Homelessness Revisited

Pathways to Housing was established in 1992 to do what no government of ours - we're more or less America Lite - has been able to do in recent memory: provide homes for the homeless. You can read Mother Jones' interview with Dr. Sam Tsemberis, founder of Pathways to Housing, here. Oddly enough, Dr. Tsemberis happens to be my mother's first cousin, although I have never met the man himself, but I digress. I wish to share some of Dr. Tsemberis' remarks:

"We were trying to get them into housing programs, but there was a huge wall because the housing providers wanted people to be clean and sober for a period of time. They wanted them to be taking medication. The homeless people were somehow supposed to be stabilized before programs would even consider them to be eligible tenants. And these are program that were designed to house the mentally ill! But with so many homeless and mentally ill people and so few program slots, the housing providers have fallen into the habit of picking from among the applicants the ones who were the best tenants. And we couldn’t persuade, beg, or in other ways entice the providers to accept these referrals."

...and...

"You can’t really pay the rent with a minimum-wage job. Minimum wage has not kept up at all with the cost of living. People are making six and seven dollars an hour where just to be able to afford a place you have to be making 12 or 15. So a lot of the people who are working at the minimum-wage jobs, even with two jobs, have a hard time paying the rent, especially if there are kids involved –- they need a bigger place."

...and here's the kicker...

"All you need to solve homelessness in the country is about $10 billion; you would solve homelessness permanently in the country."

Ten billion dollars is all that's required to ensure every last person in the United States has a roof over her or his head. Ten billion dollars - roughly two percent of the annual national defence budget - is all it will take. Two percent of what America spends on death can literally save millions of lives in its own backyard, but don't tell the Republicans or the Democrats, as they need every last red cent of your tax dollars to maintain the Empire in all its misery.

I wish America's Uncle Sam was a lot more like my Uncle Sam.