41 Million Americans Are Living In Poverty This Christmas

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Even though the stock market continues to set new record high after new record high, poverty is exploding all over America. 

It is being reported that 41 million people are living in poverty at this moment, and 9 million of them do not receive a single penny of income from anyone.  Once you have been unemployed for long enough, you don’t qualify for unemployment payments any longer, and once you are on the street there is nowhere for other governments programs to send a check to.  I have previously discussed the rising epidemic of homelessness in our nation, but most people don’t want to think about that sort of a thing these days.  Even though New York City has the most homeless since the Great Depression, and even though homelessness in Los Angeles is at an all-time record high, most people want to pretend that everything is just fine.

Well, the truth is that everything is not just fine.

A reporter from the Guardian recently traveled with a special UN envoy to some of the most impoverished areas of the United States.  His report is extremely eye-opening, and I wanted to share a short excerpt from his story.  This portion of his article is about a 41-year-old woman named Ressy Finley who is desperately trying to stay alive on the mean streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles…

Ressy Finley, 41, was busy sterilizing the white bucket she uses to slop out in her tent in which she has lived on and off for more than a decade. She keeps her living area, a mass of worn mattresses and blankets and a few motley possessions, as clean as she can in a losing battle against rats and cockroaches. She also endures waves of bed bugs, and has large welts on her shoulder to prove it.

 

She receives no formal income, and what she makes on recycling bottles and cans is no way enough to afford the average rents of $1,400 a month for a tiny one-bedroom. A friend brings her food every couple of days, the rest of the time she relies on nearby missions.

 

She cried twice in the course of our short conversation, once when she recalled how her infant son was taken from her arms by social workers because of her drug habit (he is now 14; she has never seen him again). The second time was when she alluded to the sexual abuse that set her as a child on the path towards drugs and homelessness.

Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency because the number of homeless is rising so rapidly, and so have nine other cities along the west coast.  For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “As America Gives Thanks, Homelessness Continues To Set New Records In Major Cities All Over The Nation”.

The sad thing is that there are more than a million homes sitting empty in America right now.  As economic opportunities have dried up, many communities in the middle part of the nation are becoming “ghost towns”, and it is getting worse with each passing day…

There are nearly 1.4 million vacant residential properties across the country — abandoned, not for sale, mostly unoccupied homes. With vacant properties comprising as much as 30% of residential properties, some neighborhoods are starting to feel like ghost towns.

Many believe that the answer to the decline of the middle class and the growth of poverty is even more socialism.

But if you want to see where that road leads, just look at what is happening in Venezuela.  People are eating cats and dogs, and just today there were a whole bunch of mainstream news articles about how children are literally starving to death.

No, the real answer is to do what made our economy so great in the first place.  Between 1872 and 1913, we didn’t have an income tax or a central bank, and it was the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

What we have today is not free market capitalism.  We have gone very far down the road toward government-controlled socialism, and it has created a giant mess.

If we want to have a healthy middle class again, we need to have a society that promotes entrepreneurs and the creation of small businesses.  Today we are literally choking the financial life out of entrepreneurs and small businesses, and when I am elected to Congress I am going to fight as hard as I can to change that.

*  *  *

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

US Homelessness Rate Rose This Year For First Time Since 2010

Here’s one statistic about the US economy that you probably won’t find in President Trump’s twitter feed.

Thanks to a surge in homelessness centered around several large west coast cities, the overall rate of homelessness in the US ticked higher this year, the first increase since 2010, according to a survey from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its annual Point in Time count 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 percent 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 percent 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.

The homelessness crisis is only one byproduct of the burgeoning wealth inequality in the US caused by the Federal Reserve’s decision to pump trillions of dollars of “stimulus” into the markets.

Central-bank money printing has caused asset valuations to balloon while wages for everyone but the most highly skilled workers have stagnated, as the chart below illustrates.

Ironically, the primary culprit that city officials and advocates for the homeless cite as the reason behind the spike in homelessness is a strong regional economy that’s helped drive housing prices to record highs - of course, rock-bottom interest rates have made it cheaper to borrow and obtain mortgages.

All of this is helping driving up rents across every segment of the real-estate market - particularly in trendy urban areas like LA, San Francisco and Seattle.

According to the Associated Press, the most alarming consequence of the West Coast homeless explosion is a deadly hepatitis A outbreak that has afflicted 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 feces.

Homeless populations in California, Oregon and Washington grew by 14% over the past two years, meanwhile the segment of that population considered unsheltered climbed 23% to 108,000. That is in part due a shortage of affordable housing. The unsheltered population in Seattle, the city that’s home to Amazon.com, 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. Of these, four out of every five are considered unsheltered, meaning tens of thousands of people have 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 percent 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.

For many business owners on the west coast – particularly in areas near downtown LA where the infamous Skid Row is home to thousands of homeless people – the burgeoning population of people living in the open air routinely intrudes on daily life and business.

The Monty, a bar in the Westlake neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles, usually doesn’t open until 8 p.m. 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.

 

Helping those like Neubauer is a top policy priority and political issue in Los Angeles.

One of the most interesting characteristics of the spike in homelessness is the concentration of homeless populations in places like LA. If one were to exclude the nation’s second largest city from the data, the national homelessness rate would’ve dropped 1.5%.

Of course, it makes sense that homeless people would gravitate towards cities on the west coast where services for the indigent are plentiful and the risk of dying from exposure is significantly reduced.

However, in cities like Sacramento, where rising housing costs are forcing students at Sacramento State to give up their apartments in sleep in the 24-hour study lounge. Sacramento and Alameda County each saw increases of more than 1,000 homeless individuals over the past year.

Last year, voters in the city and Los Angeles County 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, but LA mayor Eric Garcetti responded that insufficient federal funding for affordable housing was one of the drivers of the crisis.

“We need to move a little bit away from the concept that only the government can solve the problem,” Carson 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 L.A. alone,” Garcetti said in a statement.

Meanwhile, areas that recorded a decline in homelessness, according to the survey, include Atlanta, Philadelphia, Miami, the Denver area and Hawaii, which declared a statewide homelessness emergency in 2015.

As America Gave Thanks, Homelessness Set New Records In Major Cities All Over The Nation

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

If the economy is doing just fine, then why is homelessness at levels not seen “since the Great Depression” in major cities all over the country? 

If the U.S. economy was actually in good shape, we would expect that the number of people that are homeless would be going down or at least stabilizing.  Instead, we have a growing national crisis on our hands.  In fact, within the past two years “at least 10 cities or municipal regions in California, Oregon and Washington” have declared a state of emergency because the number of homeless is growing so rapidly.

Things are particularly bad in southern California, and this year the Midnight Mission will literally be feeding a small army of people that have nowhere to sleep at night…

Thanksgiving meals will be served to thousands of homeless and near-homeless individuals today on Skid Row and in Pasadena and Canoga Park amid calls for donations and volunteers for the rest of the year.

 

The Midnight Mission will serve Thanksgiving brunch to nearly 2,500 homeless and near-homeless men, women and children, according to Georgia Berkovich, its director of public affairs.

Overall, the Midnight Mission serves more than a million meals a year, and Berkovich says that homelessness hasn’t been this bad in southern California “since the Great Depression”…

Berkovich said the group has been serving nearly 1 million meals a year each year since 2013.

 

“We haven’t seen numbers like this since the Great Depression,” she said.

And of course the official numbers confirm what Berkovich is claiming.  According to an article published earlier this year, the number of homeless people living in Los Angeles County has never been higher…

The number of homeless people in Los Angeles has jumped to a new record, as city officials grapple with a humanitarian crisis of proportions remarkable for a modern American metropolis.

 

Municipal leaders said that a recent count over several nights found 55,188 homeless people living in a survey region comprising most of Los Angeles County, up more than 25% from last year.

If the California economy is truly doing well, then why is this happening?

We see the same thing happening when we look at the east coast.  Just check out these numbers from New York City…

In recent years the number of homeless people has grown. Whereas rents increased by 18% between 2005 and 2015, incomes rose by 5%. When Rudy Giuliani entered City Hall in 1994, 24,000 people lived in shelters. About 31,000 lived in them when Mike Bloomberg became mayor in 2002. When Bill de Blasio entered City Hall in 2014, 51,500 did. The number of homeless people now in shelters is around 63,000.

For New York, this is the highest that the homeless population has been since the Great Depression, and city leaders are trying to come up with a solution.

Meanwhile, things are so bad in Seattle that “400 unauthorized tent camps” have popped up…

Housing prices are soaring here thanks to the tech industry, but the boom comes with a consequence: A surge in homelessness marked by 400 unauthorized tent camps in parks, under bridges, on freeway medians and along busy sidewalks. The liberal city is trying to figure out what to do.

Are you noticing a theme?

Homelessness is at epidemic levels all over the U.S., and this crisis is getting worse with each passing day.  Some communities are trying to care for their growing homeless populations, but others are simply trying to force them to go somewhere else.  They are doing this by essentially making it illegal to be homeless.  In some cities it is now a crime to engage in “public camping”, to “block a walkway” or to create any sort of “temporary structure for human habitation”.  These laws specifically target the homeless, and they are very cruel.

Many of us tend to picture the homeless as mostly lazy older men that don’t want to work and that instead want to drink or do drugs all day.

But the truth is that women and children make up a significant percentage of the homeless.

In fact, the number of homeless children in our country has increased by about 60 percent since the end of the last recession.

And there are thousands upon thousands of military veterans that are homeless.  For example, a 34-year-old man named Johnny that served in the Marine Corps recently used his last 20 dollars to buy fuel for a woman that had run out of gas and was stranded along I-95 in Miami…

Pulled over on the side of I-95, McClure, 27, was approached by a homeless man named Johnny. She was apprehensive at first, but Johnny told her to get back into her car and to lock the doors while he walked to get her help. He went to a nearby gas station, used his last $20 fill a can and brought it back to fill up her car.

 

Grateful, but without a dollar to repay him, McClure promised she would come back with something.

 

In the weeks since, she’s returned to the spot along I-95 where Johnny stays with cash, snacks and Wawa gift cards. Each time she’s stopped by with her boyfriend, Mark D’Amico, they’ve learned a bit more about Johnny’s story, and become humbled by his gratitude.

Deciding that they wanted to do even more for Johnny, they started a GoFundMe page for him and have since raised approximately $250,000.

So it looks like there is going to be a happy ending to Johnny’s story, but the truth is that more people are falling into homelessness with each passing day.

If things are this bad now, how much worse will they become as the economy really starts slowing down?  Already, we have shattered the all-time yearly record for retail store closings, and we still have more than a month to go.  The following is from a CNN article entitled “Is This The Last Black Friday?”…

A record number of store closures - 6,735 - have already been announced this year. That’s more than triple the tally for 2016, according to Fung Global Retail and Technology, a retail think tank.

 

And there have been 620 bankruptcies in the sector so far this year, according to BankruptcyData.com, up 31% from the same period last year. Prominent names such as Toys R Us, Gymboree, Payless Shoes and RadioShack have all filed this year, and Sears Holdings (SHLD), which owns both the iconic Sears and Kmart chains, has warned there is “substantial doubt” it can remain in business.

Sadly, analysts are projecting that the number of store closings could be as high as 9,000 next year.

Yes, there are some areas of the country that are doing well right now, but there are many others that are not.

Let us always remember to have compassion on those that are struggling, because someday we may be the ones that end up needing some help.

*  *  *

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Baltimore's Homeless Erect Modern Day 'Hooverville' Tent City On Front Lawn Of City Hall

Via StockBoardAsset.com,

Baltimore’s homeless have erected a modern day ‘Hooverville’, or better yet a ‘Trumpville’ on the front lawn of Baltimore’s City Hall. 

The tent city demands are the following:

• Economics: 21st Century Jobs Guarantee Program


• Criminal & Social Justice: Support for Power Consulting to become DOJ consent decree monitor


• Housing: City Wide Housing First Program Changes in Homeless Shelter Policy

Organizers of the tent city explained to me that the ACLU is carefully monitoring the situation, and says less than 30 tents are perfectly legal. As long as there is order in the tent city, this temporary town of the homeless can stay erected…

Hooverville 1932 verse Trumpville 2017. Same shit different decade……

This is all comes at a time where 50-years of democratic controlled leadership in Baltimore, along with decades of deindustrialization have completely destroyed the city’s economy and the middle class. The city is now left with violent crime some of the highest in the United States and a public health crisis of opioids destroying the citizens from with-in. Nearly 1/3 of black households have a net worth of zero and an unemployment rate 3x higher than whites. The wealth inequality gap in Baltimore serves as a warning of where this country is headed.

Earlier this year, Trump said there are 96 million people out of the labor force. This summer the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the unemployment data at an ultra low level of 4.3%. Again something doesn’t smell right.. ShadowStats.com on the other hand offers a different unemployment rate of 22.1%.

We should now understand US productivity peaked in 1972. Ever since then, the trend has been in a terminal decline with short lived booms in the 1990’s. For instance in Baltimore, democratic leadership coupled with decades of deindustrialization have gutted the city of it’s wealth instilling chaos and death on city streets. Baltimore is not an anomaly, but is a trend that is seen in Detroit, St. Louis, ect…. Restoring America’s inner cities is the key to slowing the momentum of declining productivity in our nation.. If not, the glide path will continue signaling the decline of an empire.

What I’m about to share with you is an inside view of the Baltimore’s homeless erecting a modern day ‘Hooverville’ tent city on the front lawn of city hall. The mainstream media is not allowed to show you this because it destroys the narrative the everything is awesome in Baltimore. In the second half of the video, I interview ‘Kenneth’, the organizer of the tent city. He offers his view on Baltimore’s economy…. Spoiler alert it’s not good.

****************

Bonus: PT 2: What an interview...

These Are The Cities Where Rent Hikes Leave The Most People Homeless

The idea that rising rents beget increases in a city’s homeless population is nothing new. But in a recent study, Zillow, the online real-estate database company, used a mix of government and proprietary data to examine how much influence an increase in the first variable has on the second.

The result was surprising.

Using a mix of government data and its own proprietary databases, the company found that the magnitude of rising rents’ impact on local homeless population varies widely between cities, even when two of those cities both have worsening homelessness problems.

For example, when the rent rises 5 percent in Atlanta, another 83 people become homeless. In New York, about 3,000 do, according to a Bloomberg analysis of the data.

“That 5 percent rent hike in Atlanta can be expected to boost the homeless population by 1.5 percent—in New York, by 3.9 percent. Cities such as Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Detroit may have smaller homeless populations, but theirs are also sensitive to rising rents."

The key variable here, as Skylar Olsen, a senior economist at Zillow, explains is the amount of slack, or rental vacancy rate, in a given market.

“Rent hikes are likelier to force more people into homelessness in housing markets with less slack, said Skylar Olsen, a senior economist at Zillow. Cities such as Houston and Tampa, she added, have been more successful in preventing rising rents from forcing people out of their homes. The study used the geographic definitions that HUD uses to count homeless populations, she said.

The U.S. is short more than 7 million housing units that extremely low-income households can afford, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which defines such households as earning less than 30 percent of area median income. Such low-income renters may not be living in homes with the area’s median rent, but a median rent hike can boost prices for even the cheapest market-rate units.

‘There’s an overarching supply of units that’s becoming a real problem,’ Olsen said. ‘People move down the ladder, and it pushes everyone else down, and eventually the bottom rung falls off.’”

Of course, rent isn’t the only factor affecting rates of homelessness; government-assistance programs funded by Housing and Urban Development keep hundreds of thousands of borderline Americans in their own homes.

Now, the White House is proposing legislation that would strip $7.4 billion from HUD’s 2018 budget. Those cuts would eliminate 250,000 rental-assistance vouchers from the Section 8 housing program, according to Bloomberg. The cuts mean that the local housing officials who distribute the vouchers will need to reduce, or in some cases remove, their assistance.

Some of those cuts will be cushioned by regular turnover, since some voucher recipients move out of the program every year, for one reason or another. But the level of proposed cuts means many local housing authorities will have to reduce how much assistance they supply to voucher holders—or, in some cases, take it away entirely. According to data from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, the US economy is already short 7 million affordable homes. A policy change like this one would likely cause that number to rise.
 

San Diego Wants To Allow Homeless People To Live Inside Empty Football Stadium

Via TheAntiMedia.org,

In an effort to combat a growing homelessness crisis, city officials in San Diego are developing a plan to temporarily house vagrants at a university practice field, local media reported Monday.

The proposal comes as the city unveils a new 62-unit apartment complex specifically designed to shelter homeless individuals and families.

“I think all things are on the table,” Councilman Chris Cate said Monday. Cate is a member of the city’s Select Committee on Homelessness, and the plan is the brainchild of the committee’s chairman, Christopher Ward.

"We hope that as we’re able to provide additional housing opportunities, some may be years down the road when those come online, that we’ll be able to scale back some of the need for immediate resources — that’s certainly the intent here,” Ward said, emphasizing that the plan is a short-term measure as the city looks for more permanent solutions.

Homelessness in San Diego has surged in recent years. A January tally put the number of transients in the city at over 5,600, up more than 10 percent from last year. The total number has risen more than 40 percent since 2014.

The chairman’s idea is for the city to construct temporary housing on the practice field of Qualcomm Stadium, where the San Diego Chargers played until 2016, and the San Diego State Aztecs play.

Housing would also be built at Golden Hall, a 3,200-seat indoor arena. The committee agreed to consider Ward’s proposal and expects to have a concrete plan outlined by September. The stadium’s fate has been subject of heated public debate following the Chargers’ decision to move to Los Angeles following the 2016 NFL season, leaving it relatively vacant.

Ward contends that a major obstacle for homeless people to overcome in trying to improve their living conditions is that they have no way to secure their property. Ward says temporary housing would provide them with a way to store items while they’re away:

“One of the big barriers people have from getting off the streets today is that their stuff is on the streets. So trying to go interview with the Housing Council or seek health assistance or do a job interview, they don’t want to leave their stuff. We don’t have enough storage and that’s something the city can provide.”

The plan was announced on the same day city officials celebrated the grand opening of the Cypress, a six-story permanent housing complex for the homeless that offers private kitchens and bathrooms, communal spaces, and access to social services and substance abuse programs.

This Economy Is Ruined For Many Americans

Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

Those who lost out on the Fed’s “wealth effect.”

Here’s a mystery: Has this “wealth-effect” economy that the Fed so beautifully engineered since the Financial Crisis gotten a lot riskier, scarier, and uglier in some profound ways for lower-income Americans, those making $30,000 or less a year?

One of the questions that Gallup posed was this:

Next, I’m going to read a list of problems facing the country. For each one, please tell me if you personally worry about this problem a great deal, a fair amount, only a little, or not at all? First, how much do you personally worry about –

Then came 13 issues, including “hunger and homelessness.”

Turns out, among Americans making $30,000 or less a year, 67% worry “a great deal” about hunger and homelessness! Food and shelter, two of the most basic human needs. That’s the highest percentage ever in Gallup’s data series on this question going back to 2001.

It’s up from 52% in 2001/2004; up from 56% in 2007/2008; and up from 51% in 2010/2011.

Median annual household income in February was $58,714, according to Sentier Research. On an inflation-adjusted basis, this was about flat with February 2016 and below February 2000. Median income means 50% make more and 50% make less. Other studies have shown that incomes have risen sharply at the upper end of the spectrum, but have fallen at the lower end, with the gap widening. Thus the median might have stagnated, but for many of those below the median, things haven’t turned out so well. And there are a lot of them!

With the prices of stocks, homes, art, classic cars, commercial real estate, and the like inflated to dizzying heights after eight years of radical monetary policies, why would these folks, making $30,000 or less – worry more than ever about such basic and dreadful conditions?

More on that in a moment. There are other elements in this mystery: Even among people making $30,000 to $75,000, a record 47% worry “a great deal” about hunger and homelessness, up from 40% in 2010-2011. And even among high-income Americans, the percentage, though small, has risen (chart by Gallup):

Rising worries about hunger and homelessness can have a number of causes, including media coverage of those topics, or coverage of rising income and wealth inequality in America. In its survey report, Gallup points out that occasionally, when something terrible happens, such as 9/11, it might be “dominating the national consciousness,” and hunger and homelessness recede as primary concerns.

We get that. But Gallup goes on:

Since 2001, worry has been highest among those residing in lower-income households, likely because those with limited financial resources are more at risk of going hungry or becoming homeless. A consistent majority of lower-income adults worried about the problem before 2012, but that has only increased in the past five years.

Lower-income Americans worry about basic problems, in this order:

1. Hunger/homelessness


2. Crime/violence


3. Healthcare


4. Drug use


5. Terrorism


6. Social Security


7. Economy

At the upper section of the spectrum, at incomes over $75,000, things look different, in that order:

1. Healthcare


2. Budget deficit


3. Economy


4. Social Security


5. Environment


6. Race relations


7. Hunger/homelessness

Lower-income Americans worry more in general than those with higher incomes. Everything is riskier and tougher for them. But nothing compares to the worries about hunger and homelessness. Gallup:

On average, across the 13 issues, the percentage of lower-income adults who worry a great deal is seven percentage points higher than among middle-income Americans, and 17 points higher than among upper-income Americans.

But differences in concern about hunger and homelessness far exceed those norms. In fact, the 20-point difference in worry about hunger and homelessness between lower-income and middle-income Americans is higher than for any of the other issues. Similarly, the 30-point difference in worry about hunger and homelessness between lower-income and upper-income Americans ties for the highest, along with concern about crime and violence.

In the dazzling glitter and excitement of soaring asset prices that central banks around the world, and particularly the Fed, have tried so hard to engineer, it’s easy to forget that not everyone has those assets, that a lot of people can’t get “rich” just sitting on inflated assets, that they have to work long hours in measly jobs just to stay one paycheck ahead of hunger and homelessness.

These Americans are paying the price for the Fed’s efforts to “heal” the housing market. The Fed has implemented elaborate strategies since 2008, among them: cutting its policy rate to near zero, embarking on QE, and bailing out banks and their richest investors, including Warren Buffett and his financial and insurance empire. In 2011, the Fed began encouraging and enabling Wall Street’s biggest private equity firms and other investors to buy up hundreds of thousands of homes out of foreclosure to push up home prices.

This has led to soaring housing costs that have by far outpaced wage growth, if any. And it made it that much harder for these Americans to stay that one paycheck ahead of hunger and homelessness. There are a lot of them. They’re consumers too. And this could be why the economy, which has been ruined for them, has since then not been able to grow at a reasonable pace.

And so, America becomes “Landlord Land.” Read…  So Who’s Pumping Up this “New Normal” Housing Market?

De Blasio Vows To Spend $300mm On NYC Shelters As Homeless Crisis Spirals Out Of Control

It"s fairly safe to say that Mayor Bill de Blasio has fallen "slightly" short of his original campaign goal to remedy the homelessness crisis in New York City.  In fact, The New York Post summed up the current situation in NYC fairly succinctly back in July 2015:

Unfortunately, particularly for a man seeking re-election later this year, the following stats on NYC homelessness are fairly damning.

So what do you do when you"re up for re-election in about 8 months and realize that you oversaw a massive expansion of a problem you previously vowed to eradicate?  Well, you throw as much taxpayer money as necessary at that problem to make it go way, of course.  Per the New York Daily News:

Mayor de Blasio unveiled an ambitious new plan Tuesday to address the vexing challenge of housing the homeless, vowing to build dozens more shelters but saying little about where he’d put them and acknowledging it won’t solve the crisis.

In a speech in lower Manhattan, the mayor promised to stop using the expensive hotels and the private apartments in “cluster sites” that the city has been reluctantly utilizing to house a homeless population that grows each year.

Instead, the mayor said he would move the homeless now staying in these places — many of which are plagued by decrepit conditions — into 90 new, traditional city shelters across the city.

Although the mayor said nothing about funding during his hour-long speech, his aides said later the city will spend $300 million over five years to build the shelters.

Meanwhile, even members of De Blasio"s own party blasted his lack of details and obvious attempt to just throw money at the the problem it hopes that it simple goes away.

Assemblyman Erik Dilan, a Brooklyn Democrat who as a city councilman was chairman of the Housing Committee, raised concerns about the high number of shelters.

“It’s going to be very difficult,” Dilan said. “There’s going to be an uproar in neighborhoods because they’d rather see people in permanent housing.”

“I am disheartened. I see more aspiration than reality,” said Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx), whose district has the highest concentration of cluster sites in the city.

“The city has been throwing the kitchen sink at the crisis, expending hundreds of millions of dollars, and none of it seems to be working,” he said.

“Our community wants to be respected,” he said. “We’ve sort of heard this story before, so the proof will be in the pudding.”

We sense an opening for you, Hillary.

California City Erects 'Prison Camp' To Deal With Homeless

There are two major problems that come to mind, explains SHTFPlan.com"s Mac Slavo; first, the level of homelessness, poverty and idle populations in California and across the country, and second, the divided world between the 1% and the struggling 99% is coming to a head.

Economically, things are very close to the brink, and there are far too many people who’ve given up at the individual level. This crisis has given the impetus for cities like Santa Ana to take drastic action.

The other side of the coin, is that if they can do this to homeless vagrants, and out of work families, they can do it to anyone. If civil unrest comes, perhaps in combination with mass unemployment, a crashed stock market and monetary system and great misery, those keeping society in check will feel compelled to come down with a heavy hand. People will be rounded up, some of them unfairly. Entire communities can be disrupted, or forced under an emergency to evacuate and take shelter in FEMA centers while the cities become off limits. There are a lot of things that can happen – including to hard working, employment, head-above-water American families.

When this thing starts to unravel, making do in the current atmosphere won’t cut it; in the aftermath of what is coming, many people will be desperate. Tent cities and migrating Americans looking for temporary work will return; millions more will flock to government welfare programs, and be dragged into the dregs of collectivist measure to ride out bad times. They are moving to sweep up the disarray of a society that is crumbling, and a financial landscape that is no longer survivable for a wide sector of the general population.

City Erects Prison Camp To Deal With Homeless – Cutting Off Food And Water

Authored by The Free Thought Project"s Matt Agorist,

The City of Santa Ana has come up with an innovative and despotic way of keeping their homeless population in check — imprison them. The city is now party to a federal lawsuit over unreasonable seizure, false imprisonment, and due process violations.

Heading up the lawsuit on behalf of Michael Diehl, who has lived at the encampment for three years, is the ACLU of Southern California. The lawsuit demands the immediate removal of the 6-foot-tall chain-link fences penning in 75-100 people and their belongings.

“Defendants’ actions have not only illegally restricted the liberty of the homeless people living in the encampment, but it has also cut them off from access to food, water, and medical care thus threatening their health and well-being,” the lawsuit states.

According to Courthouse News:

Diehl was shot in the head at a Tustin convenience store in 2009. He lost his right eye and doctors were unable to remove the bullet from his head. He takes medication every day to control seizures that have become more frequent with the increased presence of authorities at the encampment, he says in the complaint.

When a woman suffered a seizure at the encampment after the fence was erected, Diehl says, paramedics had difficulty reaching her because the barriers have blocked parts of the sidewalks at Chapman Avenue and Orangewood Avenue where people used to come and go.

If people living at the encampment cut holes in the fences with bolt cutters, Orange County Public Works employees repair it. For the elderly and disabled it is neither safe nor realistic to scale the fence or navigate the river to get to a steep, rocky embankment on the river’s west side, Diehl says.

“Children, people with severe disabilities, the elderly and others are deprived of food, water and access to restrooms,” said ACLU homelessness policy analyst Eve Garrow. “The county should take action to rectify this egregious violation of basic human rights.”

Naturally, the county is claiming that they are not doing anything wrong and that the fence, put in place after the homeless community began growing there, is for ‘flood control.’

“The county is aware that there are homeless encampments in the project area. Flood control channels are not a safe place to live. Sign postings and in-person notifications about the project have been provided to those encamped along the county maintenance road,” the county said in a statement.

However, according to Diehl and the others who are imprisoned in the camp, police told them that they should move there to avoid citations for sleeping in public in the other parts of town.

What this case in Santa Ana illustrates is the state’s continued war on the right of people to exist. Every time a group homeless community finds a safe spot, located out of the way, they are targeted for removal, or, in this barbaric case — imprisonment.

Earlier this month, the Free Thought Project reported on another war being waged against the homeless population in California. Known as ‘The Promised Land,’ a group of homeless people in Oakland sought to improve their situation by creating a camp that would foster sobriety and help people to get jobs. It was located out of the way, under a series of overpasses. They had running water, were growing their own food, and did not allow drug or alcohol use within the camp.

As cops and officials allowed the other heroin riddled encampments to continue, they targeted The Promised Land for destruction. 

Diehl now seeks an injunction ordering the county to provide him with “reasonable means of leaving the riverbed and being able to retrieve his property.”