Homeless in America

I disagree with the idea of "permanent" supportive housing. The tax payers should not have to take on the burden of taking care of anyone permanently. America is great and there is plenty of support programs out there for anyone that is willing to take it, but people need to stand on their own 2 feet sooner or later.

My family immigrated to America from Hong Kong, where we were refugees from Vietnam. We were on welfare and got clothes from the Goodwill and Salvation Army. To this day I only donate to the Salvation Army because they gave me the first Christmas I can remember. But we stepped it up and got a piece of America. If a non-English speaking refugee can do it, why can't a native born in the greatest country do it? That's why I and many other immigrants voted Arnold as Overlord of California. He's one of us.

I copied that solution idea from the place I got the data. But I actually agree with it. Mental illness and lack of a support network are a large part why people end up homeless - and those aren't problems the individual can decide to overcome without permanent solutions. On a different note, when I lived in Geneva there was a law that you had to have 25 CHF on your person at all times. It was presumably so that homeless people could be ousted easily.

I really love the photo used with the data here. As much as some folks think a picture detracts from being able to read the data, I think in this case it makes the bars you are looking at more meaningful.

i agree tao, webmater a good man

goodies

Many flock to sunny southern California to bask in the sun. It's easier to be homeless here. Permanent Supportive Housing should be geared toward those who have successfully completed a stint in transitional housing or other hardcore rehabilitation facilities. In this way, there is some sense that they are willing to maintain sobriety while picking themselves up and hopefully reentering society.

But the established model created from the bowels of the Bush Administration has at its core the "low demand" approach also known as "housing first" which says that people that are chronically homeless can have the key to the apartment with NO requirement to maintain sobriety. They are not mandated to go through any programs or avial themselves of the on-site social services. They don't have to get better and can bring that which kept them on the streets (drugs, prostitution, alcoholism) into the permanent supportive housing facility. These PSH facilities will house children and elderly so can you imagine the mix? All this could be straightened out if those who live there were required to be drug tested.

Mentally ill folks should be placed in PSH facilities of their very own with mental health services there to make certain and mandate that they take their meds. But, alas, this too is not a requirement of PSH. Chronically homeless mentally ill folks who are housed in a PSH facility with mental health services available are NOT mandated to take advantage of those services. This means that psychotic episodes and rage outbursts can be expected amongst the housed mentally ill and there is nothing anyone can do to mandate they take their meds or get help.

The model must change to make it valuable.

wow ur stuff is kinda lame

The homeless are systematically and knowingly underreported by our federal and state governments.

But, no matter what the real number may be, it is a sad comment on our society.

The chart would be better if the non-homeless population were included as a third bar.

It would be interesting if each bar was itself a small graph showing the value over time, perhaps highlighting points where the slope went negative.

It would be nice to have an option to eliminate the background image as well. Tufte would approve, I think.

hi cimarron - there is data on population in swivel, probably by state to which you could compare. you can always display data over time if time is one of the data cols. and you can of course eliminate the background image. all you need to do is log in and you have all the editing controls available.

I found this on the internet, which I thought was interesting.
It is estimated that about 3.5 million individuals experience homelessness in the United States each year
In 1996, an estimated 637,000 adults were homeless in a given week. In the same year, an estimated 2.1 million adults were homeless over the course of a year. These numbers increase dramatically when children are included, to 842,000 and 3.5 million, respectively.
Families make up about one half of the homeless population
Nearly one in four people in a soup kitchen line is a child - 23.5% of kitchen client households are under the age of 18
Every night about 750,000 people in the United States experience homelessness
Nationally about 150,000 people are chronically homeless
Over a five-year period, about 2-3 percent of the U.S. population (5-8 million people) will experience at least one night of homelessness. For the great majority of these people, the experience is short and often caused by a natural disaster, a house fire, or a community evacuation.
Forty to fifty percent of the homeless have high school diplomas and 24% are employed in either full-time or part-time work.
Personal Challenges
Sometimes it is difficult to get services to overcome personal challenges. These challenges can include a disability, mental illness, substance abuse, or simply the lack of adequate transportation or childcare.
Disability: People with disabilities who are unable to work and must rely on entitlements such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) can find it virtually impossible to find affordable housing. People receiving Federal SSI benefits, which were $545 per month in 2002, cannot cover the cost of an efficiency or one-bedroom apartment in any major housing market in the country.
Many long-term homeless people in the United States served in the military. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that more than 200,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. Physical disabilities that make work difficult or impossible are also common among homeless people.
Untreated mental illness can cause individuals to become paranoid, anxious, or depressed, making it difficult or impossible to maintain employment, pay bills, or keep supportive social relationships.
Substance abuse can drain financial resources, erode supportive social relationships, and can also make exiting from homelessness extremely difficult.
Co-occurring disorders: Individuals with co-occurring mental illnesses and substance use disorders are among the most difficult to stably house and treat due to the limited availability of integrated mental health and substance abuse treatment in most localities.
Other circumstances: People might also find themselves homeless for a variety of other reasons including domestic violence, chronic or unexpected health care expenses, release from incarceration, 'aging out' of youth systems such as foster care, or divorce or separation.

For those of you who think helping the homeless is lame, then I hope that you lose your home. It is not fun living on the streets at ten years old in the cold and then growing up to watch my mother become homeless while I attended Job Corps.

I want to help homeless people .

This comment is mostly towards "Richard." Of course you got everything you want and don't have difficulty living in the US. You are a foreigner and the government gives you anything you want while constantly disregarding the ones of us who have been born and raised here. To be homeless is not because we are lazy, but more because we are losing our jobs to the...FOREIGNERS and without the proper training you can't get a job if you're a white American. Go home, and maybe we'll see more jobs come up for these homeless. Where it may not be plausible to pay for permanent housing, it IS plausible to make sure that everyone gets training in something that will help them be able to support themselves, but others from other countries are coming over here and taking our grants to go to school, and then moving BACK to where they are from and using that knowledge there, when it should have gone to our people to use it HERE