The United States saw an 18.1% increase in homelessness this year, a dramatic rise driven mostly by a lack of affordable housing as well as devastating natural disasters and a surge of migrants in several parts of the country, federal officials said Friday.
Protip: it’s not affordable housing if we can’t afford it.
Probottom: why do we include migrants in our homelessness statistics if we’re not offering them social welfare?
Propowerbottom: tax brackets should also be influenced by the number of properties a person owns. Unless a real estate agent and actively trying to sell or reno the property, get penalized for hoarding.
Edit: @metaStatic@kbin.earth I’m disappointed in your correction. Now I just look like a fool! I thought we were ride or die!!
I am really sick and tired of “Affordable Housing” being neoliberal jargon for “subsidized housing.” It’s an extremely biased framing of the debate that makes it hard to give fair consideration to other means of achieving actual affordability, such as – just for example – fixing the motherfucking zoning code so that developers aren’t forced to include expensive amenities like parking spaces and are allowed to build stuff that’s cheap enough for people to afford at market rate.
I mean, to effectively have affordable housing without parking lots and screwing traffic, you need real mass transit. Which should really be our focus over the next 15-20 years anyway, besides green energy, of course.
Speaking of which, we need a moderator for !fuckcars. The previous mod has been afk for 2 months. It’s like, your normal browsing plus maybe a five minute commitment per month. Are you interested? Message me.
I mean, to effectively have affordable housing without parking lots and screwing traffic, you need real mass transit.
No, you don’t – that’s another assumption I’m sick and tired of hearing. You change the zoning rules to allow day-to-day amenities (housing/jobs/shopping/etc.) to exist within walking distance first, then once a bunch of people with that kind of lifestyle move in, they will drive demand for good transit after.
If you try to do it backwards, by maintaining policies that cater to driving until the transit magically appears, you end up building a car-dependent Hellhole that is infeasible to retrofit while never actually getting the damn transit because you can’t show any demand for it (fucking obviously, because everybody who lives there is forced to drive!). Or if you do somehow force through transit anyway, over the kicking and screaming of the racists and reactionaries, you’ll end up with nobody using it and them screeching “we told you so” because it’ll still be worse than driving.
You HAVE to quit subsidizing the entitled driver class FIRST.
jfc 18% is a huge increase. What is that compared to historical trends?
That increase comes on top of a 12% increase in 2023, which HUD blamed on soaring rents and the end of pandemic assistance. The 2023 increase also was driven by people experiencing homelessness for the first time.
This is the “economy” that the Democrats ran on being a “good economy.”
Two straight years of massive increases in homelessness, but the increases started, shocker, in 2020.
This is from the AP News article that AP themselves references for the 12% increase in 2023:
https://apnews.com/article/homelessness-increase-rent-hud-covid-60bd88687e1aef1b02d25425798bd3b1
The numbers ticked up to about 580,000 in the 2020 count and held relatively steady over the next two years as Congress responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with emergency rental assistance, stimulus payments, aid to states and local governments and a temporary eviction moratorium.
Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, a federal agency, said the extra assistance “held off the rise in homelessness that we are now seeing.” He said numerous factors are behind the problem.
In other words, homelessness was exploding in 2020 and then was hidden for two years because of government assistance that got some people through some hard times. Obviously it wasn’t helping enough if homelessness was still growing during 2020-2022.
What policy decisions or laws enacted by the Biden administration do you think caused this?
None, I think those kind of effects take years to manifest and I think it was actually the Trump admin that undid a large amount of it (I mean remember who he put in charge of Housing?), but it didn’t start appearing when he was President due to Trump endlessly juicing the stock market and then during the Pandemic he begrudgingly agreed to assistance. Those things kind of hid how badly he was screwing the pooch.
But even then, I think that this is a six-decade long manifestation of what has been festering in the USA. Republicans tear things down and erode living standards and human rights, and while Democrats are busy trying to preserve or reverse those things which prevents them from working on making things better, Republicans are busy kicking the next thing down, and the cycle continues.
The sharp increase in the homeless population over the past two years contrasts with success the U.S. had been having for more than a decade.
Going back to the first 2007 survey, the U.S. made steady progress for about a decade in reducing the homeless population as the government focused particularly on increasing investments to get veterans into housing. The number of homeless people dropped from about 637,000 in 2010 to about 554,000 in 2017.
But…but…the unemployment rate is so low. They must actually want to be homeless. /s
I don’t want to see percentage increase values for things like these. I’d prefer percent of population, or absolute values.
If 10 people were homeless that’s less than 2 new homeless people.
If 10m are homeless, that’s close to 2m new homeless.
Mega corps buying up all the housing properties surely has nothing to do with rising housing costs…
