" to succeed and they can have a life like they see on TV. Where everyone that matters can like they got to Harvard Medical School on an alumni scholarship, have the perfect house and kids, and can pay cash for everything they need (and have good enough credit to pay for what they want).
Of course, those "other people" are disposable, and they don't matter.

Haele

[badtoworse]

4. IMO, the growth in homelessness has been caused by policies at the federal level

Unfortunately however, the federal government is not in a position to deal with the problem, so it gets left to states and local governments that are hard pressed to find the resources needed.

The root cause of the problem is the offshoring of formerly good paying jobs to countries where it is cheaper to operate. It happened for a number of reasons, but the two biggest ones were trade deals, starting with NAFTA and granting Most Favored Nation ("MFN&quot status to China. The trade deals put American labor in the position of having to compete directly with workers in foreign countries that are paid a lot less, but have much lower living costs than we do. Remember Ross Perot and that giant sucking sound? Perot was right. It's really unfortunate that we haven't learned our lesson and even now, Obama is pushing the TPP. Will that make things better or worse? My money's on worse.

The MFN with China was a particularly egregious move from an American labor standpoint. Not only is American labor non-competitive with China's, but China's appalling environmental policies allowed them to produce coal-fired electricity at lower cost than we could. We've required state of the art emission controls for decades, but these are expensive and increase the cost of electricity. Energy costs are a significant factor in many manufacturing processes and China gained a competitive edge there by basically trashing the planet. Considering these two things, is there any wonder why everything you see in the big box stores says "Made in China" on the package?

I wish I could say the Republicans did this, but both of these things happened on Bill Clinton's watch, at a time when Democrats controlled Congress.

Fixing this will be very hard. We can't solve the problem by taking more and more out of the private sector in the form of taxes and having government spend the money subsidizing things the homeless can't afford. That might work in the short run, but long term, the private sector will continue to shrink, jobs will continue to leave and the problem will just continue to grow. Somehow, we need to grow the private sector and create more of a demand for American labor - that is the only way to grow wages. The government needs to adopt policies that protect American labor from unfair competition. It also needs to adopt tax policy that makes it attractive for business to invest here - incentive tax rates and accelerated depreciation on new plant come to mind. We need to exploit our advantage in natural gas costs - it's a lot more expensive in Europe and the Far East.

I'm not really very optimistic. It took a long time for the homeless problem to grow to what it is today and fixing it will take a long time as well. With two competing political philosophies basically in a stalemate, I don't see much happening anytime soon.

[mylye2222]

5. In France homelesness has rised

About plus 50% since 2001. A huge part of them are now families (mostly asylum seeking and emigrated ones) and single and isolated women.
According to Insee ( our natilnal population and society agency) we are now the top EU country in terms of people not having a private znd personal home.