Are American Shantytowns The Solution To Homelessness?

A group in Seattle think so. Here is a piece on this interesting endeavor to pro-actively set up a Shantytown:

This Wednesday, a group of four men plan to pile into a car in Pioneer Square and head off on a unique Seattle real-estate tour.

They will be shopping for some of the largest undeveloped lots left in the city. Their wish list: flat, vacant, hopefully remote.They aren't looking to buy. They're looking to squat.

They are the "site-search committee" for Nickelsville, a planned Hooverville-style shantytown of wood shacks the homeless hope to build here later this summer.

Says James Lucas, 38, one of the leaders: "Everybody knows there is a screaming need for low-cost housing, not just more fancy condos. So we're going to do something about it."

Something illegal, apparently. Unless a private landowner miraculously gives them permission, the group will try to put up a guerrilla shantytown on public land and then dare officials to tear it down.

"We know they're going to fight us tooth and nail," says Lucas, who lives in a work-for-rent transitional house. "What else is new?"

Seattle once had a Hooverville in the 1930s on Port of Seattle land near the current sports stadiums.

Twice the city burned the wood and tin shacks, and twice the residents rebuilt. In the mid-'30s, a census counted 639 people living in 479 shacks.

This is what it has come to: The homeless in 2008 are looking to go back to the 1930s.

"It's hard to argue that a shantytown is progress," says Bill Kirlin-Hackett, director of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, a church-based group. "But the level of frustration is extremely high. Homelessness is soaring, and all we're seeing is a crackdown.

"So people are saying — 'I'm homeless right now. What's happening tonight?' If you've got nowhere to go tonight, then a wood shack starts looking pretty good."

(Pic from http://sitefly.com)

Keep Your Car? Or Receive Government Assistance?

There is a crazy rule in the government’s poverty assistance program that bans poor families from receiving assistance if they own a car. In California’s car-dependent culture, this is forcing more families to lose everything.

Here is the beginning of the op-ed piece in the LA Times on this:

With falling home prices, rising food and fuel costs and an unemployment rate well above the national average, the current economic downturn may push already vulnerable California families to the brink of financial destitution. Thousands of people may turn to welfare for support in the coming months. That's OK -- that's the purpose of temporary assistance. It's not as if this is the money-for-nothing welfare of the early 1990s; these folks are required to start looking for work the second they land on the rolls. Yet to qualify for assistance, many families may be forced to give up the most effective tool they have in the fight against poverty and unemployment: their car.

To be eligible for temporary cash assistance -- known as CalWORKS in California -- families must prove that they are both income and asset poor. To qualify for assistance, a single parent with two children, for example, can't earn more than about $12,000 a year or have more than $2,000 in other resources. In addition, the total fair-market value of all vehicles owned by a household cannot exceed $4,650 -- a figure that hasn't changed in more than a decade. In real terms, that means even a 10-year-old Honda Civic with 100,000 miles could disqualify a family from public assistance.

(Pic from http://img.timeinc.net)

Is Immigration Increasing Poverty In America?

It is definitely not a politically correct question. But the American Chronicle has an op-ed piece answering this very question.

Here is the start of the piece:

Brian Williams reported to the nation last month that Detroit, Michigan high schools suffer a 76 percent drop-out/flunk-out rate for high school seniors. All totaled, 1.2 million eighteen year olds hit the streets functionally illiterate annually. In Denver, Colorado suffered a 73 percent jump of children living in poverty.

U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo said, "Immigration, both legal and illegal, is the cause of a significant part of Colorado's increase in child poverty."

The number of children under the age of 18 living in poverty increased from 104,000 in 2000 to 180,000 in 2006, in Colorado. Colorado led the nation in child poverty, yet features only 4.6 million people—except---that state houses 500,000 and as high as 695,000 illegal alien migrants. Colorado schools suffer 43 different languages, which cause havoc in classrooms. One in five teachers quits or transfers out of Denver Public Schools every nine months. (Source: Rocky Mountain News)

"It is irresponsible for the media and the governor to not recognize the fact that immigration is largely to blame for this increase," Tancredo said. "If Colorado were actually enforcing its own laws, we would reduce the number of people in the poverty category."

(Pic from www.politicalfrenzy.com)

The Clash Between Businesses and Homeless Tent Cities

This occurs in cities, small and big, around the country. I’ve talked with dozens and dozens of city and business leaders who describe the same scenario.

Homeless people set up encampments near business districts, usually near railroads, rivers, freeways, or drainage ditches. They wander near businesses, and the business owners freak out. Police are called in. And usually encampments are cleaned out.

But without a long-term solution—can we say affordable housing?—these encampments prop up in other areas.

It is a reoccurring scenario.

Here’s what’s happening in Reno, Nevada:

Reno business owners are taking issue with what city officials call "Tent City", a growing community of homeless and transients that some call a danger to the community.

Judy Villalobos, owner of the Bliss Night Club, says her surveillance cameras recently caught what looks to be a fire started by a vagrant.

The cameras captured a man approaching a trailer last Thursday. Five minutes after the man walks away, the dock goes up in smoke.

Mike Steedman, the owner of the business in the warehouse, says that they get drunk and they smoke on the back dock. He blames their cigarettes for the fire that burned the dock.

(Pic from www.hankinsonnd.com)

Help Homeless People By Giving Them Sun Tan Lotion?

That’s what people in England have decided to do. With summer here, we all know that the heat, whether in the US or in Europe, can kill people. Especially those on the streets.

So now the next big thing is to distribute sun tan lotion, to protect them from being burned.

Will this really help people who are desperately living on the streets access housing? Or will we just have well tanned homeless people?

Ignoring people’s lack of housing is just not funny…