HAVE YOU EVEN ONCE HEARD
A DEM POL TALK ABOUT THE HOMELESS CRISIS IN AMERICA?
"When we hear stories about the homelessness in
California and elsewhere, why don't we hear how illegal aliens contribute to
the problem? They take jobs and affordable housing, yet instead of
discouraging illegal aliens from breaking the law, politicians encourage them
to come by lavishing free stuff on them with confiscated dollars from this
and future generations." JACK HELLNER
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next
two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15
million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in
the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring
an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Over 1.5 million homeless students in the US
On the day that US President Donald Trump proclaimed a “a
blue-collar boom” in his State of the Union address, the Federal government
reported that the number of students experiencing homelessness had hit a record
high.
More than 1.5 million public school students, from kindergarten
to high school, experienced homelessness at some point in time during the
2017-18 school year, according to a report released
Wednesday by the National Center for Homeless Education. The number is the
highest recorded since the organization began tracking student homelessness.
In his State of the Union address, Trump presented the United
States as a paradise for American workers, declaring “The years of economic
decay are over… Gone, too, are the broken promises, jobless recoveries, tired
platitudes and constant excuses.”
Trump has consistently pointed to the “booming” stock market as
proof that the economic situation of workers “has never been better.” However,
the report is just one of many recent social indicators that expose mounting
inequality and social distress in the United States.
The three richest people in the US have as much wealth as the
bottom half of US society. Life expectancy in the country has declined for
three years in a row, driven by overdose, suicide, and deaths of despair. On
average, wealthier Americans live almost ten more “disability-free” years,
after the age of 50, than the poorest.
The report defines homelessness as individuals who lack a
“fixed, regular, and adequate” nighttime residence. This includes students
living in hotels or motels, sharing housing with other families, living in
homeless shelters, or in inadequate housing such as abandoned warehouses or
vehicles.
Compared to the 2015-16 school year, the 2017-18 school year
showed a 15 percent increase, from 1,307,656 to 1,508,265, in students reported
as experiencing homelessness. The number from 2017-18 was more than double the
680,000 students who experienced homelessness in 2004-05, the first year
examined by the organization.
Sixteen states experienced a growth of more than ten percent in
their homeless student population, from 2015-16 to 2017-18. Texas saw the
largest increase over the period, with its number of homeless students doubling
to more than 231,000. Texas, California, and New York account for more than a
third of all homeless students. Overall, fourteen states reported a decrease.
Only six, however, reported decreases of more than ten percent.
During 2017-18, 74 percent of students experiencing homelessness
shared housing with others, due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or
similar reasons. Twelve percent of homeless students lived in homeless
shelters. Seven percent primarily resided in hotels or motels, and another 7
percent were identified as unsheltered.
The report noted a 137 percent increase, over a three-year
period, in students (totaling more than 102,000) who reported staying in
unsheltered places, such as vehicles or abandoned buildings, while homeless.
The number of students who lived in hotels or motels increased by 24 percent,
while students who “doubled up” with other families increased by 13 percent. In
contrast, the number of students in shelters declined by 2 percent.
Further statistics reveal that the severity of the issue has
worsened. More children in primary school and early childhood education are
homeless than those in middle and high school. Unaccompanied homeless youth,
who are often fleeing neglect or abuse, make up nine percent of the homeless
student population. Eighteen percent of homeless students are disabled and 31
states reported that at least 20 percent of their homeless students had an
identified disability.
Under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, school
districts are eligible for federal aid to support homeless students. In
2017-18, 4,387 school districts, just under one quarter of the total in the
country, received subgrants under the Act. Funding under the McKinney-Vento Act
rose by almost $12 million between 2015 and 2017, with states providing an
average $76.50 per pupil. However, per pupil funding hardly changed, due to the
larger number of homeless students.
The insecurity and lack of stability that homeless students face
severely impact their ability to learn and assimilate information, in the most
formative period of their lives. During the 2017-18 school year, only 29
percent of students facing homelessness achieved academic proficiency in
language arts. Only 24 percent achieved proficiency in mathematics, and just 26
percent in science.
Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection,
a nonprofit based in Washington that supports homeless youth, told the New York Times that the
causes behind the rise in student homelessness were complex and depended on
where students lived in the United States.
The sharp rises in states such as Texas and Florida were driven
by natural disasters, including hurricanes and extreme flooding. During the
2017-18 school year, the Gulf Coast was ravaged by storms that destroyed
thousands of homes. Duffield also explained that lack of affordable housing,
the opioid and methamphetamine addiction crises, and local economic factors,
such as factory closings, all influenced the increase in student homelessness.
Tom
Steyer: Americans Must Provide Cheap Housing to Illegal Immigrants
13 Jan 20202,348
8:12
Tom
Steyer, the billionaire investor and Democrat 2020 candidate, wants Americans
to provide cheap housing to illegal immigrants.
“A Steyer Administration will …
ensure that all undocumented communities have access to affordable and safe
housing,” Steyer said in his immigration proposal.
Steyer’s offer of housing is combined with promises to provide
illegals with free healthcare, plus workplace training and cultural
celebrations:
A Steyer administration … [will] provide a safe platform for
immigrants to share their culture and celebrate their heritage, foster
opportunities for public service that support new Americans, and coordinate
with Federal agencies and the private sector in order to build workforce
training and fellowship opportunities for immigrants with professional
qualifications from their home nation to help them leverage their specialized
skills in the American marketplace.
Steyer made his promise of cheap housing to illegals even though
housing costs for many Americans forces them to rent or buy cheaper housing far
from work and friends, and are being forced to give up hopes for larger
families.
But those housing costs are high partly because the federal
government welcomes one million new legal immigrants into the nation’s cities,
neighborhoods, and schools. That is a huge inflow — four million young
Americans turn 18 each year.
But Steyer is a billionaire investor, so illegal migrants will
not be moving into his very expensive and well policed neighborhood. The New
Yorker magazine described his house in 2013:
President [barack Obama] flew to San Francisco on April 3rd for
a series of fund-raisers. He stopped in first at a cocktail reception hosted by
Tom Steyer, a fifty-six-year-old billionaire, former hedge-fund manager, and
major donor to the Democratic Party. Steyer lives in the city’s Sea Cliff
neighborhood, in a house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
Any inflow of migrants will be a
boon to Steyer’s fellow investors who gain from the extra workers, consumers,
and renters. For example, one gauge of real estate investments shows a 50 percent gain since 2015,
even as Americans’ wages and salaries rose by only about 15 percent.
Meanwhile, Steyer’s home state is
experiencing record housing prices and record homelessness as today’s illegals
enjoy the state government’s offer of sanctuary, jobs, and welfare. The federal
housing agency reported January 7 the state has about 108,000 homeless:
This year’s report shows that there was a small increase in the
one-night estimates of people experiencing homelessness across the nation
between 2018 and 2019 (three percent), which reflects a 16 percent increase in
California, and offsets a marked decrease across many other states.
…
In terms of absolute numbers, California has more than half of
all unsheltered homeless people in the country (53 percent or 108,432), with
nearly nine times as many unsheltered homeless as the state with the next
highest number, Florida (six percent or 12,476), despite California’s
population being only twice that of Florida.
In September Breitbart News reported the Census Bureau showed how the state’s housing costs are
pushing Americans into poverty:
The September 10 study shows 18.2 percent of California’s
population is poor, far above the 13 percent poverty rate in Arkansas, 16
percent in Mississippi, and the 14.6 percent in West Virginia.
…
By 2017, for example, the government’s pro-migration policies
had added 11 million people to the state’s native population of 29 million
people. The huge inflow means that one-in-four residents are immigrants.
Numerous studies have shown many
millions of foreigners want to migrate into Americans’ society. For example,
another five million Central American residents want to migrate into the
United States, according to a Gallup survey published
right after the 2018 midterm elections.
Gallup also noted “three percent of the world’s adults — or
nearly 160 million people — say they would like to move to the U.S.”
California's poverty rate is worse than
Alabama & Mississippi, says Census Bureau. The major cause of this huge
change is immigration policy which spikes housing costs & shrinks wages --
and delivers huge gains for investors in real-estate & corp. shares. http://bit.ly/2mgvBlW
California Has Highest Poverty Rate, with Housing Costs
Steyer’s promise to welcome illegals
is echoed by the other investor billionaire in the Democrats’ primary, Mike
Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. In January, he promised to make
illegals comfortable with Americans’ money, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Well, it’s a no brainer. You give [a] pathway to citizenship to
11 million people. We’re not going to deport them anyways, it’s outrageous. If
you look in New York City, we make sure that people felt comfortable,
regardless of their immigration status, to come and get city services. I was
always determined that they would not be afraid to come. Somebody could need
like life-threatening things and does not get medical care. This is not a game.
You’ve got to make sure that they’re okay.
Housing costs in Bloomberg’s New
York are very high because it has huge populations of illegal and legal immigrants. The result is that it has
a homeless population of roughly 92,000, and also the nation’s highest rate of homelessness, at 46 homeless for every 10,000 people.
High housing costs also make it
difficult for Americans to move into towns and cities that have better-paying
jobs, according to a 2017 study about the rising wealth gap in the United States. Americans “are frozen where
they live,” said Tom Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, at a
January 9 meeting.
But nearly all of the Democrats in the 2020 election have called
for more migrants — without showing any concern for the impact on Americans’
housing costs.
“We could afford to take in a
heartbeat another two million people,” Joe Biden told Democrats at an August event in Des Moines, Iowa. “The idea
that a country of 330 million people is cannot absorb people who are in
desperate need … is absolutely bizarre … I would also move to
increase the total number of immigrants able to come to the United
States.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s
immigration plan, for example,
is titled “A Fair and Welcoming Immigration System.” It says:
We need expanded legal immigration that will grow our economy,
reunite families, and meet our labor market demands … s president, I will
immediately issue guidance to end criminal prosecutions for simple
administrative immigration violations … As President, I’ll issue guidance
ensuring that detention is only used where it is actually necessary because an
individual poses a flight or safety risk … I’ll welcome 125,000 refugees
in my first year, and ramping up to at least 175,000 refugees per year by the
end of my first term.
The impact of federal immigration
policy on Americans’ housing costs is taboo among establishment reporters. But
those costs were touted by a group of investors lobbying Congress to raise
housing prices by importing more immigrants. A booklet by the Economic
Innovation Group says:
The relationship between population growth and housing demand is
clear. More people means more demand for housing, and fewer people means less
demand … As a result, a shrinking population will lead to falling prices and a
deteriorating, vacancy-plagued housing stock that may take generations to clear
…
The potential for skilled immigrants to boost local housing
markets is clear. Notably, economist Albert Saiz (2007) found a 1% increase in
population from immigration causes housing rents and house prices in U.S.
cities to rise commensurately, by 1%
On January 9, Donohue noted New
Yorkers blocked the plan by Amazon and the city government to build a new corporate
headquarters in the city. The residents protested the development plan partly
because it would have driven up rents and housing costs, said Donohue. “It
is a very potent issue,” he observed.
A lobbying group for investors admits mass migration helps investors in
major coastal cities but 'fails' Americans in heartland & rural towns. So
it urges less immigration? No - it urges more migration to spike family housing
prices outside major cities! http://bit.ly/2VCZYUt
NYT Boosts Investors'
Campaign for More Immigrant Workers, Consumers
Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as
impoverished Americans wait
Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so
many homeless encampments hovering around?
Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free
public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated,
unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those
are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier.
Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold
awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these
emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal
immigrants - Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is
there a connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.
The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban
Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals
prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do
it yesterday.
The plan would scrap Clinton-era regulations that allowed illegal
immigrants to sign up for assistance without having to disclose their status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing
have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all
applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)
database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other
welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification,
though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our
citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of
past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public
housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens
attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off
of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and
some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member
being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped
across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next
day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on
government housing. Plus lots
of cheesy news coverage about how
heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to
find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these
programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact
being shut out.
The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the
virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice"
for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are
stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal
technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law.
But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as
they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the
impoverished of the U.S. out cold.
The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed
by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the
media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
Rent control 2.0: California to vote on more limits in November
Measure officially qualifies for the fall statewide ballot
Rental control at the ballot box: Here we go again!
California voters will consider expanding rent control statewide in November, the secretary of state’s office said Monday, as they weigh in on the controversial issue for the second time in two years amid a worsening homelessness crisis.
Secretary of State Alex Padilla said the measure qualified for the fall ballot after election officials determined that a sufficient number of the nearly 1 million signatures submitted by supporters in December are valid.
What’s up?
This initiative would end current restrictions in state law, allowing cities and counties to implement and expand rent control policies that limit how much rents can increase each year.
Voters in 2018 rejected a similar initiative after a $100 million battle between advocates and the real estate industry.
But California lawmakers did enact AB 1482, a law that as this year created statewide rent control. It’s now illegal for many residential landlords to raise rent more than 5%, plus the local rate of inflation, in one year.
Thus, the ballot proposition, if approved, would be a second rent-control law.
Why again?
The housing advocacy division of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, called Housing Is A Human Right, thinks supporters have a better shot this year given the increased attention on affordable housing and homelessness, which has included repeated criticism of California leaders by President Donald Trump. The foundation was also behind the failed measure.
This year’s version exempts single-family homes as well as newly constructed buildings, which advocates said should blunt that argument.
The pros?
Advocates say soaring rents can drive tenants into the streets.
Foundation president Michael Weinstein in a statement called housing affordability and homelessness “the most pressing social justice and public health emergencies in our time, especially in California.”
His group is pushing forward even after California legislators last year limited rent increases for some people for the next decade while banning landlords from evicting people without cause so they can raise the rent for a new tenant.
The state Senate last week rejected requiring local governments to let developers build small apartment buildings in some neighborhoods reserved for single family homes.
The cons?
The State Building and Construction Trades Council of California on Monday announced it is opposing the ballot measure. The council’s legislative and political director, Cesar Diaz, in a statement said the proposal would “block the path towards future investment in the construction of affordable housing units for the working class.”
California Rental Housing Association President Sid Lakireddy predicted that “property values will plummet” if the measure becomes law, resulting in less property tax revenue and lower quality rental units.
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