More Than Half A Million People: America’s Homelessness Crisis Is Rapidly Exploding On Both Coasts

Yes, excellent example of exactly what I was talking about. Blaming the homeless for homelessness and the poor for poverty and even managed to blame their families at the same time.

And all without reading or addressing any of the links or qoutes.

Excellent highlighting of my exact point.

Thank you!

 

I take it you would you blame the 'stranger in the street', but not the actual parents who produced the dysfunctional individual?

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and submit that you may have personal reasons for resisting the idea that we are responsible for the quality of the humans we create.

 

First you are lumping in anyone who is homeless as dysfunctional though the may be working poor unable to access affordable housing or one of a hundred other reasons why people end up on the street as outlined in the studies of the issue I linked upthread.

Trying to paint all homeless with the brush of disfunction is as prejudiced as trying to say all minorities are lazy or criminal. Nothing is that black and white.

Affordable housing is a huge issue in large cities where people go for work no matter who you are especially with a shrinking middle class and a full 50% of the population considered to be lower income.

Secondly there are youth homeless who don't even have parents for whatever reason - death, divorve, bad adoptions.
and many of them are quite functional despite very bad circumstances beyond their control.

And if your second paragragh was meant to be a personal insult towards me, you don't know the first thing about me so you are just demonstrating your want to lump people into generalizations so you do not have to deal with the complexity of the real world outside your little frame of reference.

Plus the insult has nothing whatever to add to the conversation and just rolls off my back as general pettiness and laziness that seems to arise here on occasion.

Did you read any of the links I posted up-thread? Any meaningful comment?

 

1) Any adult with working limbs can survive in the First World, if they choose to. Since that is the reality, it follows that those who don't, are damaged to the point of making strange choices (but choices which would make sense to the dysfunctional individual). It absolutely IS that 'black and white'.

2) 'Affordable' housing is housing you can afford - obviously. If you can't afford it HERE, you can afford it THERE. Anything else is people demanding preferred housing options in preferred areas, without having to work for it. IOW, an outrageous, disgusting, selfish, demand. You want to live in an expensive city? Work for it like the rest of us. Don't have a job? Then you're free to move somewhere cheaper.

3) I have always made a clear exception for homeless youth and homeless (physically) disabled. But they are no different in terms of having been failed by their families. These are the only people who should be 'assisted' beyond the basics of welfare and free healthcare etc.

4) It was not intended as a personal insult, it was a general observation that those most opposed to the idea that parents are responsible for the quality of the adult that their child becomes, are those with a vested interest in not being blamed. Psych 101.

 

"More Than Half A Million People: America’s Homelessness Crisis
Is Rapidly Exploding On Both Coasts"


Then relocate "them" in Oklahoma, or Nebraska,

or some middle place far from the coasts.



There is no right to live in San Francisco or NYC
if you can't afford to do so.
Bring back vagrancy laws!

 

Of course it's not that black and white and surviving is not the same thing as having a home. I know you don't read fact based links for whatever reason but I will try again:

There are three additional structural factors which have contributed significantly to the rise in homelessness over the past several decades, and which continue to exacerbate the problem today. They include: (i) rising housing costs and transformations in the national housing market, (ii) the lack of relative expansion in the government "safety net" and the inability of social service programs to keep pace with increasing demand, and (iii) the pervasiveness of socio-political norms and attitudes that stigmatize the homeless in the policy sphere and thwart efforts of homeless service providers to meet the needs of the homeless population.

(i) Since the mid-1970s, affordable housing has become increasingly scarce and beyond the reach of many people living in poverty because they are forced to contribute increasingly larger proportions of their income towards housing. Moreover, once they are homeless they find it increasingly difficult to get themselves back into affordable housing. There are several causal explanations for this new phenomenon.

First, is the loss of housing units and the failure of government and private contractors to build new low-cost homes. Indeed, while in 1970 there was a surplus of approximately 2.4 million low income units in America, by 1985 there was an estimated deficit of 3.7 million.19 Next, is community opposition to low-income housing (NIMBY syndrome). Third, is the federal government's withdrawal from housing production. As the Home Base Report suggests, the federal Housing and Urban Development appropriations for "subsidized housing fell from $32.2 billion in 1978 to $9.2 billion in 1988", while under President Clinton HUD's appropriated budget remains "less than half of what it was under Jimmy Carter in 1994 dollars."20 Fourth, is the inability of lower class incomes to keep pace with rising rents. Indeed, "one-third of all Americans - 78 million people -are 'shelter poor', meaning that they have to spend so much on housing they lack sufficient income to pay for other basic necessities.,,21 And fifth, is the functioning of the mortgage finance system.22 Indeed, "speculative forces, in addition to government deregulation of the savings and loan industry and the expansion of the secondary mortgage market in the 1980s, contributed to higher interest rates, higher housing costs and an explosion of debt."23 Between 1980 and 1987, average household morgage debt increased 30%, with the result that the rate of foreclosure has increased four-fold since 1980.

ii) The lack of expansion in the government "safety net" along with inadequate social services also constitutes an important structural determinant of homelessness. The 1970s were the beneficiary of "the explosive increase in social welfare payments, the quiet expansion of in-kind benefits, and general economic growth which collectively had greatly cut back absolute poverty."28 However, the conservative policies of the Reagan administration throughout the 1 980s "pared expenditures for food stamps, unemployment insurance, child nutrition, vocational education, the Job Corps, and the AFDC, and also terminated public service employment."29 Indeed, Reagan's Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 "increased poverty by roughly 2 percent" in only two years.30 Moreover, as Patterson notes, by the mid-1980s the "welfare system revealed the same limitations and anomalies as it had for decades." Among these limitations were the fact that AFDC benefits, "which were not indexed for inflation, fell nationally by almost one-third in real terms between 1976 and 1985....while in many states the benefits remained far below the official federal poverty line."31 Indeed, these limitations are largely a result of the fact that "the system is not designed to take a comprehensive view of people and their ongoing needs, and therefore it serves least well those whose needs are multiple and long term."32

And finally, the pervasiveness of norms and attitudes in American society that stigmatize the poor and the homeless tend to exacerbate the problem. The notions of liberal individualism and of a historical American "work ethic" which pervade American society often place the homeless on both the physical and conceptual outskirts of society. The wide-spread acceptance of the neo-classical economic paradigm in the American politico-economic sphere, the increasing centrism among political elites, and the proliferation of ideas like those of Charles Murray, signal that American society is moving farther away from the community-oriented paradigms of the 1 960s towards much more of an "each man for himself' attitude. This does not bode well for the future of poverty and homelessness in America. Indeed, it appears as though this trend will only further exacerbate this already critically pressing societal problem.

http://web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/soc_sec/hcauses.htm

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/14/the-new-face-of-homelessness-in-america-suburbanites

If the work is mostly in big cities, and even that is not enough to provide a living wage and income, how is moving to an area where there is less work going to help people get out of homelessness and poverty? How does this even make sense? Would not it be more effective to provide affordable housing in order to help employers keep workers and to increase livability in cities?

Well I disagree that these are the only ones who should be assisted but at least you are showing you have some compassion for at least one fragment of those who find themselves living in poverty. You clearly did not read the link I posted up thread that it is far more cost effective to provide affordable housing that to have the homeless interact with health professionals, hospitals and police.

Again you know nothing about me so your general observation, as well as being wrong, is nothing more than your jaundiced view of the world and your willingness to blame people with absolutely no knowledge of their their circumstances other than your own bias and opinion.

Are you saying that a caring loving couple cannot have a criminal or serial killer for a son or that kids who grow up in horrendous homes and situations of abuse or whatever cannot turn into respectable citizens?

If this is what you are implying, clearly you did not pass Psych 101.

 

Could you please supply a link or some kind of verification that 99.9% of homeless are not trying to better themselves?

And government absolutely does have the resources. It expanded military spending by well over 300 billion and gave a tax cut to the wealthy and corporations.

The government could easily subsidize affordable housing as it does for businesses and corporations.

It is a matter of allication and political will.

It has been proven to be cheaper to society to fix the problem than to continue to let it get worse as links up thread have shown.

 

Nope, you are right, they can't afford them but that does not mean that they can't acquire them.

In my lifetime I have seen us move from an economy which allowed a person in even a fairly modest job to save for and purchase a car, modest jewelry even homes with real cash. I can remember in the 1970s it was a sign of status to be approved for a credit card. That meant you had real net worth. It was possible to buy goods on extended credit terms, usually approved by the stores themselves but even then you had to prove that you had the wherewithal to meet the payments. The very poorest usually had to go to huckster lenders or the pawn shop to get through. Of course that's always a downward spiral with interest piling up from one week to the next.

Over time the pendulum has swung. Retailers now presume that the cash price of many of the goods they sell is going to be out of reach of their consumers and so they are sold with the expectancy of credit purchase as the default. In some sectors, the credit is the profit. They almost lose money by selling to a cash buyer.

No, in this context, they often don't. They are debt financing their acquisitions and in many cases have no experience of doing so in any other way. Real Disposable income means cash that is available to them after their basic needs of housing, heating (or cooling) and necessary transport to and from work have been met. If they were wholly funding these purchases with that kind of money, I'd agree that you had a point.

Yes it's a simple choice like that (not)! A teacher or deputy sheriff earning $80k before taxes per year in a place where the average one bed apartment costs $2400.00 pa is not choosing crack over housing as simplistic as it is to typify it as such. With student loans, medical debt., family break-ups this can soon turn quite decent hard working people over the edge and into the abyss. Add to that jobs which expect their workers to also rely on public benefits to get through and you began to build a wider picture of what's going on here.

Here in Los Angeles a huge influx of highly-paid tech workers in the past 10 or so years has pushed the price of a one bed apartment in an average part of the Westside from around $1200.00 per month to $2000.00 or more. It's getting like Tokyo.

We're not talking about high school drop outs. We're talking about hard working people who suddenly find themselves priced out of neighborhoods they've sometimes occupied all their lives. There's six figure tech workers in the bay area that can't find housing that's affordable for them!

This is not strictly true. For most, it is credit driven. Since the wider application of loans over longer periods to purchase homes has been in effect the cash ticket price has grown out of all proportion to the income of those buying them. In real terms they are not owners but very long term renters who, if they take one wrong step, can find themselves without a roof over their heads. Since the monthly cost of renting a like-for-like property is often higher than financing one on credit there are sometimes little options even for people with fairly decent salaries.

See above, the yardstick for most is the ability to afford the payments not the property. Lose your job and you lose that which makes it a very temporary arrangement if you are close to edge of what you can afford.

And that often nets very positive results.

More recently serving those with two or more jobs. Why?

I do know that many people will turn to drugs and alcohol to help them cope with very bad periods in their lives. And I've also known several who would choose that belligerently because they just don't give a damn. But the question I ask myself is why is the number of homeless growing so rapidly in proportion to the population? Are there just more bad people being born? Or is it also to do with an organized shift of the country's wealth towards the rich and away from the poor and middle class coupled with a decline in well paying industrial and manufacturing jobs, declining purchasing power of real wages and an explosion of both unsecured credit and credit secured on real property that people can barely afford in the first place.

 

Red states that run by republicans also have homeless people. Quit talking out of your @$$.

 

Blue states seem to have more though.

 

So what. Then it should be easy to get a handled in the red states but it's not. The narrative that only blue states have homelessness or that blue states' policies are directly resulting in homelessness is utter BS.

 

Total nonsense, the median home price in the US is under 200K. The payment on a home like that is about the same as the cost of a 2 bedroom apartment in most communities.

 

That's not true for many parts of the U.S. where people actually want to live, and where there are good job opportunities.
Yes, maybe most of the country is 200K, but most of the people do not live in most of the area, and there already are a lot of rural areas that are pretty impoverished (if they weren't people would have already moved there).

Probably for the surrounding areas where most of the people actually live, it's more like 300 or 400K.

 

I think that 550,000 out of 330,000,000 is like 0.001515%. Not a large problem.

 

I can't respond to your post properly unless you use the quote function but for the record, I never claimed this was the 1970s. I was merely pointing out that more people find themselves just using credit to get by these days versus actually having the cash to pay for goods and services which they seemed to have had more of in the past. Many economists have stated that this is the first generation of recent Americans who are expected to be poorer than their parents' generation. I don't know for a fact but I'm pretty sure that's happening right across the Western world.

I also never claimed that the homeless have credit cards, I responded to your example of "poor people". please don't fall into the trap of setting up a strawman on my behalf and then arguing against that instead of what I actually said or was responding to.

I also don't believe that property prices are purely down to population increases. Many other factors come into play. During the last downturn, prices dropped in some cases to almost a 3rd of their previous value with the same amount of people living here after the crash as there were before.

Having spent some time in finance I've seen at least three cycles since the 80s where prices dropped, banks tightened their lending criteria and that kept prices low for a while. Then the dust blows off, the market settles and banks realize that to make more money they have to expand the debt pool (cause they're not making anything on deposits) and the whole thing starts over.

A more relevant factor in CA since the crash was a large influx in both foreign and domestic purchasing of apartment blocks, complexes and even private condos for rental. Even after the crash a one-bed unit purchased for $100k cash could generate $1100 pm in the nicer parts of LA and Orange County (they're now flooring at $1800.00 pm), that's a pretty neat return when you practically had to pay to have deposits protected.

 

Well what do you expect when you throw wide open your borders to the effing world's populations ffs? I mean DUH!

 

Are they Swedish yashmaks then? I think we should be told.

 

corporitism is gonna ruin this country, they are outsourcing the jobs and and selling Americans disposable goods that do not last... I think we are the last generation to remember the good ol days

 

the issue is the corps throwing the jobs overseas

India will control all the information in a few years, talk about a national security risk... thanks Trump

 

What do you do with the homeless in Los Angeles county beach areas that refuse housing in the east side of the county because they enjoy the beach scene? These people choose homelessness on the beach over tax payer funded shelters inland. They also don’t care for all of the rules and curfews the shelters impose. These people don’t have a chance in hell of ever affording the astronomical rent that costal towns demand, hell Santa Barbara has gotten so full of Hollywood types and other elite that the police, firefighters, and teachers in that city can’t afford to live there. Yet these homeless demand it.

 

What? Are you on the wrong thread or something?

 

Red states also have blue cities with high crime and poop on the sidewalks, hypodermic needles in the parks and low cost housing box units.



To be honest, the photo above was taken in a once Republican stronghold in Los Angeles County that flipped a couple weeks ago and went blue.

Orange County, California also went entirely blue on June 7th.
Behind the Orange Curtain



Are we seeing a pattern here ?

 

So these homeless people are living in republican strongholds yet you blame the Democrats? LMAO

 

'They are no longer Republican strongholds.

What has happened in California could and most likely will happen all over America if we don't Make America Great Again.

America has one last chance...

Who's going to win ?

America or the"resistance" with obstructionism, sedition and fraud ?

 

"Services" includes maintenance, and that means maintenance of machinery, cars, buses, trucks and computers, add it to transport, trade and some other things and it has always been the lion's share of work in civilization. Additionally we do live in the Post-Industrial age. Basal Manufacturing is the shyte work of this era, we hand making things off to the less developed economies while we write and debug the software controlling their automated factories