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THE UNITED STATES’ homeless population increased this year for the first time since 2010, driven by a surge in the number of people living on the streets in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development released its annual Point in Time count on Wednesday, a report that showed nearly 554,000 homeless people across the country during local tallies conducted in January.
That figure is up nearly 1% from 2016.
Of that total, 193,000 people had no access to nightly shelter and instead were staying in vehicles, tents, the streets and other places considered uninhabitable. The unsheltered figure is up by more than 9% compared to two years ago.
Increases are higher in several West Coast cities, where the explosion in homelessness has prompted at least 10 city and county governments to declare states of emergency since 2015.
City officials, homeless advocates and those living on the streets point to a main culprit: the region’s booming economy .
Rents have soared beyond affordability for many lower-wage workers who until just a just few years ago could typically find a place to stay. Now, even a temporary setback can be enough to leave them out on the streets.
“Four cheques away from being homeless”
“A lot of people in America don’t realise they might be two cheques, three cheques, four cheques away from being homeless,” said Thomas Butler Jr, who stays in a carefully organised tent near a freeway ramp in downtown Los Angeles.
Butler said he was in transitional housing – a type of program that prepares people for permanent homes – for a while but mostly has lived on the streets for the past couple of years.
The numbers in the report back up what many people in California, Oregon and Washington have been experiencing in their communities: encampments sprouting along freeways and rivers; local governments struggling to come up with money for long-term solutions; conflicts over whether to crack down on street camping and even feeding the homeless.
The most alarming consequence of the West Coast homeless explosion is a deadly hepatitis A outbreak that has affected Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and San Diego, the popular tourist destination in a county where more than 5,600 people now live on the streets or in their cars.
The disease is spread through a liver-damaging virus that lives in faeces. The outbreak prompted California officials to declare a state of emergency in October.
Severe problem
The HUD report underscores the severity of the problem along the West Coast.
While the overall homeless population in California, Oregon and Washington grew by 14% over the past two years, the part of that population considered unsheltered climbed 23% to 108,000. That is in part due a shortage of affordable housing.
In booming Seattle, for example, the HUD report shows the unsheltered population grew by 44% over two years to nearly 5,500.
The homeless service area that includes most of Los Angeles County, the epicenter of the crisis, saw its total homeless count top 55,000 people, up by more than 13,000 from 2016.
Four out of every five homeless individuals there are considered unsheltered, leaving tens of thousands of people with no place to sleep other than the streets or parks.
By comparison, while New York City’s homeless population grew to more than 76,000, only about 5 % are considered unsheltered thanks to a system that can get people a cot under a roof immediately.
In the West Coast states, the surge in homelessness has become part of the fabric of daily life.
The Monty, a bar in the Westlake neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles, usually doesn’t open until 8 pm. Partner and general manager Corey Allen said that’s because a nearby shelter requires people staying there to be in the building by 7.
Waiting until after that to open means the streets outside are calmer.
Allen said the homeless have come into his bar to bathe in the restroom wash basins, and employees have developed a strategy for stopping people from coming in to panhandle among customers.
Seventy-eight-year-old Theodore Neubauer sees the other side of it. Neubauer says he served in Vietnam but now lives in a tent in downtown Los Angeles.
He is surrounded by thriving business and entertainment districts, and new apartments that are attracting scores of young people to the heart of the nation’s second most populous city.
“Well, there’s a million-dollar view,” he said.
Policy priority
Helping those like Neubauer is a top policy priority and political issue in Los Angeles.
Since last year, voters in the city and Los Angeles County have passed a pair of tax-boosting ballot initiatives to raise an expected $4.7 billion over the next decade for affordable housing and services for the homeless.
HUD Secretary Ben Carson praised the region for dealing with the issue and not relying solely on the federal government.
“We need to move a little bit away from the concept that only the government can solve the problem,” he said.
But Mayor Eric Garcetti said that insufficient federal funding for affordable housing and anti-homelessness programs are part of the reason for the city’s current crisis.
“Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis was not created in a vacuum, and it cannot be solved by LA alone,” Garcetti said in a statement.
Excluding the Los Angeles region, total homelessness nationwide would have been down by about 1.5% compared with 2016.
The California counties of Sacramento, which includes the state capital, and Alameda, which is home to Oakland, also had one-year increases of more than 1,000 homeless people.
In contrast, the HUD report showed a long-running decline in homelessness continuing in most other regions. Nationally, the overall homeless number was down by 13% since 2010 and the unsheltered number has dropped by 17% over that seven-year span, although some changes in methodology and definitions over the years can affect comparisons.
Places where the numbers went down included Atlanta, Philadelphia, Miami, the Denver area and Hawaii, which declared a statewide homelessness emergency in 2015.
The homeless point-in-time survey is based on counts at shelters and on the streets.
While imperfect, it attempts to represent how many people are homeless at a given time. Those who work regularly with the homeless say it is certainly an undercount, although many advocates and officials believe it correctly identifies trend lines.
The report is submitted to Congress and used by government agencies as a factor in distributing money for programs designed to help the homeless.
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What’s not mentioned in this article is that the boom in the economy is the tech giants rolling into town, for example Amazon in Seattle or Facebook in CA. They ship in workers from all over the world, drive rents up and push residents out onto the streets. Add the rental properties taken off the market by Airbnb and renting becomes impossible for workers on an average industrial wage or lower. Not unlike what is happening here.
@Kate Murphy: So your saying that shipping in people from all over the world causes homelessness?
@Don Shavago: Nope, I´m saying that tech giants taking over a city and bringing in workers drives up rents and causes homelessness. I think you tried to twist my words into some sort of anti-immigration statement? Not my agenda at all. More anti-corporation. For example: Capitol Hill in Seattle has always been an arty, queer, radical neighbourhood. Amazon came in, brought thousands of staff (40,000 currently), and, attracted by cheap rents and a cool, creative vibe, a lot of their staff moved to Capitol Hill. Now, the area has got so many homeless people sleeping rough, many of whom are previous renters in that area. Gentrification targets the most vulnerable in society – those with low incomes, or mental health issues.
We seem to want an american style of goverment, property tax, privitizaton of all services… the downside to this is we all must work harder and longer, people will be left behind.
Our government need to be conscious of every time they increase the cost of living…
@Stephen Cullen: The only way the government is involved in cost of living increases is through tax. So you want tax reduced then?
@Stephen Cullen: sounds like communism
Homeless in southern California is not as bad as in New York or Ireland because of the weather there.
@tom McCormack: you can’t eat sunshine
@Dave O Keeffe: You mean Kelloggs Cornflakes have been lying to us?
@tom McCormack: have you ever been to San Fran….it’s scandalous bad
@tom McCormack: did you miss the bit with hepatitis being a problem that kills you?
@Padraic Burke: San Fran is survivable outside in the winter. Even Vancouver is, which is why so many homeless move there from across Western Canada.
Flooded with homelessness articles for the Irish and just in case we don’t have enough of those, here is one from the other side of the world, ffs give us a break.
Is it a global conspiracy?
Homelessness is worldwide. Listening to irish media and vested interests. I thought it was only an Irish problem caused by Fine Gael.
@Macc Dan: a global issue caused by policies by the likes of FG
Capitalism is such an amazing, roaring success isn’t it?
@Franklin Roosevelt: as opposed to what happened to Venezuela. Sure. Too many people in this world. Some have gotta be ok right, for the survival of the planet.
Just arrived back from that part of America. Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Unbelievable the amount of homeless people living on the streets, under bridges and any piece of waste ground. Thousands and thousands of them. I have never seen anything like it. Parts of it looks like the jungle in Calais. Absolutely disgusting for supposedly the richest country on Earth. If Trump is going to make America great again he would want to start here and not with his rich buddies.
They should have mentioned the fact that certain offensives means you can’t live near schools. This means when they are released from prison they can only live in the homeless camps.
Wouldn’t surprise me if it was the gov spin unit behind this article. The FG solution to the homeless crisis is to normalize it, then it’s not a crisis anymore! Typical Irish gombeen political solution when they’re not competent enough to actually find a solution.
@Adrian:
There is an article on leinster club football just above this, see if you can get an anti FG rant into that as well..
@P.J. Nolan: I’m a keen rugby fan, former FG voter, and a critic of successive Irish governments’ abject failure to address the housing crisis. As well-run countries like Austria have shown, social housing helps to protect the private market from the disastrous swings in price we have seen in Ireland. The market should serve us, not be our master.
Homelessness is a problem that should be aggressively tackled. In this regard, the US should serve as a warning rather than a good example. We don’t want typhus, a disease associated with the Famine, coming back to Ireland as it has among the homeless in LA. Irish governments seem to have almost given up on social housing. They used to do a decent job at that.
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