Surge in Homeless Families Sets Off Debate on Cause

[PfcHammer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/national/29homeless.html

Surge in Homeless Families Sets Off Debate on Cause
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: June 29, 2004

ST. CLOUD, Minn. - In small cities like this one and big ones like Kansas City, Mo., and New York, families are knocking on the doors of homeless shelters in growing numbers. Inside a faded yellow-brick Victorian on a block near downtown here, dozens of families know of the increase firsthand.

Behind the front door, the 11 rooms of the Landon House Shelter are packed with homeless parents and their children, often exceeding the 48-bed capacity and requiring the staff to roll out cots. In the communal kitchen, someone is always cooking, and the refrigerator has eight different gallons of milk. Children wander in and out screaming for peanut butter and jelly bars and fruit punch boxes. Behind the house is a courtyard where mothers gather to smoke while the children run in circles.

"We are always full," said Darlene Johnson, executive director of the shelter. "Pretty much bursting out of the seams."

With its rents near record highs and wages stagnant, this wind-swept Plains city of 60,000 about 60 miles northwest of Minneapolis has seen the number of families requesting shelter climb by 45 percent in the last decade, to an average of 124 families a night. The number of homeless families in Minnesota tripled to 1,341 in 2003 a night from 434 in 1991, when the state first started conducting surveys every three years, and most of the last increase came in rural areas like this one.

[Sugarbleus]

1. This topic is one of my foremost passions...I am livid

about these circumstances for our people in a country like this!

I believe this mess started during the Reagan era and eked up ever since. There was the "dot com" bubble in the 90's that made a bit of a difference in terms of work, but the price of housing just keeps climbing and climbing! No plans to build affordable rentals anywhere that I know of and I'm hearing that Bush wants to significantly cut Section 8 vouchers from the program!.........MORE people scrambling for a place to lay their head. IT'S OUTRAGEOUS.

What kind of people are the children of these poor families going to grow up to be?

I swear to God, this is the worst thing since the Great Depression and it doesn't have to be this way. What vile thing has come in and gotten hold of our decency in America???

In the MM film, F911 I like what one young boy said about his neighborhood: he said the pictures of a bombed out Iraq didn't look all that different from HIS neighborhood. The delapidation and disrepair..........no one cares about their fellow human beings. And we're suppose to bring democracy to other parts of the world.. OH BROTHER! Why don't the Machiavellian greedwhores just admit they are really trying to bring CAPITALISM to other countries--damn democracy.

I'm sick to death of back and forth politics too. We get four years of a conservative party that guts everything. The we get four years of a liberal party trying to repair it...it's not enought time to fix the problem and KEEP IT FIXED. There's something terribly wrong with this system of government. :grr:

[AwakeAtLast]

3. Yes, and Freepers will find a way to blame Clinton. eom

[Terran]

2. The "cause" is obvious

Homelessness is cause mainly by poverty and a lack of access to affordable housing. With the economy in a shambles and more and more people losing jobs, what would you expect to happen? People can't pay their utility bill, the get evicted. People can't make their mortgage payment, they lose their home. Both parents lose their jobs...? And even if they get another job, it may well be at minimum wage. In most states you need two adults bringing in an average of around $15/hour just to provide the basics for a family of four, and that assumes employer-provided medical insurance.

This isn't rocket science. And this isn't happening just in cities. The rural areas of this country are in big trouble too. And all the little county and mom-n-pop aid agencies out there usually spend their funds out by October or November, and have nothing left to help people the rest of the year.

[Dover]

11. I would like to see a documentary about the plight of families who

have just lost their home to foreclosure, and their jobs, etc.

America needs to see the reality of this situation.

[PassingFair]

29. My thoughts exactly!

How about a reality TV weekly. Like Survivor, but for real, we could call it "Forclosure" or "Repossessed" or something. Some people would eke it out, others would go down. I've often wondered what becomes of those middlish-class folks who go off the page. I'm not being a ghoul or a financial voyeur here. We came critically close to going down ourselves a year ago, and I was REALLY worried.
It made me wonder what had happened in the Depression, did they repossess folk's homes at gunpoint, or did we become a nation of squatters in our own homes?
ATTENTION MICHAEL MOORE...

[dumpster_baby]

4. Just raise the taxes on the rich

and use it to help people with housing, food, education and medical care.

Pretty simple.

[Mountainman]

27. roll back the Bush tax cuts and stop fighting the bogus war on terror.

Which is a bigger threat to American families, terrorists or homelessness? We have a government that is giving the tax money to the wealthy who own the business that make money off of the war on terror. Eg. Hiliburton, Cheney starts a war and tears a country to shreds and then give a no bid contract, to the company he use to be in charge of and that still pays him, to rebuild it. Your tax dollars given to the already wealthy.

[lucky777]

5. How bad will it have to get before people realize we are in

another great depression, only this time we all have TVs and Walkmans?

F911 showed how the cities are bombed out; I'm from Chicago, where whole swatches of the city are verboten if you value your life; it is a shame that we have places like that, and it is all economic-based. I had some friends from Germany come over once and they made me give them a 'slum tour' -- they couldn't believe it.

The majority of Americans are a couple paychecks from being on the street. We need federally recognized rights to housing, health insurance, meaningful work, and state-funded day care.

We are already very low ranked among industrial nations on health care, education, etc -- and now housing is going down too. This country is fucked. I wonder how bad it will have to get before there is real change.

[tooncesj0nes]

6. I can address part of the problem...

....I have been a lanlord in Indiana/ Illinois for 17 years now. Unfortunately, there are many people who simply lack the discipline to abide by something as simple as a lease agreement. Even when rents are affordable as mine have been, people with weaknesses for partying, cars they cannot afford, rent to buy furniture and appliances just dont seem to care. they get behind with the rent and go down the road to another landlord and play them until they get behind again....Ive bent over backwards to keep my tennants in my houses...most of these people have addiction problems and have 2-3-4 kids...the problem of addictive types multipling becomes exponential after a while. some of these people would be strong candiates for sterilization...

[natrat]

7. ya know

i was just thinking that about freeper idiots. Not the forced sterilization-that is unspeakable unless your a freeper...

[cap]

20. you're right...

have they no prisons? have they no workhouses?

[tom_paine]

25. "Then perhaps he should hurry and die to reduce the surplus population."

What is truly ironic now is that we Imperila Subjects of Amerika are still feted with "A Christmas Carol" repeatedly every Xmas, while the reality of the situation is that an ever-growing minority of Imperial Subjects and of course, their Masters, are now virtually philosophically INDISTINGUISHABLE from Scrooge.

[Bridget Burke]

23. Let's hear it from the slumlord......

How nice that you keep your rents "affordable".

How much is that? Got any pictures of your fine properties?

[Zomby Woof]

8. Clinton's Penis

Personally hauled everyone of them out on the street! It's true because Hannity said so.

So did the bible.

[Ivan Zero]

9. It isn't just the economy

but also that millions of adults in this country have never learned the basic life skills required to weather hard times, let alone how to do what they can to try and avoid getting into deep shit to begin with.

Even when they get money ahead, so many people have no idea how to maximize it - save it, budget it, forego living beyond their means in exchange for some amount of future security.

You have to include media skills in this mix, how to resist the "more more more" siren song of consumer culture and take joy in what you can afford.

I grew up almost dirt poor, and the greatest gift my folks ever gave me was their hard-learned knowledge of how to navigate those rough seas without sinking.

I think of these millions of kids growing up without that kind of guidance, and my blood runs cold.

[union_maid]

13. No, that's a different situation

What you're describing is a situation that might well contribute to homelessness in good times. I think it's a lot more complicated than that, though. Managing your life, even in better times, takes a lot more smarts than it did 40 years ago. I recall some of the parents of friends I had in the early sixties and I don't think that some of them could cope today. The jobs that supported their families no longer pay living wages as labor has been devalued. Some of them weren't capable of doing more intellectually demanding jobs. They got a piece of the American dream by working on assembly lines and driving delivery trucks. The goal was often to get into a civil service job, but some never did well enough on the tests to do that, and yet they made a living and many had even managed to purchase a retirement home before selling their first one. Life has become way more expensive as compared to wages. Now, there wouldn't be a lot of hope for people with their limitations.

Now, if you live in an area where there's a housing bubble, like the one I live in, happening, you might well not be able to maintain any housing even at a modest, middle class income level. There used to be "low rent" areas here. They're all gone. Some of the areas are just as crappy as they ever were, but miserable basement apartments are commanding large rents. Homeless shelters are filling up with working families. If you have income, those shelters aren't free. In fact, they'll cost so much relative to your income that you're never, ever going to get a bit ahead. People who can get out of the area before trouble finds them are doing so, but there are myriad reasons for not being able to leave and if you can't get out of here, you can wind up homeless even if you have a job, and even if you have a half-way decent job.

[Ivan Zero]

24. It's a combination of factors

You're absolutely right, union_maid - even the savviest among us are being pressured by economic forces beyond our control, and in some regions, it doesn't matter how good you are with your finances. Sometimes you just can't make it without running up massive debt. Sometimes you just plain can't make it.

I know of what you speak. I'm in Carson City, Nevada and we're in a housing bubble. Our support services for low-income residents are strained to the breaking point. People are sinking, despite our status as one of the alleged "hot spots" in Bush's so-called recovery.

What I'm saying is, it's not just the economy, but also economic illiteracy that's contributing to the widespread malaise we're seeing. As Mari333 points out above, programs that seek to pass on these skills are being cut. We've got hordes of economically clueless kids entering a economically savage society.

You can add to the mix the political apathy among those being affected. There's almost no counter-pressure coming from below.

It's all adding up, and it's going to turn volatile.

[Mari333]

22. Listen, here in Michigan I tried to get a job

with a group called Family Links...its a place where the poorest of the poor and the disenfranchised are taught basic life skills..how to save money, how to cook , how to take care of a baby, etc...
I called them and was told 'WE HAD TO CUT ALL THE STAFF BECAUSE OF BUDGET CUTS'
That means the poorest of the poor and those single moms with kids who can barely survive, and single dads too, or couples who are in deep trouble, are the ones who suffer..
Im 52..I have life skills from being a stay at home mom, and I know how to take care of babies properly and cook.
Now my knowledge cant be passed on, because the staff and monies have been cut off for these people. The Bush regime has helped only the top 1%, the rest of America can die or shine their shoes at this point.

[NickB79]

10. Holy crap, that's my old town!

I just moved to the Twin Cities from there less than a month ago. I grew up 30 mi. north of there as a kid, and spent 5 yrs going to college there. It's not a bad town, especially around the campus area, but there is a respectly large Republican population that really shows when you read the newspaper editorials. I have brought the homeless issue up many times with friends I went to school with there: the homeless population has surged the past 3 yrs in St. Cloud. Every day at work (until I moved), I'd look out the front window of our building and see homeless men walking down the sidewalk. Many times men would be talking to themselves, yelling at someone who wasn't there, obviously in need of medical help but not recieving it. There was a stabbing just a block down the street from where I worked this spring, as two homeless men fought over a blanket. A few of the regular guys who'd sit in front of the store and talk with me on break would break your hearts with the stories they'd tell.

Listen to this for a taste of "Minnesota Nice" and good Christian values in this town. There was a large vacant building across the street from a Catholic high school that many residents had wanted to convert into a new homeless shelter. The parents of the students protested and stopped the whole process, saying they were afraid the homeless men and women across the street would be a safety danger for their children. I'm sure Jesus would have had some choice words for them.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

34. The worst thing in that article

was the claim by conservatives that shelters are "too attractive" and causing homelessness.

That reminds me of the days when Reagan was claiming that people who could afford food were eating at soup kitchens just to get all the great free food.

Yeah, right, if I could afford other food I'd eat the cheapest grade of hot dogs, watery baked beans, Wonder Bread with Velveeta, and canned peaches. :eyes:

[Ivan Zero]

35. This always burns me up

The rightist attitude that poverty is a simple matter of choice, that it's some kind of easy street with free food and unlimited leisure time.

The cons know exactly what they're doing - this kind of shit is expressly designed to cause resentment of the lowest classes by those a few rungs higher on the ladder.

All the while claiming they abhor "class warfare". Oh, they do, as long as that warfare is directed UPWARDS at them. Aim it downward, and they gleefully participate in it.

[Voltaire99]

12. The failures of market fundamentalism...

...will keep these shelters brimming for years to come.

Alas for those who suffer so that the greedy may have more!

[Mnemosyne]

14. Is ron Raygun pResident again????? I thought he died? n/t

[snippy]

18. Reagan died? Was it on the news? n/t

[cthrumatrix]

15. a story that "deserves" attention .... what is the plan to stop this trend

there is zero discussion on issues again.

[jpgray]

16. I lived ten years in St. Cloud

A pretty depressing suburban town, but damn I don't recall any degree of homelessness when I left.

[GreenArrow]

17. the cause is simple

"compassionate conservatism" on the right mixed with social liberalism/fiscal conservatism (oxymoron) on the left. It's the myth of rugged individualism taken to the level of pathology.

[moondust]

19. Trickle Up economics.

Robbing the poor to pay the rich. Worked for Reagan, works for Bunk*.

[catmandu57]

21. We've had this problem for over twenty some years now

I think it's time to do a radical mastectomy on it. The income disparity, lack of afforable housing, compassion fatigue, call it what you will, it's time to tear this shit down, declare the system broke and start all over again.
Let people make as much as they can, but, lets tax progressively and use it to better the lives of our citizens. Let's make the corporations pay the taxes they owe, close every fucking loophole and lop off the head of the first person to try to make one.
I don't want to live in Dicksonian England, I don't even want to live in America before our safety nets. This is just so wrong.

[depakid]

26. What's to debate?

"Real pay for the bottom 10 percent of wage earners rose less than 1 percent in adjusted dollars from 1979 to 2003... By contrast, housing costs have nearly tripled since 1979."

Seems pretty clear to me.

[struggle4progress]

28. Do we need more debating? Or do we need to organize? eom

[maxsolomon]

30. it is NOT a simple problem

family networks are broken - there is no familial home to crawl back to when you've fucked up & gotten evicted. perhaps you burned that bridge, perhaps they are on the edge, too.

social service networks are broken. just gutted.

cheap credit is epidemic - running up debt has no social stigma attached, but certainly has consequences.

poor family planning is rampant & the single earner family is dead - dad can't get a decent paying job that allows the mother to raise the toddlers.

all i can suggest is that if you are homeless, hop on a bus & come to seattle. everyone else seems to.

[cdsilv]

31. My story....

I'm homeless - have been for nearly a year now. I live at a 'fundie christian' homeless shelter in downtown Houston.

How did I get there? (I'm composing this in a hotel room in Central FL, attending hi-tech computer OS training, more on that later).

I was laid off from a software company in October of '02 - went through my saving and unemployment maintaining my 1k/mo apartment rent, 1k/mo child support and of course looking for a job for 9 mos.(and crawling into a bottle along the way...).

After nearly killing myself w/alcohol and dislocating my shoulder thru a seizure I realized I had to do something - upon my eviction I checked into a rehab program at the aforementioned shelter - yes, I've been saved - was probably the smartest thing I've ever done.

We're told that the Bush family supports the shelter, I know that alot of businesses do, as well as alot of the Houston riche.

There's a real societal cross-section of folks at the shelter - former executives, ex-cons, 'street people', former middle-class yuppies like me, --- most end up there as a result of addiction. Primarily crack and alcohol - some make it thru the program, alot don't - they either can't handle the rules and leave or disobey them flagrantly and get put out.

I finished the program and looked for work for 3 months before being contacted by someone I worked with in the eighties wanting to hire me to work for him. This kind of 'coincidence' will help you believe in God, as I had no idea where he was, nor he I - he just got in touch with the one person we both knew who could reach me.

Bush & Co's policies certainly haven't helped too much, but I do wonder if the shelter gets some funding from 'faith based initiatives'.

I've been working (in training, getting paid) since early May and am paying my 'token' rent and required savings (30% of gross) while living in the shelter's transitional living area - I'll be leaving to move to Pensacola (and begin my real work) once my training period is over (August).

I do thank God that my ex-wife had a good job and was able to make it while I was out of work and funds - I'm paying CS again and have plans to repay the back CS (as well as repaying all the creditors who haven't seen any $ since last July)....

I NEVER thought I would be homeless!

There's alot of people out there in the shelters and on the streets who haven't been blessed like I have. Keep them in your prayers (if you pray...)

~14,000 homeless in Houston with ~6,000 beds available for them each night.....

[freeforall]

32. Here's to you cdsilv!

You're absolutely right in that it can happen to any of us.

Good luck with your training and new job, and God bless.

[Mnemosyne]

36. Hi cdsilv, pray things go well for you!!! I was homeless also at one time

in my life finally got some education and decent job.

Unfortunately, work went elsewhere and I've been ill, so survive on SSD and care of friends and family, very blessed at the toughest time in my life.

Homelessness definitely teaches you to be very grateful for every little blessing in your life.

I'll have you in my heart. Best of luck!!!

[alarimer]

33. Predatory lending

One thing I read recently said that companies like H&R Block basically prey on the poor with their "rapid refund" program. Most people don't realize this is actually a loan, at exorbitant interest rates. Also those payday loan outfits will offer short-term loans at ridiculous rates (amounting to something like 200% interest over a year). Just disgusting what these companies do. A lot of debt is not frivolous- medical bills are a major cause of that, especially for those lacking health insurance.