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Why Homelessness is Increasing: Homelessness crisis engulfs the United States
After reflecting on the death of my god sister during the pandemic, I noticed a lot of observations and writings about homelessness. I heard recent news about lawmakers and state and local leaders taking actions that will harm more homeless people. Yet we see that experts are saying that homelessness is increasing. Where does the accountability begin and end? Homeless populations are not monolithic and many are taxpayers and workers, disabled, families and increasingly elderly populations.
Why Homelessness is Increasing
Homelessness crisis engulfs the United States
Diana C
Published in Fourth Wave Magazine – Medium.com
In 2020, my god sister who was a long-time New York City resident reached out to us to ask for help. Joyce lost her temporary housing after being harassed by, then assaulted by, a roommate which led to her being evicted. She was able to obtain funds from friends to find emergency temporary hotel accommodations until she was offered a longer term housing situation in Raleigh, North Carolina.
After flying to North Carolina with the help of a friend who was a pastor, she sought employment. She moved again to Albuquerque, New Mexico because she was offered a job there. While that didn’t work out, she found a room in a house to rent. Within weeks of moving there, she had an emergency health crisis due to unnoticed diabetes. A few days after she was released with from emergency hospitalization, she had a sudden stroke and passed away. In retrospect, my siblings, her friends, and I suspect that her eviction led to her increased vulnerability, lack of healthcare, and death.
Joyce was unfortunate to have become homeless during the Pandemic. The only help she needed in order to stabilize her life was affordable housing and healthcare. She was disowned by her brothers who were her only surviving family members because she was gay. She died at the age of 64 years old and was buried in an anonymous mass grave in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
New York City, like all other cities in the United States, faced challenges during the Covid Pandemic but particularly after it. City and state governments didn’t anticipate that Americans would would not be able to pay their housing and utility bills. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people fell through the cracks. Not enough was done to address the root causes of homelessness: racial, social, or economic disparities; addiction, drug abuse, and lack of access to healthcare; mental health problems and access to mental healthcare.
New York City
In a documentary by the DW German Broadcast Service (below) on homelessness in New York state, 10 cities were surveyed: Troy, Schenectity, Utica, Yonkers, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. Homelessness rates have been on the rise in New York, ranging from ten to thirty percent increases. All cities reviewed dealt with the problem of shelters being overwhelmed and had very limited success in solving the problem because the numbers of homeless people continues to go up.
The right to shelter
The trend of financialization of housing has had glaring impacts on homelessness in the United States, and in particular major American cities. Financialization “occurs when housing is treated as a commodity — a vehicle for wealth and investment rather than a social good,” according to the United Nations.
Every American city that deals with increasing homelessness experiences lack of temporary shelters for homeless populations that need special care to deal with everything from mental health emergencies to addiction, drug abuse, trauma, lack of employment, and lack of ability to afford rent due to rising rent prices.
Cities are seeing increasing numbers of families, children, youth and the elderly living on the streets. Many homeless people are employed and some are even caretaking for vulnerable members of their family or community.
The United Nations took a look at the crisis and made a report. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNOCHR) Special Rapporteur confirms that housing is a human right. The report notes that:
Housing is the basis of stability and security for an individual or family. The center of our social, emotional and sometimes economic lives, a home should be a sanctuary — a place to live in peace, security and dignity. Housing is a right, not a commodity. —
The Special Rapporteur says that being “adequately housed means having secure tenure — not having to worry about being evicted or having your home or land taken away.”
But unfortunately, “Housing and real estate markets worldwide have been transformed by global capital markets and financial excess. Known as the financialization of housing, the phenomenon occurs when housing is treated as a commodity — a vehicle for wealth and investment rather than a social good.”
Seattle
In May 2024, Seattle and King County reported that they have experienced the largest number of homelessness ever with over 16,000 people counted, according to the documentary below. Seattle’s framework for addressing homelessness is due to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s vision of providing services to at risk communities and planning for long-term housing development based on collaboration, robust data and equity. Despite programmatic successes, homelessness in Seattle still persists.
California
California has the world’s fifth largest economy boasting an agricultural industry worth about $5.3 billion dollars, a tech industry worth $2.2 trillion dollars, and a military industrial complex worth $190 billion dollars. The entertainment industry was worth $226 billion in 2022. California is considered the agricultural bread basket of the world, according to the governor’s office.
Since California’s economy is strong compared to most other states, what could be the cause of having over 400,000 homeless people on the streets of California’s cities today?
There has been an explosion in homelessness in California cities in the last four years. Here is the most recent data from the documentary series Unbelievable Homeless Crisis in America 2024 at Best Blocks on Youtube.
• In San Diego, the current homelessness rate is over 42,000 where Blacks, Latinos and Pacific Islanders are disproportionately represented.
• In Sacramento, over 57,000 are homeless with a disproportionate number of them Black, and Native American.
• In Oakland, over 65,000 people are homeless, with blacks representing over 70% of the homeless population even though they are less than 10% of the general population.
• Then in San Jose, there are over 76,000 homeless people, with blacks overrepresented.
• Los Angeles has a homeless population of over 96,000 with blacks again overrepresented.
• Finally, San Francisco has a homeless population of over 38,000 which is more visible because it’s a small and very popular tourist city.
San Francisco
A study was conducted by the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI). Researchers found that homeless people experienced multiple forms of trauma throughout their lives, contributing to vulnerability to homelessness and exacerbating mental health and substance abuse challenges.
One third experienced physical or sexual violence during periods of homelessness. The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness conducted in depth interviews in places where 30% of the nation’s homeless population lived. The cost of housing was found to be “unsustainable, according to the story below by KTVU.
KTVU Fox 2 San Francisco 2024
Supreme Court ruling
As a result of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on a South Oregon case, criminalizing people for sleeping on the streets, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit now grants the City of San Francisco more authority to clear homelessness encampments.
In a 6–3 decision written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court ruled that cities enforcing anti-camping bans, even if homeless people have no other place to go, do not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Gorsuch was joined by the rest of the court’s conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts, as reported in Vox.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed has announced that a “very aggressive” sweep of homeless camps will launch in August, even though the homeless people have nowhere else to go.
Death from Homelessness is Preventable
When Leilani Farha, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing visited California cities in 2018, she said that the sight of the mass homeless encampments she witnessed brought her to tears.
Push the Film documents her work and was created to enable public dialogue about homelessness and housing. Farha has since started a non-governmental organization called “the Shift” and created a Podcast to continue to talk about housing problems and homelessness around the world. She says these issues must be discussed in the halls of power.
In one interview of UCLA Urban Planning professor Ananya Roy on Pushback Talks she said that Los Angeles populations have been rent burdened for a long time. She said rates of homelessness have increased since the Pandemic and the deaths among the homelessness are preventable. Roy said in 2020 that mass evictions were on the brink of increasing after the Pandemic housing protection programs would end.
Oakland
In another podcast interview on Pushback Talks, film maker Frederick Gertin introduces guests to talk about the situation in California. One segment entitled “Extreme Vengeance Against the Poor,” features Farha who says she was particularly troubled by what she witnessed in Oakland.
Farha visited several cities in California because she was writing a report on informal settlements in the global north instead of focusing only on the global south.
Farha came away from visiting homeless encampments in Oakland feeling traumatized by seeing what she described as “the cruelty being unleashed on the most disadvantaged, already vulnerable populations.”
“The cruelty was shocking…” she says in the podcast. “The relationship between politics, those in power versus the most vulnerable, is replicating itself again and again.”
Poor People’s Army at the Republican National Convention
On July 15, 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewed representatives of the Poor People’s Army, a coalition that was part of a protest effort outside the convention which advocates for homeless people on a variety of human needs from housing to jobs to healthcare.
Tara Colon, a long-time homelessness activist, said that poverty doesn’t discriminate in the United States. She said that there are homelessness encampments in every town, even the very small towns, all over the United States. Part of the Poor People’s Army mission is to advocate for people who become homeless because of eviction and lack of affordability.
According to experts and social justice activists, rent control is essential to preventing homelessness.
Goodman also interviewed Cheri Honkala, the Poor People’s Army national spokesperson, about her reaction to the recent Supreme Court decision on Grants Pass vs. Johnson. Activists for the homeless and progressive advocates for housing, health, and poor people’s rights say that the Supreme Court now allows cities to punish the homeless by banning sleeping outdoors even if the homeless have nowhere else to go.
Honkala and other homelessness advocates say the Supreme Court ruling will have devastating impacts for poor people.
Deep pocketed California lobby group opposes Prop 33
The Justice for Renters Act, now called Proposition 33, was created by housing rights and homelessness advocates because of the surge in homelessness after the Covid Pandemic.
Housing rights campaigners say that corporate landlords are funding aggressive anti-rent control efforts in California. Five corporate landlords in the RealPage price-fixing scandal are spending millions to stop Prop 33, the ballot measure that expands rent control in California. The companies cited include Equity Residential, Essex Property Trust, Greystar, UDR, Camden Property Trust and others. These companies want to kill Prop 33 because it would end their ability to charge wildly inflated rents year after year, according to Yes on 33.org.
ProPublica reported that a group of corporate landlords used RealPage software to illegally collude to charge exorbitant rents in California and other states. This triggered dozens of federal lawsuits by tenants with numerous investigations by state attorney generals and the department of justice.
AIDS Healthcare Foundation is trying to help
The California Apartment Association or CAA which represents home owners, investors, developers, managers and suppliers of rental homes and apartment communities is increasingly known for it’s public relations efforts against strong rent control regardless of the harm it creates for middle income people who are pushed out of rent controlled units and find market-priced units unaffordable.
The Aids Healthcare Foundation or AHF, which impacted the gay community in the 1980s, was motivated to confront the humanitarian crisis of homelessness. AHS has many clients who are too poor to afford high market-based rents and basic healthcare.
Financialization of housing has had glaring impacts on homelessness in the U.S. . . . Financialization ”occurs when housing is treated as a commodity — a vehicle for wealth and investment rather than a social good”
AHF, a broad coalition of local and state pro-housing groups, unions, veterans groups and progressive lawmakers support the Justice for Renters Act, which repeals the Costa Hawkins Rental Housing Act of 1995.
Supporters of the Justice for Renters Act say that CAA public relations is false. It is not true that the Justice for Renters act would slow down construction of affordable housing or adversely impact homeowners and small landlords.
In conclusion
Homelessness is the result of poverty and poverty has become pervasive in every major city in the United States. Poverty is the result of economic disparities based on unregulated and in many cases criminal capitalists putting profit before everything else. An already widening class division between the wealthy versus the shrinking middle class and the very poor has become exacerbated, with the deepest impact on marginalized groups including people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. Current safety nets or government policies have not been sufficient and eliminating government altogether is not the answer.
Housing rights and homelessness advocates are showing up at the Republic National Conventions and the Democratic National Conventions to assert their basic human rights to adequate housing and holistic wrap around services.
After the Covid Pandemic, housing assistance protections that were put in place to protect vulnerable populations, dried up. Long-term solutions to lack of affordable housing and homelessness have not been prioritized. Homelessness has only gotten worse since the 2008 economic crisis and especially after the economic shut down due to the Covid Pandemic.
All cities have found it difficult to keep up with the increasing numbers of homeless people needing government assistance. The homelessness and housing crisis is not only the result of cities not being able to respond to housing and health needs of vulnerable populations but other factors have come into play.
Deep pocketed lobby groups represented by mostly large and corporate landlords, the real estate development interests and the California Apartment Association (CAA), have invested millions in trying to stop the Justice for Renters Act. Sometimes under the guise of small landlords, the CAA invests millions in lobbying both Republicans and Democrats in the State Assembly and they regularly monitor rent control hearings at city council meetings around the state.
Additionally, according to Keith McHenry of the Food Not Bombs Movement, a defense contractor venture capitalist named Joe Lonsdale, owner of the company Palantir, has begun providing artificial intelligence services to states to generate anti-homeless policies. McHenry said that there has been an extreme GOP Republican effort in nine states to make it illegal for homeless people to sleep outside. Lonsdale’s organization is called Cicero Action.
New York, Washington and California, like others cities in the United States, will continue to face the challenge of addressing the root causes of homelessness because of the persistence of racial, social, and economic disparities and the financialization of the housing market pushing rents and home values sky high. The problems of addiction, drug abuse, and lack of access to health care, as well as mental health problems and lack of access to mental health care are only symptoms of being desperately poor. Eviction is now seen as a major cause of homelessness. Economic systemic changes are called for that are broad, dynamic, progressive and proven.
@ Diana C, July 21, 2024. All Rights Reserved.
Homelessness crisis engulfs the United States
Diana C
Published in Fourth Wave Magazine – Medium.com
In 2020, my god sister who was a long-time New York City resident reached out to us to ask for help. Joyce lost her temporary housing after being harassed by, then assaulted by, a roommate which led to her being evicted. She was able to obtain funds from friends to find emergency temporary hotel accommodations until she was offered a longer term housing situation in Raleigh, North Carolina.
After flying to North Carolina with the help of a friend who was a pastor, she sought employment. She moved again to Albuquerque, New Mexico because she was offered a job there. While that didn’t work out, she found a room in a house to rent. Within weeks of moving there, she had an emergency health crisis due to unnoticed diabetes. A few days after she was released with from emergency hospitalization, she had a sudden stroke and passed away. In retrospect, my siblings, her friends, and I suspect that her eviction led to her increased vulnerability, lack of healthcare, and death.
Joyce was unfortunate to have become homeless during the Pandemic. The only help she needed in order to stabilize her life was affordable housing and healthcare. She was disowned by her brothers who were her only surviving family members because she was gay. She died at the age of 64 years old and was buried in an anonymous mass grave in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
New York City, like all other cities in the United States, faced challenges during the Covid Pandemic but particularly after it. City and state governments didn’t anticipate that Americans would would not be able to pay their housing and utility bills. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people fell through the cracks. Not enough was done to address the root causes of homelessness: racial, social, or economic disparities; addiction, drug abuse, and lack of access to healthcare; mental health problems and access to mental healthcare.
New York City
In a documentary by the DW German Broadcast Service (below) on homelessness in New York state, 10 cities were surveyed: Troy, Schenectity, Utica, Yonkers, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. Homelessness rates have been on the rise in New York, ranging from ten to thirty percent increases. All cities reviewed dealt with the problem of shelters being overwhelmed and had very limited success in solving the problem because the numbers of homeless people continues to go up.
The right to shelter
The trend of financialization of housing has had glaring impacts on homelessness in the United States, and in particular major American cities. Financialization “occurs when housing is treated as a commodity — a vehicle for wealth and investment rather than a social good,” according to the United Nations.
Every American city that deals with increasing homelessness experiences lack of temporary shelters for homeless populations that need special care to deal with everything from mental health emergencies to addiction, drug abuse, trauma, lack of employment, and lack of ability to afford rent due to rising rent prices.
Cities are seeing increasing numbers of families, children, youth and the elderly living on the streets. Many homeless people are employed and some are even caretaking for vulnerable members of their family or community.
The United Nations took a look at the crisis and made a report. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNOCHR) Special Rapporteur confirms that housing is a human right. The report notes that:
Housing is the basis of stability and security for an individual or family. The center of our social, emotional and sometimes economic lives, a home should be a sanctuary — a place to live in peace, security and dignity. Housing is a right, not a commodity. —
The Special Rapporteur says that being “adequately housed means having secure tenure — not having to worry about being evicted or having your home or land taken away.”
But unfortunately, “Housing and real estate markets worldwide have been transformed by global capital markets and financial excess. Known as the financialization of housing, the phenomenon occurs when housing is treated as a commodity — a vehicle for wealth and investment rather than a social good.”
Seattle
In May 2024, Seattle and King County reported that they have experienced the largest number of homelessness ever with over 16,000 people counted, according to the documentary below. Seattle’s framework for addressing homelessness is due to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s vision of providing services to at risk communities and planning for long-term housing development based on collaboration, robust data and equity. Despite programmatic successes, homelessness in Seattle still persists.
California
California has the world’s fifth largest economy boasting an agricultural industry worth about $5.3 billion dollars, a tech industry worth $2.2 trillion dollars, and a military industrial complex worth $190 billion dollars. The entertainment industry was worth $226 billion in 2022. California is considered the agricultural bread basket of the world, according to the governor’s office.
Since California’s economy is strong compared to most other states, what could be the cause of having over 400,000 homeless people on the streets of California’s cities today?
There has been an explosion in homelessness in California cities in the last four years. Here is the most recent data from the documentary series Unbelievable Homeless Crisis in America 2024 at Best Blocks on Youtube.
• In San Diego, the current homelessness rate is over 42,000 where Blacks, Latinos and Pacific Islanders are disproportionately represented.
• In Sacramento, over 57,000 are homeless with a disproportionate number of them Black, and Native American.
• In Oakland, over 65,000 people are homeless, with blacks representing over 70% of the homeless population even though they are less than 10% of the general population.
• Then in San Jose, there are over 76,000 homeless people, with blacks overrepresented.
• Los Angeles has a homeless population of over 96,000 with blacks again overrepresented.
• Finally, San Francisco has a homeless population of over 38,000 which is more visible because it’s a small and very popular tourist city.
San Francisco
A study was conducted by the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI). Researchers found that homeless people experienced multiple forms of trauma throughout their lives, contributing to vulnerability to homelessness and exacerbating mental health and substance abuse challenges.
One third experienced physical or sexual violence during periods of homelessness. The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness conducted in depth interviews in places where 30% of the nation’s homeless population lived. The cost of housing was found to be “unsustainable, according to the story below by KTVU.
KTVU Fox 2 San Francisco 2024
Supreme Court ruling
As a result of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on a South Oregon case, criminalizing people for sleeping on the streets, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit now grants the City of San Francisco more authority to clear homelessness encampments.
In a 6–3 decision written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court ruled that cities enforcing anti-camping bans, even if homeless people have no other place to go, do not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Gorsuch was joined by the rest of the court’s conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts, as reported in Vox.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed has announced that a “very aggressive” sweep of homeless camps will launch in August, even though the homeless people have nowhere else to go.
Death from Homelessness is Preventable
When Leilani Farha, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing visited California cities in 2018, she said that the sight of the mass homeless encampments she witnessed brought her to tears.
Push the Film documents her work and was created to enable public dialogue about homelessness and housing. Farha has since started a non-governmental organization called “the Shift” and created a Podcast to continue to talk about housing problems and homelessness around the world. She says these issues must be discussed in the halls of power.
In one interview of UCLA Urban Planning professor Ananya Roy on Pushback Talks she said that Los Angeles populations have been rent burdened for a long time. She said rates of homelessness have increased since the Pandemic and the deaths among the homelessness are preventable. Roy said in 2020 that mass evictions were on the brink of increasing after the Pandemic housing protection programs would end.
Oakland
In another podcast interview on Pushback Talks, film maker Frederick Gertin introduces guests to talk about the situation in California. One segment entitled “Extreme Vengeance Against the Poor,” features Farha who says she was particularly troubled by what she witnessed in Oakland.
Farha visited several cities in California because she was writing a report on informal settlements in the global north instead of focusing only on the global south.
Farha came away from visiting homeless encampments in Oakland feeling traumatized by seeing what she described as “the cruelty being unleashed on the most disadvantaged, already vulnerable populations.”
“The cruelty was shocking…” she says in the podcast. “The relationship between politics, those in power versus the most vulnerable, is replicating itself again and again.”
Poor People’s Army at the Republican National Convention
On July 15, 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewed representatives of the Poor People’s Army, a coalition that was part of a protest effort outside the convention which advocates for homeless people on a variety of human needs from housing to jobs to healthcare.
Tara Colon, a long-time homelessness activist, said that poverty doesn’t discriminate in the United States. She said that there are homelessness encampments in every town, even the very small towns, all over the United States. Part of the Poor People’s Army mission is to advocate for people who become homeless because of eviction and lack of affordability.
According to experts and social justice activists, rent control is essential to preventing homelessness.
Goodman also interviewed Cheri Honkala, the Poor People’s Army national spokesperson, about her reaction to the recent Supreme Court decision on Grants Pass vs. Johnson. Activists for the homeless and progressive advocates for housing, health, and poor people’s rights say that the Supreme Court now allows cities to punish the homeless by banning sleeping outdoors even if the homeless have nowhere else to go.
Honkala and other homelessness advocates say the Supreme Court ruling will have devastating impacts for poor people.
Deep pocketed California lobby group opposes Prop 33
The Justice for Renters Act, now called Proposition 33, was created by housing rights and homelessness advocates because of the surge in homelessness after the Covid Pandemic.
Housing rights campaigners say that corporate landlords are funding aggressive anti-rent control efforts in California. Five corporate landlords in the RealPage price-fixing scandal are spending millions to stop Prop 33, the ballot measure that expands rent control in California. The companies cited include Equity Residential, Essex Property Trust, Greystar, UDR, Camden Property Trust and others. These companies want to kill Prop 33 because it would end their ability to charge wildly inflated rents year after year, according to Yes on 33.org.
ProPublica reported that a group of corporate landlords used RealPage software to illegally collude to charge exorbitant rents in California and other states. This triggered dozens of federal lawsuits by tenants with numerous investigations by state attorney generals and the department of justice.
AIDS Healthcare Foundation is trying to help
The California Apartment Association or CAA which represents home owners, investors, developers, managers and suppliers of rental homes and apartment communities is increasingly known for it’s public relations efforts against strong rent control regardless of the harm it creates for middle income people who are pushed out of rent controlled units and find market-priced units unaffordable.
The Aids Healthcare Foundation or AHF, which impacted the gay community in the 1980s, was motivated to confront the humanitarian crisis of homelessness. AHS has many clients who are too poor to afford high market-based rents and basic healthcare.
Financialization of housing has had glaring impacts on homelessness in the U.S. . . . Financialization ”occurs when housing is treated as a commodity — a vehicle for wealth and investment rather than a social good”
AHF, a broad coalition of local and state pro-housing groups, unions, veterans groups and progressive lawmakers support the Justice for Renters Act, which repeals the Costa Hawkins Rental Housing Act of 1995.
Supporters of the Justice for Renters Act say that CAA public relations is false. It is not true that the Justice for Renters act would slow down construction of affordable housing or adversely impact homeowners and small landlords.
In conclusion
Homelessness is the result of poverty and poverty has become pervasive in every major city in the United States. Poverty is the result of economic disparities based on unregulated and in many cases criminal capitalists putting profit before everything else. An already widening class division between the wealthy versus the shrinking middle class and the very poor has become exacerbated, with the deepest impact on marginalized groups including people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. Current safety nets or government policies have not been sufficient and eliminating government altogether is not the answer.
Housing rights and homelessness advocates are showing up at the Republic National Conventions and the Democratic National Conventions to assert their basic human rights to adequate housing and holistic wrap around services.
After the Covid Pandemic, housing assistance protections that were put in place to protect vulnerable populations, dried up. Long-term solutions to lack of affordable housing and homelessness have not been prioritized. Homelessness has only gotten worse since the 2008 economic crisis and especially after the economic shut down due to the Covid Pandemic.
All cities have found it difficult to keep up with the increasing numbers of homeless people needing government assistance. The homelessness and housing crisis is not only the result of cities not being able to respond to housing and health needs of vulnerable populations but other factors have come into play.
Deep pocketed lobby groups represented by mostly large and corporate landlords, the real estate development interests and the California Apartment Association (CAA), have invested millions in trying to stop the Justice for Renters Act. Sometimes under the guise of small landlords, the CAA invests millions in lobbying both Republicans and Democrats in the State Assembly and they regularly monitor rent control hearings at city council meetings around the state.
Additionally, according to Keith McHenry of the Food Not Bombs Movement, a defense contractor venture capitalist named Joe Lonsdale, owner of the company Palantir, has begun providing artificial intelligence services to states to generate anti-homeless policies. McHenry said that there has been an extreme GOP Republican effort in nine states to make it illegal for homeless people to sleep outside. Lonsdale’s organization is called Cicero Action.
New York, Washington and California, like others cities in the United States, will continue to face the challenge of addressing the root causes of homelessness because of the persistence of racial, social, and economic disparities and the financialization of the housing market pushing rents and home values sky high. The problems of addiction, drug abuse, and lack of access to health care, as well as mental health problems and lack of access to mental health care are only symptoms of being desperately poor. Eviction is now seen as a major cause of homelessness. Economic systemic changes are called for that are broad, dynamic, progressive and proven.
@ Diana C, July 21, 2024. All Rights Reserved.
For more information:
https://medium.com/fourth-wave/why-homeles...
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