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| U.S. Reports Drop in Homeless Population | |
| 2008-07-30 | |
Housing officials say the statistics, which are collected annually from more than 3,800 cities and counties, may reflect better data collection and some variation in the number of communities reporting. But officials also attribute much of the decline to a policy shift promoted by Congress and the administration that has focused federal and local resources on finding stable housing for homeless people suffering from drug addiction, mental illness or physical disabilities, long deemed the hardest to help in the homeless population. Under the strategy, known as "housing first," local officials have over the last eight years increasingly placed the chronically homeless into permanent shelter -- apartments, halfway houses or rooms -- and provided them with services for drug addiction, mental illness and health problems. | |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #13 I blame Ace at Ace of Spades. He's been hunting hobos for years, and lately, spending less time on his blog...ergo...? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2008-07-30 21:57 |
| #12 Pappy, I don't give a damn if he's upset. Give him several; he deserves them. The heartier the better! |
| Posted by: Jomock Platypus9662 2008-07-30 19:38 |
| #11 So good for Bush, for solving a problem by abandoning the conservative obsession with the undeservingness of these people. Would you be upset if I gave you a hearty 'Screw You'? |
| Posted by: Pappy 2008-07-30 15:14 |
| #10 If you give people housing, they are no longer homeless. Makes sense to me. While I'm glad to hear that the homeless are being given a place to live other than the street, I'm not convinced this is the best long-term solution. I hope for the best but time will tell. |
| Posted by: eltoroverde 2008-07-30 14:21 |
| #9 I knew a voluntarily "homeless" man in a small midwestern town some years ago, mostly a harmless nuisance. He did scare people shopping on main street & would now & then throw a rock through a store window so he would be jailed whenever it suited him. The kicker in the story was this: He was the beneficiary of a trust fund, run by a reliable trustee, who paid & maintained a home for the man to live in in the town, a home that he refused to live in. Eventually the town fathers tired of his antics, he was declared incompetent by the judge of probate, ordered confined to an assisted living institution & the proceeds of his trust fund were attached to pay for all this. Eventually the "homeless" guy was reconciled to this terrible fate. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2008-07-30 11:13 |
| #8 Woe is me! My career path is drying up. |
| Posted by: Richard of Oregon 2008-07-30 10:24 |
| #7 Help me, I thought giving them housing despite their problems was the liberal solution. So good for Bush, for solving a problem by abandoning the conservative obsession with the undeservingness of these people. |
| Posted by: liberalhawk 2008-07-30 10:23 |
| #6 A lot of this is crapola. To start with, the original statistics were provided by homeless NGOs with every motivation to grossly exaggerate the number of homeless--and they did. Most of the drop is because they are no longer using contrived "models" (sound familiar?), and instead are basing their count on "actuals". The truth of the matter is that the homeless can be subdivided into groups. The group everyone is concerned with are homeless families, whose provider has been put out of work and is looking for new work. They usually have a rapid turn-around and get new work in just a month or two. The homeless services are very helpful to them. The second group are voluntary homeless, mostly kids and young adults under 25. They have all sorts of motivations, but they want to wander, not be cooped up. So they avoid the violence of shelters and older homeless, and think of themselves as travelers, anarchists, or libertarians. They abhor government and government help. The third group are involuntary homeless, who are usually older and have serious problems, especially mental illness and substance abuse. Interestingly, they usually start later in life, and are not ex-voluntary homeless. They are almost all "goners", and the best solution is to save public money by putting them in a cheap hotel with free food, to keep them off the streets and out of the emergency rooms. Many people are upset with doing this, wanting to coerce them away from alcoholism, etc. But that doesn't work and is terribly expensive. Keeping them on the street and trying to control their behavior costs maybe $100k a year. Putting them in a flop house and leaving them alone maybe $10k. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-07-30 10:00 |
| #5 There are 123,833 chronically homeless people? There are over 3 MILLION vacant houses in the surplus housing stock. That's... well, crap. I'm definitely staying out of the market for another couple years. |
| Posted by: Mitch H. 2008-07-30 08:55 |
| #4 Just prepping the media battlefield so they can pooh-pooh stories about homeless people being given cartons of smokes and short dogs to vote early, often and dem in the fall election... |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2008-07-30 08:38 |
| #3 That's "find out". |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2008-07-30 05:35 |
| #2 Interesting news, this. If you recall, when Gore finally conceded to W, within the next few days literally hundreds of newspapers across the country which hadn't run a story about homelessness during the entirety of the Clinton administrations printed stories about the subject, as if to make it look that the mere election of W had caused the problem. So blatant and embarrassing was this obviously coordinated assault that even a couple of Dem congressmen commented negatively on it. Now we out, that like so many other "problems" that have "occurred due to Bush", this was really something that was inherited from the Clinton years, and improved during the past eight. If the NYT - whose literal hatred for W is a proven fact, and which has spent eight years trying to undermine and even destroy him - will run this, the improvement in getting the homeless off the street is real, and probably even better than reported. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2008-07-30 05:34 |
| #1 Oh, great! Now we are running out of homeless people. Will this Bush-induced nightmare never end? |
| Posted by: SteveS 2008-07-30 01:58 |