I have been working with @We_Deny_Everything on a post about homelessness and poverty. He aided me with this blog, and pointed me to the article and the book that could open my eyes to some of the ugly here in America.
Sometimes we don’t know how lucky we are. With foreclosure rates remaining steady, unemployment rates comparable to the 80s, and record high personal debt levels it is no wonder why homelessness is increasing. Homelessness is at a record high in many urban areas, namely Las Vegas. Las Vegas has always had a high population of transients, homelessness, and poverty due to the appeal of gambling, night life, substance abuse and moderate temperatures. Las Vegas also has a large number of low paying jobs that cannot sustain low income rents.
I recently finished a book called Beneath the Neon Lights. This is a story about people who make the sewer systems beneath Las Vegas their home. These are semi permanent dwellings and many of the residents have lived beneath the city for years. These “camps” house families, couples, and singles. They house drug dealers and murderers. They house insane people, brilliant people, and people’s who are not completely classifiable.
The conditions are just as you would imagine living in a sewer. Filthy, smelling of feces and garbage, dead bodies that need to be pushed out of the ends of the tunnels, roaches, rats and black widows. Toxic fumes and gasses. Dark, wet and dangerous.
The journalist who wrote the story, Matthew O’Brian, shares many stories about the people he met and encountered. One is a man from Omaha named Lawrence that moved to Las Vegas with an inheritance. He gambled and drank his money away, and ended up under ground. He is an educated man that stores his possessions and bed 4 feet above the sewer floor so it isn’t washed away with the flash floods that occur in the sewers. He uses a side tunnel as his restroom and garbage can so he doesn’t attract as many roaches, spiders and rats to his own area. He discussed at length his ideas about homelessness with Matthew, and suggested that policies that dated back to the early 80′s in the Regan administration led to so many mentally ill and chronically homeless people being on the street. He stores a bicycle in his camp and rides it to and from work everyday. He even wrote a poem about his dwellings:
” I look upon the night
And sometimes wonder
What kind of tunnel I dug for myself;
Dark, cold, lonely and damp.
I long for the warmth.”
Lawrence has been living in the sewer for 7 years, and still considers it a temporary position he is in.
Another man Matthew talked about was “The Troll”. All the dwellers feared the troll. He is almost a mystical man, they say he can see in the dark and he beats anybody to death that attempts to cross his area. They met the said “Troll” while he was carting a dead body of a friend of his out. The Troll suggested he died of natural causes.
The sewer does offer its residents some semi-permanent state. They hang pictures, store food, have beds and clothing there. If they were above ground they would be kicked out of doorways and sleeping holes by security and police.
Vegas is only one city, and the Sewers are only one area. There are homeless camps everywhere in America. One of the most famous is the “Moles” in New York that live in subway tunnels. Though patrolling and a lot of media coverage has reduced that area, they haven’t eliminated it.
People have mixed opinions on how to handle the homeless. There are wet houses, dry houses, shelters, halfway houses and low income housing projects. Despite the money and attention placed on this, only 1 in 20 have overnight shelter. Many people do not want to help the homeless – they made their beds, they can sleep in them. Many want to rehab the homeless, clean them up, sober them up, and stand them back up. Then there are those that only want to offer safety and warmth, with no expectations of rehab. These are the most controversial, but also the most successful. Oregon has had terrific successes with their wet houses.
The cost of homelessness on the tax payer go beyond the shelters and rehabs. Imagine the cost of jails, police, emergency room visits, detox stays, and ambulance rides. This is only what they do to themselves. There is also the cost of petty crimes, of theft, assault, disorderly conduct. The price of housing values declining near homeless areas, the price of maintaining parks that people are afraid to walk through at night. These are indirect costs of homelessness but they add up to ten times the amount spent on shelters.
- The national rate of homelessness was 21 homeless people per 10,000 people in the general population. The rate for veterans was 31 homeless veterans per 10,000 veterans in the general population.
- Chronic homelessness decreased by 3 percent from 110,911 in 2009 to 107,148 in 2011. The chronically homeless population has decreased by 13 percent since 2007. The decrease is associated with an increase in the number of permanent supportive housing beds from 188,636 in 2007 to 266,968 in 2011. Permanent supportive housing ends chronic homelessness.
- A majority of homeless people counted were in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs, but nearly 4 in 10 were unsheltered, living on the streets, or in cars, abandoned buildings, or other places not intended for human habitation. The unsheltered population increased by 2 percent from 239,759 in 2009 to 243,701 in 2011, the only subpopulation to increase.
- The number of individuals in homeless families decreased by 1 percent nationally, but increased by 20 percent or more in 11 state.(Including Nevada)The number of poor households that spent more than 50 percent of their incomes on rent – defined by HUD as households that are “severely housing cost burdened” – increased by 6 percent from 5.9 million in 2009 to 6.2 million in 2010. Three-quarters of all poor renter households had severe housing cost burdens.
- The number of unemployed people increased by 4 percent from 14.3 million in 2009 to 14.8 million in 2010. The unemployed population increased in 32 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Unemployment rose by 10 percent or more in 11 states.The average real income of working poor people increased by less than one percent, from about $9,300 in 2009 to about $9,400 in 2010. There was not a single county in the nation where a family with an average annual income of $9,400 could afford fair market rent for a one-bedroom unit.
- Foreclosure activity continued to increase with nearly 50,000 more homes in foreclosure in 2010 than in 2009. Foreclosures increased from 2.83 million units in 2009 to 2.88 million units in 2010, a 2 percent increase. Nationally, 1 out of every 45 housing units was in foreclosure in 2010. In Nevada, 1 out of every 11 housing units had a foreclosure.
- For a young adult who has aged out of foster care the odds of becoming homeless are 1 in 11.
I don’t care what your moral views, ethical views, or socials view are – you cannot deny the economic sense it makes to invest more money into shelters and other housing areas for all of the homeless, including substance abusers and felons. This will keep everyone safer and save the taxpayers.
Citations
“Beneath the Neon Lights” Matthew O’Brian
