Anybody who's been reading me for any length of time isn't going to be surprised but it's coming as a shock to a lot of people. The NYT is all "Who could have expected this?"
As the operations manager of an outreach center for the homeless here, Paul Stack is used to seeing people down on their luck. What he had never seen before was people living in tents and lean-tos on the railroad lot across from the center.
“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” Mr. Stack said. “One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”
Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”
While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.
It's just barely possible that this might have some slight connection to the new Bushvilles.
For a 10th straight week, the number of people who are continuing to claim jobless benefits increased, fresh evidence that the labor market remains weak despite other hopeful signs that the recession may have bottomed out.
New claims for unemployment benefits last week rose to a seasonally adjusted 652,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 644,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. The total number of people claiming benefits jumped to 5.56 million, worse than economists' projections of 5.48 million, a ninth straight record and the highest total on records dating back to 1967.
The dismal job news is one indicator of the overall economic pain Americans have endured early in the new year. The Commerce Department said Thursday that the economy shrank at a 6.3 percent annual pace at the end of 2008, the worst showing in a quarter-century, and a bit faster than the 6.2 percent drop estimated a month ago.
(emphasis added)
Um, what "hopeful signs" might those be? 'Cause bro, we don't see nothing down here.
But many economists project the economy is contracting in the current quarter at a 5 to 6 percent pace, still very weak by historical standards, but slightly better than the end of last year.
The stock market shook off the news. The Dow Jones industrial average added about 70 points in morning trading, and broader indices also rose.
The yo-yo is up today? That's your evidence? Here's what that means: nuttin'.
That's David Horsey, of course, and it says pretty much everything there is to be said about anything the stock market does now or in the future.
What is maddening, frustrating, and depressing about all this is that it could have been avoided. We don't need to be here. We let ourselves get scammed by a bunch of snake-oil salesmen and con artists because they convinced us they knew what they were talking about. The only thing it turned out they "knew" was how to use the govt to pick our pockets.
The people in these camps are people who were in houses and apartments as little as a year ago. They were people who had jobs, families, cars. I see a lot of it. Familes broken up where the kids are living with a relative and the parent(s) is on the street, or the wife is in a shelter and the husband is under a bridge. Even in Georgia (at least in Savannah and Atlanta, the two cities I know about) the homeless authorities and shelters try to keep families together but their budgets have been cut so badly and the increase has appeared to come so quickly that they simply don't have room for everyone and hard decisions have to be made. Often the decision to split is made by the family itself: if there's room in a shelter for the kids but not the parents, the parents will volunteer to live on the street and visit their kids when they can. Usually Mom can stay with them but Dad has to...make other arrangements, as they so delicately put it.
Conservatives will tell you - over and over and over, apparently on the theory that a lie repeated often enough becomes to all intents and purposes the truth - that all these people are drug addicts and alcoholics and just plain lazy bums who don't want to work and, really, you shouldn't waste any energy, compassion, or (dawg forbid) tax money on them when the (genuflecting to the word) banks are in so much trouble. Conservatives, after all, have their priorities. That particular lie is becoming more transparent by the day and will continue to as desperate people with few options take the only one open to them.
This past winter the Savannah police, pushed by the business community naturally, began an attempt to clean out the homeless camps under the bridges and in the woods around the city. The officer in charge said in a tv interview that he expected they could find room at the shelters for all but 100 or so. He also estimated that the number of camping homeless was in the neighborhood of 400 tops.
That number is astoundingly clueless. There are at least 1500 homeless in camps in and around Savannah just from the ones I've seen personally (and I haven't seen them all by any stretch). The total number of shelter beds hovers around 500 but almost half of those are reserved for Program Clients - people who have entered drug and alcohol programs. If you're not a druggie or a drunk - and most of us aren't - you have, quite literally, nowhere to go but under a bridge.
The effort was finally stopped when the very first contingent of people - the residents of only two camps cleaned out during the first week of what was supposed to be a month-long crusade - threatened to burst the walls of the shelters and the managers and Homeless Auithority screamed that they had to stop bringing them in because there was no room.
And it's getting worse, of course. Over the winter I counted almost 200 new street people, nearly all of them recently homeless, usually because they lost their jobs or got sick. And, again, I'm sure I haven't seen them all. Out in Garden City, the closest suburb and less than 5 miles away from mid-town Savannah (you can walk there in an hour or so), I'm told - I haven't been there - that there are even more and bigger camps than in Savannah proper, though the residents have to come into the city to find food and clothes. The lines at the soup kitchens are 2 to 3X as long as they were last year, and donations are down to the closets (that's what they call the places that give clothes away) even though demand is way, waaay up.
Nothing about this situation is improving. There are no improvements even dimly glimpsed on the horizon. Georgia's Republican Gov Sonny Perdue is threatening to follow Texas Gov Rick Perry's example and refuse Federal unemployment money because the state would have to commit to picking up the tab a few years down the road. The infrastructure money - if there is any - hasn't even begun to hit the streets and there are fewer jobs than there were even 6 months ago when everybody was complaining because the job market was so depressed.
Put it all together and this isn't anything like the end. Those analysts continue to indulge in an orgy of wishful thinking while President Obama still hasn't figured out that Timmy and Larry are part of the problem and wouldn't know a solution if it did a full-costume rain dance on the White House lawn.
We got a looong way to go yet.
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