Where Have All The Homeless Gone?

Where have all the homeless gone? Remember during the Bush years the continual cacophony of homeless noise on CNN and the rest of the “mainstream” media? The unemployment was at 4.5%, but the media talked about “jobless prosperity” and how many homeless there were in the country. Story after story of people looking for shelter told us the Bush and the Republicans were deaf to the cries of the poor and needy.

Of course, those stories only surfaced during the administrations of Bush the elder and the Bush the younger. There were no homeless under Bill Clinton, and there are definitely no homeless under Barack Obama. It’s a miracle.

The truth is far more disturbing. Poverty in the United States is on the rise. The poverty rate is currently 15%, up from 13.5% last year. That means 1 in 7 Americans are living in poverty, and experts claim that, truth be told, it is actually approaching 1 in 6.

Approximately 3.5 million Americans will be homeless at least sometime during this year, if not more. Approximately 1.6 million of these folks will be housed in a public shelter. On any given day, there are approximately 650,000 American living in a temporary shelter. The rest will end up in a car or on the street, or take refuge in the home of a relative. The chronically homeless number about 110,000 and is on the rise.

A little under ½ of the homeless suffer from a disability, from mental disease to HIV. Each night there are approximately 107,000 veterans using a public shelter. Of families located in shelters, 240,000 are single mothers. Other categories include those suffering from domestic violence, and young adults barely 18 years of age bounced out of the foster care system (Statistics taken from Poverty.org / Who Is Homeless in America by Josie Raymond /July 6, 2010).

Yet to watch the evening news, you would think that they have simply been absorbed in the aura of Obama’s wonderfulness. They don’t exist unless they are reported by the media, and the media has chosen not to report them.

In my research for this article, what surprised me was the coldness of the statistics that were being reported by various government agencies. Rather than examining the causes of homelessness, the numbers were couched in terms of 6000 people being served. The measure of success at the various agencies was not geared in developing policies to end homelessness, but rather to signing people up for government programs.

Here is the bad news. The government can try, but it will NEVER “program” folks out of poverty. There isn’t enough money in the world to do that. Best case scenario, any government program will be temporary (as it should be). Worst case scenario, those signing up for the program instead sign up for a life style of continual poverty and hopelessness. When success is measured in “numbers served” rather than numbers moved off the roles to successful lives, those in the system become just that…a number served. No help. No improvement. No success. Just a number to justify more money to the agency!

Obama has made homelessness a priority, whatever that means. But the increasing poverty numbers and homeless don’t do anything to help his presidency. He prefers to keep them hid. What he has proposed is an expansion of the Bush homeless policy. Bush concentrated on housing for the chronically homeless and veterans. Obama is keeping the Bush strategy intact and expanding on it with the goal to “end homelessness by 2020.”

Good luck with that, because the Washington Post reported that while the Obama proposals are strong on platitudes, they are short on funding. There is a reason for that…like I said…there is not enough money in the world to take care of the problem.

In the meantime, if you see a homeless story on TV news show, let me know. I bet the next time you see a homeless story on any network other than Fox, there will be a Republican president. They will just kind of pop up from nowhere.