California's [ America's ] Chronic Homelessness .

Its's 2040 AD , California Homeless crisis
spreads Nation wide .

It's interesting to hear a wealthy billionaire President called out California's homeless problem. According to a report in the Washington Post, President Donald Trump has ordered White House officials to come up with a solution to  (1)>>the visible homelessness crisis in Los Angeles and possibly other California cities. Officials from the White House, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and other agencies—including some who are meeting this week with their counterparts in Los Angeles—are weighing several possible steps, including moving homeless people into facilities administered by the federal government and razing encampments.While many people hate Donald Trump . He had a serious point , that points the finger at the Democrat state leadership. Trump went off on California , Pres. Trump continued his political attacks on Democrats during a campaign rally in Cincinnati, Ohio on Thursday night offering a critique of California's elected leaders handling of the homeless problem in the state."What they are doing to our beautiful California is a disgrace to our country," he said during the rally. "It's a shame. The world is looking at it. Look at Los Angeles with the tents and the horrible, horrible conditions. Look at San Francisco, look at some of your other cities." California is home to some of the world’s toughest environmental and public health laws, but skyrocketing homelessness has created an environmental and public health disaster.   He is right on this problem  & YES there is a lot of homelessness in California . Still, the shared diagnosis of California’s housing problem left many policymakers here in California in a deeply uncomfortable position of conceding that the Trump administration has made some fair points. Homelessness is curable , there is plenty of money in every state of the Union to get people off the streets . WELL Trump is right on this, why can't California get people off the street , place them in a shelters ???  (2)>>Maybe California needs to use that 90 billion on the so called bullet train on something more humanitarian . The question of California's homelessness raises issues how is it that it is really bad . Many people in California first of all have been swept in the current of a state that has no affordable housing , high rent . While  Homeless is a choice for some , for many people it is not . Unorthodox efforts to drive away people who are homeless have increasingly made headlines as communities grapple with escalating crises of housing shortages, drug addiction and mental health care. The situation is putting residents on edge — and, in some cases, driving them to violence. (3)>>But the Homeless are also dying in our streets , many government officials don't know what to do with a lack of funds to deal with A record number of homeless people — 918 last year alone — are dying across Los Angeles County, on bus benches, hillsides, railroad tracks and sidewalks.Deaths have jumped 76% in the past five years, outpacing the growth of the homeless population, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of the coroner's data.Health officials and experts have not pinpointed a single cause for the sharpincrease in deaths, but they say rising substance abuse may be a major reason. The surge also reflects growth in the number of people who are chronically homeless and those who don't typically use shelters, which means more people are living longer on the streets with serious physical and behavioral health issues, they say. Nearly 53,000 people were homeless in L.A. County last year, according to a point-in-time count of homeless residents, an increase of about 39% since 2014. The majority were not living in shelters.The homeless population has also grown nationwide, but there is no national count of homeless deaths. Meanwhile  White House hopefuls crisscross the country, making big promises on issues such as college debt relief, climate change and boosting the working and middle classes, they have largely ignored an issue — the soaring number of unsheltered Americans — that has reached a crisis point in communities on the West Coast and elsewhere. 

The Future .

It's 2040 if we allow the current trends regarding affordable housing shortages , sky rocking rent there could be seeing a pandemic . As the 2020 presidential election heats up, the numerous candidates are tackling the issues at hand, and while it may seem like affordable housing and housing in general have been on the back burner for most candidates so far, that doesn't mean that they've all been silent about housing to this point. In California , using the Bay Area for example a home price now is between 900,000 and 5 million [ that is  market value ] now in 2019 . Think 30 years into the future,  those prices are going to price people out of housing , forcing more people into the streets .  The current rate of wages will not keep up with the rising cost of living . If WE EVEN RAISE the MINIMUM WAGE to 15$,  (4)>>it would not keep up with inflation . The lack of affordable housing is an increasing problem in many places—particularly those that are walkable and have transit service. The demand for walkable places continues to increase, but too much of what our zoning allows and what the market has traditionally built is sprawl. This has created a classic supply/demand issue, where the demand for housing in our cities and walkable neighborhoods is high but supply is low, leading to rising prices, gentrification, and housing crises across the country. But this is a crisis long in the making. Cuts by the federal government to affordable housing programmes and mental health facilities in the last few decades helped send many to the streets nationwide, officials and service providers said, as local authorities were unable to fill the gaps. The current affordability problem is now adding to it.

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

(1)>>the visible homelessness crisis . How did things get so bad in California? The state has long prided itself on being humanistic and innovative. It is home to some of the world’s largest public health philanthropies, best hospitals, and most progressive policies on mental health and drug addiction. The Democrats have a supermajority. What went wrong?   During his recent push for a ‘right to shelter’ law, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg made eye-opening claims about the share of unsheltered homeless people in California compared with New York City — and on the soaring rate of homeless deaths in two major cities in the state. Steinberg co-chairs the state’s Commission on Homelessness and Supportive Housing. He was elected Sacramento mayor in 2016. Before that, he served in the Legislature from 1998 to 2014, serving as state Senate President for his final six years.  For the next part of the claim, the mayor’s office cited data from The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, compiled by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.It shows approximately 95 percent of New York State’s 92,000 homeless people were sheltered in 2018, meaning they slept indoors at a temporary facility. By contrast, it found nearly 69 percent of California’s 130,000 homeless individuals were unsheltered, meaning they slept on the streets, in cars or abandoned buildings. It also found California had the highest rate of unsheltered people in the nation.   (2)>>Maybe California needs to use that 90 billion on the so called bullet train on something more humanitarian .   Homelessness is a huge issue in California. Twenty-five percent of the national homeless population resides in the state even though it makes up only twelve percent of the USA's population.  California is the country’s wealthiest and most highly taxed state, but its politicians have utterly failed to tackle the state’s most basic problem: homelessness. Estimates place California's homeless population at close to 130,000. To grasp the magnitude of that figure, imagine the entire population of New Haven, Connecticut or Charleston, South Carolina living on the streets.(3)>>But the Homeless are also dying in our streets , many government officials don't know what to do with a lack of funds to deal with A record number of homeless people .  Not that voters are uninterested. In California, for instance, a sizable majority of likely voters — Democratic, Republican and independent — consider homelessness a big problem, according to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. However before Obama left office there was a "plan" called Open Doors  plan proposed to end youth and family homelessness by 2020, the final year of the Obama administration and just four years before the deadline to end family homelessness—that HUD’s budget called for any focused effort on family homelessness. This came in the form of an $11 billion request in mandatory funding over ten years for housing assistance (mostly Housing Choice Vouchers, plus new funding for rapid re-housing) for families who meet HUD’s limited definition of homelessness.(4)>>it would not keep up with inflation . How bad will it get by 2034 AD ?  Let's take anyone that makes between 100, 000 to 200,000 $ a year [ combined incomes of spouse's ] In that "year' if we are lucky that the Market has not crashed in 2020 AD , the people that make CEO and CBO salaries will not be able to afford anything , even a home or apartment in California . By the 2030s that only way a person could live a decent life in certain parts of America is to earn close to 1 to 5 million a year . So take heed! You will not be able to have children , or feed them . The data for 2018 on homelessness says  ,  recent Zillow study — which estimated the number of homeless people in America to be closer to 661,000 — found a specific correlation between rent affordability and the rate of homelessness at a certain threshold: “Communities where people spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness.” By the 2030s , you add by population of immigrants [ both legal and illegal] , the homeless population will increase by 2 million nation wide , but the rest of the 300 million Americans might face harsh economic conditions , unless things change with the government .