xchrom (84,706 posts)
This Week in Poverty: A Wake-Up Call on Housing and Homelessness
http://www.thenation.com/blog/171534/week-poverty-wake-call-housing-and-homelessness
***SNIP
Indeed, the Campaign for Housing and Community Development Funding (CHCDF)—a group of seventy-four national organizations across the country—estimates that the 8.4 percent cut to housing and community development programs that would occur in January under sequestration would result in: a $1.6 billion cut in tenant-based rental assistance, with 185,000 households losing assistance; an $830 million cut in project-based rental assistance, with more than 92,000 households losing their housing if the cuts aren’t restored; a $180 million cut to homeless assistance grants—nearly 146,000 people would be homeless instead of housed; a $32 million cut to housing for the elderly, with 114,000 households receiving reduced unit maintenance and supportive services; a $28 million cut to housing opportunities for persons with AIDS, resulting in more than 4,700 households losing their housing; and a $13 million cut in housing for persons with disabilities, leading to more than 24,500 households receiving reduced unit maintenance and supportive services.
At a time when there are only thirty affordable and available rental units for every 100 extremely low income households, and low-income housing programs serve only about one of four people who qualify for them, sequestration would negatively affect more than 440,000 households currently receiving assistance.
Further, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) notes in a paper released this week, funding for housing has already been cut by 6 percent, or $2.5 billion, since 2010. Meanwhile, the number of low-income renter households paying housing costs of more than 50 percent of their income—a financial burden associated with an increased risk of homelessness—has risen by 14 percent over the past two years.
“Federal rental assistance programs have been treading water, while the need for assistance has been climbing dramatically since 2007,†report author Douglas Rice, a senior policy analyst at CBPP, told me
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021914956How can this be? I thought when we elected Mr hope n change that homelessness would be a thing of the past.
In fact homelessness only ever exists when a repuke is in the white house, same as high gas prices being bad.
marmar (58,070 posts)
3. True. The topic of poverty is almost as absent here as it is from Official Washington.
nt
When you are trying to build a legacy for your preezy it's not a good idea to discuss mass poverty that has occurred under that preezy.
99Forever (2,552 posts)
6. What the hay..
... they're just poor people, they don't really count.
What you say sarcastically is actually true. Poor people don't really count unless 0bama needs their vote, at which time he will promise them every freebie he can dream up.
In fact 0bama needs poverty in order to gain support for his agenda. If the economy was doing good and most people were doing well there would not be such a huge desire to soak the rich, but when you have mass poverty and tons of folks suffering it is easier to make them resent the rich and want to punish them.
If 0bama had really given us economic miracles then he and his desired policies would not be needed, people would be providing for themselves enjoying the prosperity and not worried how many cars and houses Mitt Romney has. The only people who would be demanding that 0bama soak the rich would the be the malcontents at the DUmp, who even in good economic times still manage to stay poor.
This is why 0bama wants us to go right over the fiscal cliff, the more people suffering the more people will turn to him demanding a fix, and they won't give a damn what he does to "fix" it.
