Homelessness Remains Major U.S. Problem

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
At Public School 188 on New York’s Lower East Side of Manhattan, 47 per cent of the students were homeless last year. The percentage was higher at two other schools in New York City.

The number of homeless people in the city, now estimated at more than 61,000, has never been larger. One in every 147 New Yorkers is currently homeless.

More than one-fifth of America’s homeless are in California, with Los Angeles alone accounting for 82,000 on any given night.

About one in ten of California State University’s 460,000 students is homeless, and one in five doesn’t have steady access to enough food, the initial findings of a study commissioned by California State University Chancellor Timothy White last year has discovered.

More than 56,000 college students identified themselves as homeless in the country, according to 2013-14 Federal Student Aid Form data.

The homeless in America are getting older. Across the country, there were 306,000 people over 50 living on the streets in 2014, a 20 per cent jump since 2007, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They now make up 31 per cent of the nation’s homeless population.

The surge in older homeless people is driven largely by younger baby boomers born between 1955 and 1965, according to an analysis by Dennis P. Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor.

There has also been a sharp increase among homeless people ages 18 to 30, many who entered the job market during the Great Recession. They make up 24 per cent of the homeless population. They have come of age during the economic downturn, and confront a tight housing and job market.

There has been a lack of home building since the financial crisis, and many can simply not afford to pay soaring rents in big cities like Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, even if working at minimum-wage jobs.

San Francisco is considering a plan to get some of its 6,600 homeless into supportive housing -- prefabricated units that can be constructed in months and cost just $200,000 apiece.

The cost would be about $200 million to build these, and about $50 million annually to operate those and other added units. That’s a lot of money -- but today the city spends about $241 million annually on its homeless citizens, not including police and emergency medical services.

Somewhat luckier are those people who can at least live with their parents. In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were, at 32.1 per cent, slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data.

This is a huge increase from the affluent boom period after the Second World War. In 1960, just 20 per cent of 18-to 34-year-olds lived with their parents.

In their book $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, professors Kathryn Edin of Johns Hopkins University and Luke Shaefer of the University of Michigan assert that what they call “extreme” poverty roughly doubled between 1996 and 2012.

They noted that the overall unemployment rate was almost twice as high in 2009 as in 1996. But the very poor have also been affected by city, state and federal budget cuts that have led to a reduction in the funding for programs for reducing homelessness.