Saturday, November 21, 2009

HOMELESSNESS - America's Wave of the Future UNDER MEX OCCUPATION

HOMELESS – A PRODUCT OF THE RAPE AND PILLAGE OF BANKSTERS i.e., foreclosures for profits, AND THE MEXICAN OCCUPATION where NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!
Every year 1.5 million poor, illiterate, pregnant, and frequently criminal Mexicans walk over our border. They are directed to the American borders by their own government as the place they need to cut to the front of the line for welfare, American jobs, and the flourishing Mexican gang and drug cartel franchises. They are also invited to hip our borders by the LA RAZA DEMS, such as Nancy Pelosi, who has long illegally hired illegals at her St. Helena, Napa winery, and Dianne Feinstein who has long illegally hired illegals at her S.F. hotel. Both of these lifer-politicians, along with their side-kick Ma’am Boxer, now running for another 6 years of worthless senate seat saving, are LA RAZA ENDORSED and OPEN BORDERS = DEPRESS WAGES = HUGE PROFIT MARGINS.
The city with the largest number of homeless is Los Angeles, under Mexican occupation where 47% of those with a job are illegals, and the MONTHLY welfare paid to ILLEGALS is $50 million!
WSWS.org
New York City homeless population at an all-time high
By Sandy English and Ali Ismail
21 November 2009
According to a report released last month by the New York City advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless, there are currently almost 37,000 people in the city shelter system. This includes approximately 10,000 homeless families with 16,500 children.
The number of homeless housed by the city marks an 11 percent increase over last year and is the highest number of people seeking shelter on record. These figures are all the more significant because they reflect the state of the homeless population before the cold weather has started.
The report notes, “The growing homeless family shelter population has been driven by historically high numbers of newly homeless families entering the municipal shelter system.” In August, over 1,900 families sought shelter in the city’s system. For the last fiscal year (FY), over 120,000 homeless people used the city’s shelters.
The emergence of mass unemployment in the city has been the leading cause of the increase in homelessness. The official figure now stands at 10.3 percent, with a loss of 111,000 jobs since last year. Among Blacks and Hispanics, the figure is over 20 percent. If part-time workers who want full-time jobs and those who have stopped looking for work are counted, the overall unemployment rate rises to 15.8 percent.
Antonietta Bertucci, Director of Part of the Solution (POTS) Justice Center, a nonprofit agency that supplies services to the poor in the Bronx, told the WSWS: “We’ve seen people that would never have imagined they would be seeking our services. One woman who came to us is sleeping her car. She was evicted because she lost her job.”
The city’s capacity to shelter the homeless is being severely strained. Mary Brosnahan, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, wrote in the Daily News, “New York City is in the midst of a homeless emergency. … As of Sept. 30, there were only two empty beds left in the entire New York City shelter system for homeless men and only eight empty beds for homeless women—10 available beds in a system of more than 7,000 for homeless single adults.”
The city spent over $856 million providing these services in FY 2009.
On November 7, the Department of Homeless Services announced that it would close the city’s largest drop-in shelter to make way for the construction of a new subway line. The Open Door on 41st St. near the Port Authority Bus Terminal serves meals to homeless men and women. According the Daily News, although the shelter does not have beds, an average of 94 people slept there each night in September.
Robert Hess, the chairman of the Department of Homeless Services, the city will not replace the center, but seek to add beds to churches and synagogues that house the homeless. But Patrick Markee, a policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, told the News: “With all-time record homelessness, this is no time for the Bloomberg administration to close the city’s largest drop-in center for homeless people”.
Bloomberg’s policies, like those of his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani, are more concerned with hiding the homeless from view than with addressing the needs of people in distress.
One of these schemes involves providing homeless individuals and families with one-way bus or plane tickets to wherever they have contacts that could give them a place to stay. The New York Times reported that at least 550 families have been relocated in this fashion. City Hall would much rather ship families off rather than spend the funds necessary to house them. People have been relocated to many states and to a number of countries around the world.
According to the Times, many of these families are often long-time residents of the city, while others are newcomers. Hector Correa, an immigrant from Puerto Rico, told the Times, “I didn’t expect the city to be the way it is. I was expecting something different, something better.”
Ruby Davis told WCBS TV that she felt the city was trying to give her the boot when she was offered a one-way ticket to North Carolina, where her estranged mother lived. She said, “I didn’t take it because when I was living in North Carolina, I was sleeping on a broken pull-out couch, and I wasn’t getting along with my mom at the time.” Domestic violence and domestic disputes often lead to homelessness—a fact the one-way ticket program obviously does not consider.
Arnold S. Cohen, president of the Partnership for the Homeless, criticized the policy for failing to address the underlying causes of homelessness. He said, “What we’re doing is passing the problem of homelessness to another city. We’re taking people from a shelter bed here to the living room couch of another family. Essentially, this family is still homeless.”
In a grotesque scheme, the city’s Department of Homeless services began charging rent (see “New York City demands rent from the homeless”) to some families living in shelters in May. After a public outcry, the city backed off. Based on WSWS interviews with families seeking shelter from the city, it is clearly difficult for families to obtain services to begin with.
In addition to mass unemployment, the irrationality of the housing market and the very high cost of housing in New York City aggravate homelessness. Millions of working-class and middle-class people sacrifice huge portions of their income to pay rent or mortgages. When someone in a family loses a job or has a medical emergency, it can become impossible to pay rent or make payments on a house.
In New York City, however, blocks of units remain unfinished or unoccupied because big landlords cannot make a profit by completing or renting them. Often wealthy property owners chose to hold back empty apartments from the market, hoping to make a return on them later. Three years ago, the group Picture the Homeless estimated that 24,000 units in Manhattan alone are empty and available.
The New York Times noted recently that, despite city financing for the creation of affordable housing, over 200,000 apartments for lower-income working-class families have been eliminated since 2002. According to data supplied by New York University’s Furman Center, the city now has only 991,591 units that it considers affordable for families that make less than 80 percent of the city’s median income, $37,000 a year. This is a loss of 17 percent since 2002.
Antonietta Bertucci of POTS told the WSWS that over the last year, a number of landlords have taken advantage of a program sponsored by the Department of Homeless Services. The DHS will pay up to $3,000 to rent an apartment as a shelter for the homeless. This has prompted mass evictions from some buildings, especially in the Bronx, because landlords see it as a way to make more money. “They take their tenants to housing court and accuse them of violating their leases,” Bartucci said. “The tenants are obligated to prove that they did not”.
She added, “Everybody is suffering because of the recession, including the landlords. They can’t afford their mortgages and pass the cost on to their tenants. Many apartments are in awful condition. It is quite widespread in the Bronx for tenants not to have hot water”.
The housing crisis in New York City and nationwide is so egregious that the United Nations Human Rights Council recently appointed a special rapporteur on the right to affordable housing in the US. The rapporteur, a professor of city planning from the University of São Paulo in Brazil named Raquel Rolnik, was denied entry into the US by the Bush administration. Admitted to the US after the election of Barack Obama, she found that little had changed in US government attitudes to the homeless: “One of the first meetings I had at the State Department, they clearly told me: here, adequate housing is not a human right.”
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Atlanta homeless shelters strain under economic crisis
By Naomi Spencer
23 October 2009
As the economic crisis deepens, Atlanta, Georgia, emergency providers are straining to accommodate more than 7,000 homeless people, including many newly homeless families.
Along with rising unemployment and a growing number of home foreclosures across the US, the homeless population is swelling far beyond the capacity of emergency facilities. Urban centers have felt the impact most sharply, with service organizations facing budget cuts at the same time that thousands are thrust into poverty and foreclosure.
According to an October 12 report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta’s Salvation Army cannot open a nearly completed homeless shelter for families because of a lack of funds. Similarly, the city’s Midtown Assistance Center, an agency providing emergency financial assistance, announced in August that it had spent twice its monthly $24,000 budget on aid in the month of July. The agency assists employed workers and those in job training who do not receive public assistance.
Another area service provider, MUST Ministries, reported that it aided 29,000 people last year, and requests for assistance are up 25 percent this year. Annette Lee, MUST Ministries’ resource development coordinator, commented to the Journal-Constitution of September 29: “It’s no longer just hourly wage workers. These are professionals—from bankers to people with masters and PhD’s…. We are seeing more and more people who are above the poverty line.”
Metro Atlanta has lost nearly 143,000 payroll jobs in the past year, according to the most recent Labor Department figures, and well over a quarter million workers are unemployed in the city. Foreclosure filings have surged, with more than 97,000 foreclosure notices served in the metro area so far this year, up from the already high 79,400 in 2008.
According to Census Bureau data released in September, nearly 26,000 metro Atlanta families fell below the poverty line in 2008—before the sharp economic decline of 2009—representing an increase of 19 percent over 2007.
The Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, a large walk-in shelter downtown, is now serving more than 700 people each night and anticipating far higher numbers as the weather turns colder. The Task Force is often the only emergency shelter open to men, after other city shelters fill with families.
According to employees, the shelter has come under attack from a local business group, Central Atlanta Progress (CAP), which wants the agency closed. The Task Force filed a lawsuit in July against CAP and members of city government on charges of harassment and interference. According to the lawsuit, the city refused to issue certifications to the Task Force that would have allowed the group to obtain government funds, despite the agency’s compliance with city requirements.
The shelter has also had its water shut off by the city twice in the past year without explanation. CAP officials have publicly expressed the opinion that the shelter breeds crime and encourages laziness among the homeless population. In September, the city petitioned to have the Task Force’s lawsuit dismissed. That petition was denied by Fulton County Superior Court.
According to Anita Beaty, director of the Task Force, more than three-quarters of the people who sleep at the shelter earn a living during the day, but not enough to afford rent in the city.
“Atlanta has been trying to hide poverty so they attack us for keeping poverty out front,” shelter employee Troy Harris told the Journal-Constitution. “If the city was doing what it says it is doing in placing people in housing, we wouldn’t have 700 people a night in here. We are the visible truth of Atlanta.”
Atlanta’s political establishment has taken several measures over the past decade to push out the poorest layers of the population and gentrify the downtown area. In the mid-1990s, in preparation for hosting the Olympics, the city initiated a systematic destruction of public housing.
The first city to open public housing units to the poor in the 1930s, Atlanta now bears the distinction of being the first city to have all of them closed down. In the past 15 years, the city has torn down some 15,000 units in 32 housing projects. According to a 2007 study by the Georgia Institute of Technology, as the number of units was halved and replaced by mixed-income communities, only one third of displaced residents were able to resettle.
As part of the same broad strategy of gentrification, beginning in 2003 Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin issued a series of orders banning such acts as donating food to the homeless on downtown streets, soliciting donations and sleeping in public areas. Atlanta police, posing as tourists, have staged a series of undercover street sweeps, arresting dozens of homeless people for asking for money.
The policies in Atlanta are not unique. Virtually all major cities in the US have put in place measures to criminalize homelessness and push shelters, clinics and other services outside of the downtown areas. As the economic crisis deepens, those pushed out of their jobs and homes will come under increasing attack, as the ruling establishment seeks to obscure the social realities.
In July, the National Coalition for the Homeless issued a report on this trend throughout the country. A survey of 235 cities found that one-third have ordinances in place banning “camping” in public areas, and 30 percent banned “sitting/lying” in public areas. Nearly half of all cities surveyed had bans on “loitering” and begging.

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