704,000 People Homeless

That figure is low. If you read the article, it expresses my first thought. "What about the people who don't seek shelter? They're homeless too". According to the article, they're not included in the total. It would be much higher if they were but they live under the radar and aren't easy to track.

I've worked most of my adult life and I'm here to tell you that for most of it I was one or two paychecks away from homelessness myself. Now that I'm retired and raising the girls, that hasn't changed. We live payday to payday and get to hear morons like Johnny Appleseed tell us what leeches we are.

I have a suggestion for my blogging partners. We could start a new blog consisting of excerpts from our hate mail. On second thought, that would give them far more attention than they deserve.

I'll just consider the source and ignore it.

Here are a couple of articles from USA Today regarding homelessness. The first is a breakdown of the numbers.

704,000 sought shelter

19% are veterans

65% of the adults are men

23% are children, half of whom are younger than 5

45% are blacks

Source: Department of Housing and Urban

Development

And here is the main article. Click on the post title (I haven't done that in a while) to read the entire page of USA Today.

HUD gets new view of who's homeless

Study a 'huge leap' in understanding problem, chief says

By Wendy Koch
USA TODAY

A groundbreaking survey of homelessness being released today found that 704,000 people nationwide sought shelter at least once in a three-month period.

Families with children accounted for one-third of those seeking emergency shelter or transitional housing between February and April 2005, the most recent period studied, according to the report by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The rest were individuals, mostly adult men. Nearly half were black.

The count covered only those seeking shelter, not people living on the street, so the total number of homeless people would be higher.

"This first-of-its-kind study is a huge leap forward in our understanding of not only how many people are homeless, but also what their needs are," HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson says. The report says, for example, that at least a quarter are disabled.

HUD, which briefed USA TODAY on the report Monday, says it is the most comprehensive government estimate ever of homelessness. Previous counts looked only at the number of people homeless on a given day or week.

The three-month figure � equal to the population of South Dakota � is an estimate based on a sample of 80 communities. It will serve as a baseline for annual reports to Congress and may be expanded to include people living on the street.

Martha Burt, a homelessness scholar at the Urban Institute, says the new database has shortcomings. For example, it has limited information about the health of those seeking shelter, and she thinks future versions will have trouble tracking those living on the street.

HUD's report also cites a previously reported one-night survey of hundreds of communities in January 2005. That survey found 754,000 homeless people, including 45% who were living on the street. USA TODAY published its own estimate of 727,000 in October 2005, based on earlier tallies.

The three-month count found that on an average day, 335,000 people sought shelter, but more than twice that number sought shelter at least once during the entire period.

Dennis Culhane, a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania who co-wrote the HUD report, says it's unclear whether homelessness has increased or declined, because past estimates were done differently.

He says poverty among blacks, who are more likely to live in urban areas, runs deeper than for other groups.

Culhane says families with kids have remained a steady one-third of the homeless, and he says government needs to do more to provide housing, such as expanding rent subsidies.

One of every three homeless kids has a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, such as post-traumatic stress, by age 8, says Ellen Bassuk, a psychiatrist who is president of the National Center on Family Homelessness.

"They have trouble sitting still and learning in school," she says.

Nine of 10 homeless mothers have been victims of violence, often domestic, she says.

Michael Stoops, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless welcomes the new count but says more housing and shelters are needed as well as a focus on the root causes of the problem. He says homelessness "can happen to everyone."