Posted on 11/17/2014 7:40:05 AM PST by Uncle Miltie
The number of homeless children in the U.S. has surged in recent years to an all-time high, amounting to one child in every 30, according to a comprehensive state-by-state report that blames the nation’s high poverty rate, the lack of affordable housing and the impacts of pervasive domestic violence.
Titled “America’s Youngest Outcasts,” the report being issued Monday by the National Center on Family Homelessness calculates that nearly 2.5 million American children were homeless at some point in 2013. The number is based on the Department of Education’s latest count of 1.3 million homeless children in public schools, supplemented by estimates of homeless pre-school children not counted by the DOE.
The problem is particularly severe in California, which has one-eighth of the U.S. population but accounts for more than one-fifth of the homeless children with a tally of nearly 527,000.
Carmela DeCandia, director of the national center and a co-author of the report, noted that the federal government has made progress in reducing homelessness among veterans and chronically homeless adults.
“The same level of attention and resources has not been targeted to help families and children,” she said. “As a society, we’re going to pay a high price, in human and economic terms.”
Child homelessness increased by 8 percent nationally from 2012 to 2013, according to the report, which warned of potentially devastating effects on children’s educational, emotional and social development, as well as on their parents’ health, employment prospects and parenting abilities.
The report included a composite index ranking the states on the extent of child homelessness, efforts to combat it, and the overall level of child well-being. States with the best scores were Minnesota, Nebraska and Massachusetts. At the bottom were Alabama, Mississippi and California.
California’s poor ranking did not surprise Shahera Hyatt, director of the California Homeless Youth Project.
The crux of the problem, she said, is the state’s high cost of living, coupled with insufficient affordable housing.
“People think, ‘Of course we are not letting children and families be homeless,’ so there’s a lot of disbelief,” Hyatt said. “California has not invested in this issue.”
Hyatt, 29, was homeless on and off throughout adolescence, starting when her parents were evicted when she was in 7th grade. At 15, she and her older brother took off and survived by sleeping in the tool sheds, backyards and basements of acquaintances.
“These terms like ‘couch surfing' and ‘doubled-up' sound a lot more polite than they are in practice,” she said. “For teenagers, it might be exchanging sex for a place to stay or staying someplace that does not feel safe because they are so mired in their day-to-day survival needs.”
Near San Francisco, Gina Cooper and her son, then 12, had to vacate their home in 2012 when her wages of under $10 an hour became insufficient to pay the rent. After a few months as nomads, they found shelter and support with Home & Hope, an interfaith program in Burlingame, California, and stayed there five months before Cooper, 44, saved enough to be able to afford housing on her own.
“It was a painful time for my son,” Cooper said. “On the way to school, he would be crying, ‘I hate this.’ ”
In mostly affluent Santa Barbara, the Transition House homeless shelter is kept busy with families unable to afford housing of their own. Executive director Kathleen Baushke said that even after her staff gives clients money for security deposits and rent, they go months without finding a place to live.
“Landlords aren’t desperate,” she said. “They won’t put a family of four in a two-bedroom place because they can find a single professional who will take it.”
She said neither federal nor state housing assistance nor incentives for developers to create low-income housing have kept pace with demand.
“We need more affordable housing or we need to pay people $25 an hour,” she said. “The minimum wage isn’t cutting it.”
Among the current residents at Transition House are Anthony Flippen, Savannah Austin and their 2-year-old son, Anthony Jr.
Flippen, 28, said he lost his job and turned to Transition House as his unemployment insurance ran out. The couple has been on a list to qualify for subsidized housing since 2008, but they aren’t counting on that option and hope to save enough to rent on their own now that Flippen is back at work as an electrician.
Austin, due to have a second child in December, is grateful for the shelter’s support but said its rules had been challenging. With her son in tow, she was expected to vacate the premises each morning by 8 a.m. and not return before 5 p.m.
“I’d go to the park, or drive around,” she said. “It was kind of hard.”
The new report by the National Center on Family Homelessness – a part of the private, nonprofit American Institutes for Research – says remedies for child homelessness should include an expansion of affordable housing, education and employment opportunities for homeless parents, and specialized services for the many mothers rendered homeless due to domestic violence.
Efforts to obtain more resources to combat child homelessness are complicated by debate over how to quantify it.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development conducts an annual one-day count of homeless people that encompasses shelters, as well as parks, underpasses, vacant lots and other locales. Its latest count, for a single night in January 2013, tallied 610,042 homeless people, including 130,515 children.
Defenders of HUD’s method say it’s useful in identifying the homeless people most in need of urgent assistance. Critics contend that HUD’s method grossly underestimates the extent of child homelessness and results in inadequate resources for local governments to combat it. They prefer the Education Department method that includes homeless families who are staying in cheap motels or doubling up temporarily in the homes of friends or relatives.
“Fixing the problem starts with adopting an honest definition,” said Bruce Lesley, president of the nonprofit First Focus Campaign for Children. “Right now, these kids are sort of left out there by themselves.”
Lesley’s group and some allies have endorsed a bill introduced in Congress, with bipartisan sponsorship, that would expand HUD’s definition to correlate more closely with that used by the Education Department. However, the bill doesn’t propose any new spending for the hundreds of thousands of children who would be added to the HUD tally.
Shahera Hyatt, of the California Homeless Youth Project, says most of the homeless schoolchildren in her state aren’t living in shelters.
“It’s often one family living in extreme poverty going to live with another family that was already in extreme poverty,” she said. “Kids have slept in closets and kitchens and bathrooms and other parts of the house that have not been meant for sleeping.”
Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2014/11/17/3492765_child-homelessness-at-historic.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy
I didn’t see what age they considered a ‘child’ I wonder if some of those ‘children’ will be in ferguson robbing burning and stealing in a few days?
Not to mention that it is zoning that has made housing “unaffordable”.
Homeless children and education[edit]
The original federal Act, known as simply as the McKinney Act, provided little protection for homeless children in the area of public education. As a result, the State of Illinois passed the Illinois Education for Homeless Children Act, which was drafted by Joseph Clary, an attorney and advocate for the Illinois Coalition to End Homelessness. Clary then worked with national advocates to ensure that the protections afforded to homeless children by the Illinois statute were incorporated into the McKinney Act. At that point, the McKinney Act was amended to become the McKinney-Vento Act. That Act uses the Illinois statute in defining homeless children as “individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” The Act then goes on to give examples of children who would fall under this definition:
(a) Children sharing housing due to economic hardship or loss of housing;
(b) Children living in “motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camp grounds due to lack of alternative accommodations”
(c) Children living in “emergency or transitional shelters”
(d) Children “awaiting foster care placement”
(e) Children whose primary nighttime residence is not ordinarily used as a regular sleeping accommodation (e.g. park benches, etc.)
(f) Children living in “cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations…”
Source: Wikipedia
If a republican was in office this would be headline news for years.
I know you meant amateur, but armature is pretty funny, even if it makes no sense. Neither does he.
“In 2010, the Obama Administration launched Opening Doors, the nation’s first comprehensive strategy to prevent and end homelessness,...”
Oh yeah. That’s where they told the homeless they could break into a house and claim squatter’s rights.
Operation OPENING DOORS (with a swift kick).
I think these folks should be paid AT LEAST $100/hr. Why, its the only humane thing to do. And it would instantly solve all these problems.
I’m actually surprised to see this.
“homeless problem” is one of those terms that disappeared from media mention in Jan 2009.
Along with “recovery for Wall $treet but not Main Street” and “McJobs”
we wont be around...in the Limelight by 2020 so he thinks he can say anything he may need to ..to keep his approval ratings from falling off the charts completely.
it cant GET much more pathetic than this latest claim.
That is what I was wondering.
Root cause? California is a libtardian state, ran of, for, by the libtards, with occasional interludes of sanity.
1 in 30 is a ridiculous number
They waited until the mid-terms were done, and they realized nobody was buying their BS about the economy (as evidenced by the strong Republican showing). Now they are “playing balanced” (when it won’t hurt the left).
It's OK to discuss because the rich white Republicans are causing this by hoarding all the money.
Flippen, 28, said he lost his job and turned to Transition House as his unemployment insurance ran out. The couple has been on a list to qualify for subsidized housing since2008 ....
Austin, due to have a second child in December,
I read the above over and over. If these people have been homeless since 2008, why did they have a child just two years ago? And why is the woman expecting another one?
Basic economic theory and historical and current record plainly tells us that big, coercive government creates poverty. Only the voluntary cooperation of the free market economy, free from government interference creates wealth.
America, why won’t you listen? CUT this $4,000,000,000,000 unconstitutional federal government beast by at least 80% (= $800 billion, still too big but it’s a start).
Not at all. They will be first in line for free or subsidized housing.
Hardworking woman who works at a nearby market hurt her back really seriously, couldn't carry cases of stuff anymore, was on the verge of losing her apartment where she and her two girls lived. She went to sign up for subsidized housing and was told she would be placed on a waiting list. At the counter next to her, recent immigrants were being given housing with no waiting period.
I hear they have brown uniforms in keeping with tradition.
And if you speak out against it the Catholics will call you a nazi.
Have a kid on welfare, get your tubes tied. Get the child a father to marry you, or only half payment.
Yeah, they call me a nazi because I don't want to be enslaved by Idiocracy.
This is mostly true yes however I can’t help but say that it IS a shame that many Americans are reduced to going childless or being limited to having an only child all because it’s just too darn expensive to live many places in this nation. That is a problem. There’s not much quality of life here unless you are well-off financially. That much is true too. I had only one child and now that I’m just past the age of fertility I do regret not having had another. I would have loved another child. Plus our family is so small as it is. My daughter will not have much of anybody when we are gone.
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