Thomas Sowell on poverty…
Tag: poverty
LVMPD plans ‘tunnel sweeps’ of homeless people as part of Super Bowl security
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department tells FOX5 it will begin clearing homeless people from drainage tunnels next week for the Super Bowl.
But one homeless advocacy group says tunnels have already been thinned out.
“Since F1, the talk about the A’s coming here, the stadium, all the presence downtown, there’s definitely been more of a presence in trying to clear out the tunnels around the Strip, and to keep it cleared out, more so than in the past,” said Shine A Light Outreach Director Robert Banghart.
In fact, Banghart tells FOX5 there may already be 70% fewer people in tunnels near the Strip. He says around 30-40 people were living in a tunnel near the Rio but says right now, there may be only three or four people there.
“On the route I usually do, it seems in the underground tunnels around the Strip it’s down to bare minimum,” he said.
Shine A Light goes into drainage tunnels to provide emotional support, supplies and even an immediate way out of tunnel life if people choose. The group will get people into detox right away and work to place them into sober living and eventually into independent living.
“We’ll engage them in our IPATH program, which will be 18 months if they so choose. And every step of the way, we’re going to walk them through all the different levels of care,” said Banghart.
Record number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report finds
A growing number of Americans are ending up homeless as soaring rents in recent years squeeze their budgets.
According to a Jan. 25 report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, roughly 653,000 people reported experiencing homelessness in January of 2023, up roughly 12% from the same time a year prior and 48% from 2015. That marks the largest single-year increase in the country’s unhoused population on record, Harvard researchers said.
Homelessness, long a problem in states such as California and Washington, has also increased in historically more affordable parts of the U.S.. Arizona, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas have seen the largest growths in their unsheltered populations due to rising local housing costs.
That alarming jump in people struggling to keep a roof over their head came amid blistering inflation in 2021 and 2022 and as surging rental prices across the U.S. outpaced worker wage gains. Although a range of factors can cause homelessness, high rents and the expiration of pandemic relief last year contributed to the spike in housing insecurity, the researchers found.
“In the first years of the pandemic, renter protections, income supports and housing assistance helped stave off a considerable rise in homelessness. However, many of these protections ended in 2022, at a time when rents were rising rapidly and increasing numbers of migrants were prohibited from working. As a result, the number of people experiencing homelessness jumped by nearly 71,000 in just one year,” according to the report.
Rent in the U.S. has steadily climbed since 2001. In analyzing Census and real estate data, the Harvard researchers found that half of all U.S. households across income levels spent between 30% and 50% of their monthly pay on housing in 2022, defining them as “cost-burdened.” Some 12 million tenants were severely cost-burdened that year, meaning they spent more than half their monthly pay on rent and utilities, up 14% from pre-pandemic levels.
California homeless people are found living inside CAVES 20 feet below street level complete with home furnishings – as Democrat state grapples with vagrancy and LA begins annual count of those living rough
Rough sleepers in California were found living inside furnished caves dug into the banks of a river 20 feet below street level.
The groups were removed from the eight caves – along the Tuolumne River in Modesto – over the weekend, and they were emptied of belongings, furniture and 7,600 lbs of rubbish, filling two trucks and a trailer.
Some of the caves were decorated with murals, had broken floor tiles and one even had a makeshift fireplace with a chimney.
Modesto Police Department said: ‘This particular area has been plagued by vagrancy and illegal camps, which have raised concerns due to the fact that these camps were actually caves dug into the riverbanks.’
It comes as Los Angeles carries out its annual homeless count to try to take an accurate snapshot of the rough sleeper population in the city, after 75,500 were found to be sleeping rough in the county on any given night last year.
Zoning Bans the Good Samaritan
Since March 2023, Chris Avell’s church, Dad’s Place, in Bryan, Ohio, has been keeping its doors open 24/7 for anyone who might stop by to use the church’s kitchen, get food for themselves or their pets from its pantry, or join in church services.
When the homeless shelter next door is full, Dad’s Place will take in some of those people too. Avell considers all these activities a core part of his church’s mission. The city of Bryan, however, considers his sheltering of people an illegal, residential use of a commercially zoned property.
This past New Year’s Eve, when Avell was arriving at the church to preach that Sunday morning, a police officer served him with 18 criminal charges related to violations of the town’s zoning code. Avell pleaded not guilty to those charges earlier this month.
Churches’ charitable activities often don’t fit neatly into zoning codes’ definitions of commercial and residential uses. For that reason, they often get dinged with code violations for doing things like operating a soup kitchen in a residential area or sheltering people in a commercial zone.
The fact that churches are also serving the poor and homeless can make them a target of nuisance complaints from neighbors and extra scrutiny and enforcement from local officials as well.
Bryan’s decision to criminally charge Avell is nevertheless unusually punitive.
Kentucky GOP bill paves the way for ‘deadly physical force’ against the homeless
Republicans in Kentucky are cooking up new legislation that would pave the way for property owners to deploy “deadly physical force” against homeless people.
Vice reports that the bill, known as the “Safer Kentucky Act,” says that physical force against homeless people is “justifiable” if a property owner believes that criminal trespass, robbery or unlawful camping are occurring on their property.
Additionally, “deadly physical force” can be justified if the property owner believes a homeless person is trying to “dispossess” them of their property.
Lyndon Pryor, the CEO of the Louisville Urban League, tells Vice that the legislation will likely have deadly consequences for the homeless in his state.
Feds To Spend Hundreds of Millions of Dollars on E.V. Chargers in ‘Disadvantaged Communities’
Last week, the White House announced that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) would issue $623 million in grants for states to build chargers for electric vehicles (E.V.s). The money comes from the Charging and Fuel Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, a $2.5 billion fund established as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. According to the announcement, the project “will fund 47 EV charging and alternative-fueling infrastructure projects in 22 states and Puerto Rico, including construction of approximately 7,500 EV charging ports.”
Unfortunately, that money is unlikely to go as far as it would have in private hands. “The CFI Program advances President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative, which set a goal that 40% of the overall benefits of federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution,” bragged the FHWA press release. “More than 70% of the CFI funding announced today will support project sites in disadvantaged communities.”
As an example, it notes “$1.4 million to the Chilkoot Indian Association, an Alaska Native Tribe, to build an EV charging station in Haines, a rural and disadvantaged community where there are no publicly available EV charging stations.”
Haines is in Haines Borough, Alaska, which has a population of just over 2,000 people.
It’s hard to imagine that “disadvantaged” communities would buy E.V.s if only there were public charging stations available. A November survey from S&P Global Mobility showed that potential buyers cite high E.V. prices as their primary concern, higher than concerns about range or charging infrastructure. And while E.V. prices have declined in recent years, the average new electric vehicle still costs around $50,000.
Not that this is the first instance of poorly planned government spending on E.V. infrastructure. Last month, Reason reported that even though the federal government had dispensed $2 billion out of the $7.5 billion apportioned by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to build public charging stations, no chargers funded by the cash had come online. Speaking to Politico‘s James Bikales, state and E.V. industry officials blamed “the difficulties state agencies and charging companies face in meeting a complex set of contracting requirements and minimum operating standards for the federally-funded chargers.”
“The barrier isn’t technological,” The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board noted this week. “It took Tesla less time to install 80 chargers at its Harris Ranch station in northern California.” Rather, “the bureaucrats are getting in their own way.”
Welfare Is Great—for the Welfare Bureaucrats
A few months ago, Christie Gardner’s apartment was wrecked by a fire. Now she’s living with the damage left by the fire, smoke, water, and the firemen who helped save her apartment. “It’s a total disaster right now,” says Gardner. “They broke up all my bookshelves, my computer.” To make matters worse, her electricity has been turned off, so she has to get by with just a few battery-operated lamps and the waning hours of daylight.
But Gardner is no stranger to suffering. The six decade-plus resident of Washington, D.C., was forced to quit her job as a certified nursing assistant after she suffered from a workplace injury that left her needing a hip replacement. Still, Gardner remains positive, always reminding herself and those around her: “It will get better. God is good.”
Gardner now spends her time advocating for her community, volunteering for several nonprofit organizations, attending doctor appointments—and fighting the D.C. government for welfare benefits.
Like many in D.C. and throughout the country, Gardner has fallen over a welfare benefit cliff—it’s what happens when someone suddenly loses benefits because a slight increase in income pushes them over the welfare program’s income-eligibility threshold.
Since 2020, Gardner has seen some of her welfare benefits decline roughly 90 percent despite still being on disability. Among other changes, since 2020 her monthly SNAP benefits have decreased from almost $300 to just $30. Despite her best efforts, she has been unable to determine the precise cause of these reductions, though she says she thinks it could be due to her becoming eligible for and receiving Medicaid.
She turned to a local nonprofit, Bread for the City, that aims to empower low-income Washingtonians to escape poverty by providing food, clothing, medical care, and legal and social services. The organization also advocates for their clients by soliciting the D.C. government for needed reforms and by helping them understand what welfare programs they qualify for, how to apply, and how to avoid falling over their benefit cliffs.
The bureaucracy surrounding welfare programs makes them very expensive, inefficient, and confusing to navigate—costing taxpayers a lot of money while failing to provide meaningful help to those that are struggling economically.
Highly-contagious infection spread by feces breaks out in Portland as homeless crisis sparks disease common in Third World
A highly contagious infection that is spread through tiny particles of fecal matter has broken out in Portland – with officials warning that the homeless population are most at risk of catching the illness.
Shigella is a bacteria that spreads through human feces. People transmit the infection after getting the microbes on their hands and then touching their mouths.
People can also spread the intestinal infection through sexual intercourse.
Multnomah County in Oregon has warned that homeless people and same-sex male partners are most at risk because of their lack of access to hygienic facilities.
In the last month, 45 cases have been found in Portland, bringing the total from 2023 to 218. The influx of infections were reported among unhoused people in downtown Portland’s Old Town neighborhood.
Homelessness In U.S. at Highest Level Since 2008 Financial Crisis, Federal Report Reveals
Spurred on by the rising cost of living and the end of pandemic aid, U.S. homelessness this year reached a level not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, according to one influential annual metric released by the The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on Friday.
HUD’s annual homelessness count, which is called the “Point In Time,” or P.I.T., count, is not a count of all cases of homelessness throughout the year, but a snapshot of who was homeless on a single day in the last ten days of January.
This year, HUD said 653,100 people were experiencing homelessness, the highest number since HUD began issuing the report in 2007 and a 12 percent increase from 2022. Nearly one-third, or 143,105 people, of those experiencing homelessness reported that they were chronically homeless, also the highest number ever counted.
In a press release, HUD said that the increase in homelessness was a result of the expiration of pandemic-era expansions in the social safety net, like eviction moratoria and rental assistance.
“The rise in homelessness at the beginning of 2023 continued a pre-pandemic trend from 2016 to 2020, when homelessness also increased,” HUD said. The agency said the American Rescue Plan had prevented a rise in homelessness between 2020 and 2022, but many of its resources have now expired.
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