Tag / poverty

by Edward Champion

The American Homelessness Crisis

The new HUD report shows a remarkably unsettling rise in American homelessness. This is the worst homelessness crisis since the Reagan years. Wages and affordable housing have failed to rise in proportion with these new figures. And the hell of it is that it would not cost that much for Americans — particularly, the richest ones — to pay their fair share and ensure that nobody lives in poverty.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (aka HUD) released its Annual Homelessness Assessment Report and the data is extremely dispiriting and disturbing. Homelessness rose 18.1% over the course of 2024. And to give you an indication of just how dramatic this unfathomable rise truly is, by point of comparison, homelessness increased 19.2% from 2007 to 2024. In other words, in one year, homelessness increased at nearly the exact same rate that it had over the course of the previous seventeen years. As HUD was careful to note in its press release, this report was generated from data collected more than a year ago. Meaning that the tally of homeless Americans — which stood at 770,000 on a cold solitary night in January 2024 — is undoubtedly larger than this.

The culprits, of course, are the lack of affordable housing and wages not rising fast enough to accommodate this new influx of people who don’t make enough money at their jobs to pay their rent. The chart pictured above is taken from data pulled from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which shows a dramatic upward curve — one that correlates with the sharp increase in homelessness during the last seventeen years — of the consumer price index for the average residential rent in America. 230,806 in January 2007 to 426,651 in November 2024. According to the NYU Furman Center, the median gross rent increased by 16.2% between 2011 and 2021. In Los Angeles County, the average rent increased 14.09% between 2023 and 2024. The average rent in Chicago went up $600/month in just under ten years.

There has not been a federal increase in minimum wage since 2009. A series of amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 2007 increased the minimum wage to $5.85/hour as of July 24, 2007, $6.55/hour as of July 24, 2008, and $7.25/hour as of July 24, 2009. In other words, during the same time window in which homelessness drastically increased, minimum wage — which was intended to offer the bare minimum to live in America — has not risen in direct proportion to these draconian costs.

In other words, the data couldn’t be any clearer. Even before Donald Trump has taken office, the United States is presently experiencing the worst homeless crisis seen since the Reagan years, in which homelessness doubled from 1984 to 1987. But in 1984, the number of homeless people was lower, estimated to be somewhere in the area of 200,000 to 500,000. Reagan famously cut vital social services that were designed to combat this grossly immoral and utterly cruel neglect of the most marginalized members in society.

This is only going to get worse.

Trump is prepared to go much further than Reagan with the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (aka DOGE). Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are prepared to dismantle nearly anything that’s left to aid the vulnerable. Earlier this month, Elon Musk stated, “In most cases, the word ‘homeless’ is a lie. It’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness.” On July 25, 2023, when Ramaswamy was running for President, he published an op-ed in The New York Post in which he outrageously suggested that homeless people should stop receiving any financial assistance whatsoever and risibly concluded that a focus on “family, faith, and truth” would somehow serve in lieu of the vital cash needed to escape impoverishment. Last I heard, “family, faith, and truth” isn’t recognized as our national currency and it sure as hell isn’t going to buy you a sandwich at the bodega. “Family, faith, and truth” — particularly the truth twisted with coldblooded glee — won’t land you an apartment when the average rent continues to rise. It won’t build affordable housing units. It won’t, in short, solve the problem. But these two callous vultures are now eager to slice anything that remains of homeless aid.

And if you seriously believe that the Democrats are going to come to the rescue, think again. The duplicitous Bill Clinton set the cruel tenor when he signed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, dismantling ADFC and replacing it with a forced labor requirement if you hoped to receive the penurious allotment to put food on your table or diapers for your children. The Welfare Reform Act was never intended to help the homeless. It was set up to create welfare companies that could profit from these new marks. In 2023, That Uncertain Hour‘s Krissy Clark conducted an investigation on this nefarious practice, which has been scantly reported on in by corporate media.

In 2014, Obama signed the Farm Bill, which made more than $8 billion in cuts to the food stamp program and increased the likelihood that someone teetering on the edge of homelessness would fall off the precipice. 89 Democrats voted for this vile bill in the House.

How much would it cost to cure poverty in America? The great Matthew Desmond has calculated the figure at $177 billion. That’s how much it would take annually to ensure that all Americans rise above the poverty line. He believes that if the richest 1% paid their fair share, this new safety net would eliminate homelessness and its attendant problems (crime, addiction, mental health).

But the prospect of any radical remedy to a very serious problem is nonexistent under Donald Trump and under a House and a Senate that is controlled by Republicans. These politicians have been purchased by the very millionaires and billionaires who don’t want to pay their fair share for American success.

Given all this overwhelming data, one must naturally ask what it will take for America to get serious about homelessness. How many people have to become homeless before the issue, which is already out of control, is properly addressed? Two million? Ten million? Fifty million?

Lawmakers and everyday Americans have grown accustomed to looking the other way when they see a homeless man begging for change on the streets. This is a deeply ingrained behavioral pattern that needs a significant 180. Because it’s very clear that government is not going to help us. But maybe if we get serious about pooling our resources through mutual aid, we can do what the government can’t.

What’s so astonishing is that it actually would not cost that much to fix poverty. If we take Desmond’s figure of $177 billion and divide it by the American population of 334 million, that works out to $526 each year that every American would have to pay. Five hundred dollars. That’s half the price of your annual cable bill. That’s five trips to the grocery store. Five nights out on the town. It really doesn’t cost that much. In fact, the annual tally would be considerable less for the working-class and the middle-class if those in the higher income brackets paid a greater proportion.

Financially speaking, it makes no sense whatsoever for the plutocrats to continue profiting on the underprivileged. If the homeless population continues to rise so rapidly, there won’t be a consumer class that can prop up the economy. Unless, of course, the idea here is to create a new form of slavery, whereby the hungry and the homeless are forced to toil for the most picayune remuneration imaginable while being deracinated of all opportunity and democratic agency. Given the sociopathic declarations from Elon and Vivek, it would appear that this is going to be the plan. Because why does anyone need a roof over his head when there’s “family, faith, and truth”?

by Edward Champion

The Casual Villainy of Feel-Good Neoliberal Bullshit

I attended a private film screening and was confronted by cruel and dangerous myths from Panglossian neoliberals. They need to be stopped.

A few nights ago, a very kind friend took me to a private screening of a film about homelessness, under the presumed theory that my own homeless experience from four years before might be of help to the filmmaker. This filmmaker, who I should point out was an extremely tall and quietly affable man (affable, at least, to anyone who he detected was very much like himself!), believed, like many myopic neoliberals, that he was doing the right thing with his film. But he wasn’t. He was, in fact, contributing dangerously and cruelly to a repulsive dehumanizing myth that has become as seductive as catnip to most of the American population.

The film played. The affluent crowd that gathered in the basement of this tony Manhattan restaurant cheered as some talking head boasted about delivering forty pairs of socks to the homeless. The socks, said this starry-eyed subject, were a way to give the homeless an identity. But I knew damn well that what these people really needed, as I once so desperately begged for, was food, a shelter that wasn’t committed to daily debasement and that actually did something to protect residents from random stabbings, and a stable job that permitted someone who had nothing to save enough resources for first and last month’s rent. This preposterous subject also bragged on film about taking homeless people to a comedy show to cheer them up. Never mind that this is a risible impossibility, considering that shelters impose a draconian curfew each night, usually sometime between 9 PM and 10 PM, that you must hit. If you don’t make this curfew, for which you must factor in a lengthy line in which security guards pat you down and tear through what little you have, you will lose your bed and have all your possessions, meager as they are, thrown into a huge plastic bag and tossed into the street. (This happened to me. And I was forced to haul a very heavy bag with fragile lining, half of what I had damaged and dingy, on a subway, where I could feel the eyes of every commuter looking the other direction.)

I watched as a shoeshine man on-screen bought into the lazy, drug-addled homeless stereotype who never seeks out work (oh, but they do, even when they have a substance abuse problem!). It was a trope no different from the way Reagan had used Linda Taylor, an incredibly rare and unlikely figure hardly representative of homelessness, to establish his staunch conservatism and needlessly demonize the welfare system in 1976. And I was shaking with indignation as the filmmaker, who appeared himself as the film’s first talking head in a bona-fide act of artistic narcissism, bragged about how he had talked to a homeless person, believing her sad face to be an act. He refused to acknowledge her real pain and true fear as he painted himself as a champion of the underprivileged. I looked to my right and I witnessed the filmmaker himself sitting in his chair, responding to his repugnant untruths and counterfactual bromides by bobbing his head up and down to every cinematic cadence he had manufactured.

The film I saw, or at least what I mostly saw (because I bolted after about thirty minutes of this: I was so enraged after one “well-meaning” audience member laughed at a homeless stereotype and chuckled over the film’s bootstraps bullshit, which presented poverty as a “choice,” an emphasis that greatly overshadowed, oh say, examining the details of a rigged system or humanizing the people who are often locked into a nigh inescapable abyss and who are rendered invisible simply because they lost their jobs at a bad time or suffered any number of setbacks that could happen to anyone (hell, it happened to me!), and because this was a “celebration” for the filmmaker and I knew that if I stuck around, I would have gone out of my way to fight fiercely with ruthlessly truthful invective and I am really trying to live a more peaceful life and let things go more — but goddammit you see puffed up privilege like this and it’s not easy!), angered me beyond belief. It was a superficial glimpse of what at least half a million people in this nation go through (and this number is rising): an absolute lie that refused to address vile welfare-to-work realities, the shameful bureaucracy of standing in line for a day arguing to some underpaid heartless stooge why you should get a mere $150 each month to eat (and under Trump, these already svelte and insufficient benefits are in danger of being cut further), the violent and depressing culture within homeless shelters that causes so many to give up and that causes smart people (and let me assure you that there are many smart people who are homeless) to throw in the towel when they shouldn’t have to.

As many have argued (including Thomas Frank, whom I interviewed about this significant problem here), the Democratic Party has completely divorced itself from advocating for working people and those who need our help. The Democrats haven’t seriously championed for universal aid since Mario Cuomo’s inspiring keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. When principled progressives stand against this milquetoast centrism, they are — as this incredible episode of This American Life recently revealed — urged to push the reasons why they are running into the middle if they want access to funds that will help them win elections. And when candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actually stand for something and beat out long-time incumbents in a primary, they are, as the disheartening replies to this tweet reveal, declared “a piece of work” and “arrogant” by middle-of-the-road cowards who have never known a day without a hot meal and who refuse to address deeply pernicious realities that people actually live. These weak-kneed and priggish pilgarlics still drop dollars with their colicky hands into the room rental till for their Why Isn’t Hillary President? support groups. They are more interested in wrapping themselves in warm comforting blankets rather than surrendering their bedding to someone sleeping on the streets. They are so enamored and ensnared by this ugly and unsound marriage between capitalism and humanism that they adamantly refuse to listen to the very people they’ve pledged to cure. They ignore any fresh new voice who has the steel to launch a political campaign based on the truth. Their shaky tenure is out of sync with the robust reform we need right now to address our national ills.

I now believe neoliberalism to be just as much of an evil cancer as Trumpism. It needs to be fought hard. Because any ideology that prioritizes supremacy (and neoliberals can be a smug and oh so certain bunch) is a call to dehumanize others.

So how did the film screening conclude? Well, I apologized to my friend, told her that I couldn’t take the film anymore and that I knew this was triggering deep rage in me because it denied and invalidated the horrors that I personally experienced and that I had somehow found the resilience and strength to overcome. I took my leave, tipped the bartender far more than these moneyed types did, and saw that the filmmaker was watching me. What? A man fleeing his unquestionable genius? Why yes, you imperious insensitive clueless dope! So I went up to him and said, “My name is Ed Champion. I was homeless four years ago and your film is a terrible lie. You should be ashamed of yourself.” True to form, he went back to cheering on his own film, paying me no heed whatsoever.