Area Homeless Increasing
The Local Puppy Trainer reports on the annual homeless survey, and it is up 22%. The report says that the majority of homeless have jobs, and 55% of the group are women.
The problem is perception. The visible homeless are either men looking for work, or the small group of that cause trouble.
You can’t afford to rent anything down here with a minimum wage job. The deposits are a huge barrier, and if you have ever been evicted after losing a job, you choices are even more restricted. Most of the homeless shelters won’t accept you into their programs if you are female, sober, or employed, and there is almost no low-cost housing available. Many of those who qualified for the BP fund checks couldn’t get them because they didn’t have a mailing address. Most of the government programs are the same way.
There is only one program in the county that provides the employed homeless a place to stay and helps them budget and save to amass the money for deposits, to transition into the housing market. It has a dozen slots, which isn’t much help for the over a thousand people who qualify.
4 comments
All those foreclosed-on empty condos that are just sitting there empty and rotting, and no low-cost housing available. Anybody else find this to be sad, sickening, and disgusting?
– Badtux the Well-housed Penguin
You mean all those empty rental condos that the owners have to keep the utilities going, and pay the maintenance fees in hopes that someone will rent them for a week every month or so? The ones where they are required to change out the furniture every three years, so “they’ll remain rentable”? Those empty condos?
Or do you mean the brand new, never lived in condos that no one seems to own, and no one is paying the taxes on?
Possibly you are referring the the foreclosed properties that the banks are not doing anything with, including maintenance?
We have all kinds of empty housing stock, and homelessness keeps growing. At a minimum it is “sad, sickening, and disgusting.”
“the majority of homeless have jobs”
That was the dirty not-so-little secret of the Reagan administration. No one would talk about it on the news, but I saw it with my own eyes. Homeless people lived under bridges along the bayous, beside the bicycle paths. As I biked past them on my way to work, I noted that many of them had alarm clocks. The only reasonable explanation of the alarm clocks is that they, too, had jobs… jobs that did not pay enough to provide them a place to live.
I don’t know the level of homelessness in Houston right now; I cannot bike anymore… and I’m not sure I’m prepared emotionally to cope with what I could learn about unemployment, poverty and living on the streets right at the moment. If it’s what I expect, I am embarrassed for my nation.
We have millions of empty houses and condos in this county and people living in the street. Badtux is right, it is “sad, sickening, and disgusting.” The worst part is that no one has access to the media will to go on and point out this absurdity. It is a national disaster and it gets buried in the real estate or business section. Apparently the country can’t handle the truth – reality is too scary.