California has such a huge undersupply of housing -- and oversupply of housing speculators -- that affluent homebuyers have effectively rendered the state's major cities unaffordable for all but the very wealthy, even pushing into neighborhoods that were historically undesirable due to poverty, poor housing stock and crime. Read the rest
According to this short documentary, there are hundreds of miles of service, storm, and sewer tunnels beneath the glitz and neon of Las Vegas, and these tunnels are home to many people. The video has interviews with some of the residents, who say they rely on each other for food, money, and support.
Image: YouTube Read the rest
The verification requirements on the neighborhood app Nextdoor effectively make the app an unwelcome place for homeless people. Read the rest
Seventeen homeless people live on a footbridge in Hong Kong. This video profiles several of them.
From South China Morning Post:
Read the restNguyen Van Son and Eppie Yip were among the 17 homeless people who lived on a footbridge in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong’s poorest district. After packing up their shelters in mid-July, some of them have moved to a nearby park. But the homeless problem still persists in the neighbourhood.
Hong Kong property is the most expensive in the world. The monthly rent for low quality subdivided flats even smaller than a car park space can cost more than HK$4,000 or US$509, while public housing has a five and a half year long waiting list. Soaring rents, and inadequate public housing force the city’s poorest inhabitants to sleep rough.
A successful program in Santa Monica, California is simply helping folks who need help.
LA's homelessness epidemic continues to rage unabated as housing prices soar and wages stagnate; the result is a "wheel estate" boom of people living in cars and vans, with the greatest proportion of vehicles-dwellers being seniors, families with children, and working people. Read the rest
LA has the nation's worst homelessness problem, a (literal) epidemic so terrible it distorts the national statistics. Read the rest
Seattle's immensely popular business tax was designed to do something about the city's epidemic of desperate homelessness, but then Amazon threw its muscle around to get the tax canceled, mostly by threatening not to occupy its new offices in Ranier Square, a 30-story building currently under construction that Amazon was to be sole tenant of, with 3,500-5,000 employees working out of the building. Read the rest
Homelessness in New Orleans spiked after Hurricane Katrina, reaching 11,600 by 2007; today that number has been reduced by 90%, thanks to a "housing first" (previously) approach that starts by giving homeless people stable, permanent housing, and then addressing confounding factors like mental illness and substance addiction (on the grounds that these conditions are easier to treat when people have stable housing). Read the rest
Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, isn't afraid to keep it real for kids. Last year they introduced Julia, the first muppet with autism. Now they've launched an initiative called Sesame Street in Communities that, amongst other things, will bring the first muppet to experience homelessness. Her name is Lily and she was originally introduced in 2011 as a character whose family was struggling with hunger.
Unfortunately, Lily’s path is common for many children experiencing homelessness. “We know children experiencing homelessness are often caught up in a devastating cycle of trauma—the lack of affordable housing, poverty, domestic violence, or other trauma that caused them to lose their home, the trauma of actually losing their home, and the daily trauma of the uncertainty and insecurity of being homeless,” said Sherrie Westin, President of Global Impact and Philanthropy at Sesame Workshop. “We want to help disrupt that cycle by comforting children, empowering them, and giving them hope for the future. We want them to know that they are not alone and home is more than a house or an apartment—home is wherever the love lives.”
CNN:
Read the rest"When Lily was first launched, she came out as part of the food insecurity initiative. So she's not brand new, but this seemed like a really perfect extension of her story, so that we could use her to help children identify with," Westin said. "With any of our initiatives, our hope is that we're not only reaching the children who can identify with that Muppet but that we're also helping others to have greater empathy and understanding of the issue."
Although her journey with homelessness will not appear in televised episodes of "Sesame Street" at this point, she will be in separate videos and materials in the initiative.
Habitot Children's Museum in Berkeley, California is making an unusually generous offer to the families of homeless kids. They are providing them with the opportunity to celebrate their child's birthday at their facility for free. Their free birthday party offer includes all the standards: decor, pizza, juice, cake, and even goodie bags for the guests. Plus, they gift the birthday child something special.
Now, I'm not sure the age limit for the eligible children but, according to their site, the museum serves infants, toddlers and preschoolers.
Want to learn more? Email the museum's Family Programs Manager at familyprograms@habitot.org. Also, if you have the means, please consider donating to Habitot so they can keep the magic going.
photo by Yoshika Mcalister Read the rest
San Francisco's housing crisis is also (of course) a homelessness crisis, and homelessness crises beget public defecation crises -- and San Francisco has a serious public defecation crisis. Read the rest
San Francisco has a homelessness epidemic that is both heartrending and a threat to public health, and it has only worsened for decades, and continues to get worse even now. Read the rest
Update: An earlier version of this article misidentified Dick's Towing of Everett as the Dick's Towing of Seattle involved this this story. I apologize to Dick's of Everett for the error.
Seattle is in the grips of a dire housing emergency (though the city has money to burn when it comes to subsidizing multi-billion-dollar sports teams); Amanda Ogle is one of the many people in Seattle living out of a car, in her case, a 1991 Camry. Read the rest
114,659 of New York's public school students is homeless, bouncing from shelters to relatives' beds: homelessness is a predictor of poor academic performance for all the obvious reasons, including very long commutes to school (some students' families have ended up at shelters that are two boroughs away from their schools). Read the rest
Sean Kayode, a homeless person hustling to make ends meet in San Francisco unsurprisingly received a lot of parking tickets, in San Francisco. Naturally, the best way for San Francisco to secure payment was to seize his method of earning money. A federal judge has ordered the car be returned, for now.
Via the SF Examiner:
Read the restA federal judge on Wednesday ordered the city of San Francisco to return a towed car to a homeless man who couldn’t afford to pay the parking tickets he received while working as a food delivery driver.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White said Sean Kayode had raised “serious questions” about whether the March 5 towing of his car because of unpaid parking tickets violated the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures.
White wrote that in a situation in which a car owner can’t afford to pay overdue parking tickets, “it is not clear…that seizure is reasonable in an effort to secure repayment of the debt owed.”
The judge issued a preliminary injunction requiring return of the car. The order will remain in effect until there is a full trial on a lawsuit filed by Kayode, 52, and James Smith, 64, whose car was towed on Dec. 28, 2017.
Kayode’s car was towed from a street-cleaning zone outside a homeless shelter where he was staying. In the previous 10 months, he had received about 30 parking tickets and had paid some but not all of them.
A state law allows local authorities to tow a car whose owner has five or more unpaid parking tickets for at least three weeks.
San Francisco's giant fleet of semi-illegal electric scooters have come to symbolize the tech industry's worst excesses, inspiring all kinds of creative resistance Read the rest
