Ramanisblog

Tag: poverty in US

  • Tent Cities US Photos Essay

    A few tents cropped up hard by the railroad tracks, pitched by men left with nowhere to go once the emergency winter shelter closed for the summer.

    Then others appeared — people who had lost their jobs to the ailing economy, or newcomers who had moved to Reno for work and discovered no one was hiring.

    Within weeks, more than 150 people were living in tents big and small, barely a foot apart in a patch of dirt slated to be a parking lot for a campus of shelters Reno is building for its homeless population. Like many other cities, Reno has found itself with a “tent city” — an encampment of people who had nowhere else to go.

    From Seattle to Athens, Ga., homeless advocacy groups and city agencies are reporting the most visible rise in homeless encampments in a generation.

    Nearly 61 percent of local and state homeless coalitions say they’ve experienced a rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, according to a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless. The group says the problem has worsened since the report’s release in April, with foreclosures mounting, gas and food prices rising and the job market tightening.(lowmoralground)

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    A new report by US charity theNational Coalition for the Homeless has revealed the growing number of tent cities across the country.

    Tent Cities in America: A Pacific Coast Report examines how the camps have emerged, and the need for affordable and accessible housing.

    As the US continues to react to its biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, home foreclosures and unemployment continues to rise, with newly homeless families doubling in the past year. Almost half America’s 3.5m homeless are unsheltered, with a large number congregating in tent cities for safety. The charity’s director Neil Donovan said: “Tent Cities are American’s de facto waiting room for affordable and accessible housing.”

    The report examines the 11 tent cities across the US’s west coast, and the charity plans to produce further reports to examine other encampments across the rest of the country.

    Across the country, homeless groups and government agencies say they are witnessing the biggest increase in homeless encampments for a generation.

    “What you’re seeing is encampments that I haven’t seen since the ’80s,” said Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, an umbrella group of homeless groups in west coast cities.

    Amenities in the camps – reminiscent of the ‘Hoovervilles‘ of the Great Depression – are basic, with no mains electricity, no plumbing or no drainage. In Reno, Nevada, the state with the nation’s highest repossessions rate, a tent city recently sprung up on the city’s outskirts and quickly filled up with about 150 people.

    Most tent cities are in California, where you will find more than 200 people living in Tent City in Sacramento, which became infamous after appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The site was currently under threat of closure, but others will no doubt spring up.

    http://www.thepavement.org.uk/story.php?story=978

     

    Tent cities of USA
    Tent cities of USA
    Tent cities USA
    Tent cities USA
    Tent City USA
    Tent City USA
    Tent City USA
    Tent City USA

     

    US Tent city
    US Tent city

     

  • Hunger and Poverty in USA-Reuters.

    The other side of US.
    Story:
    Call it a paradox of plenty. In the world’s wealthiest country, home to more obese people than anywhere else on earth, almost 50 million Americans struggled to feed themselves and their children in 2008. That’s one in six of the population. Millions went hungry, at least some of the time. Things are bound to get worse.

    This the bleak picture drawn from an annual survey on “household food security” compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and released in mid-November. It showed the highest level of food insecurity since the government started the survey, in 1995, and provided a graphic illustration of the effect of sharply rising unemployment.

    This year’s picture will be even bleaker – the unemployment rate more than doubled from the beginning of 2008 to now, at 10.2 percent the highest in a quarter century. It is still climbing, and for many the distance between losing a job and lack of food security is very short.

    In keeping with the American predilection for euphemisms, the word “hunger” does not appear in the report which classes food security into several categories, from “marginal” and “low” to “very low.”

    Marginal food security means, in the lexicon of the USDA, “anxiety over food shortages or shortage of food in the house.” The second category, low, means “reduced quality, variety or desirability of diet,” but not necessarily less food.

    The most severe category, “very low,” used to be labeled “food insecurity with hunger” and is defined as “disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.” That applied to around 17 million people, up from 12 million in 2007. Black and Hispanic families and single-parent households are the most affected.

    It is not the kind of hunger — think African famines, skeletal babies with distended bellies — that brought world leaders to a U.N. food summit in Rome this month to boost aid from rich countries for agricultural development in the Third World. The U.S. is a land of plenty, so much so that a study by the University of Arizona a few years ago found that the average household wastes about 14 percent of their food purchases.

    Food is so abundant that overeating is more of a problem, numerically and in terms of public health, than under-nutrition. The Food Research and Action Center, a Washington-based advocacy group, makes the point that “poverty can make people more vulnerable to hunger as well as obesity,” one of the reasons being that food high in calories is cheaper than healthy food. For many Americans, hunger and obesity are two sides of the same poverty coin.

    (International health statistics put the United States at the top of the obesity league. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight and a third of these are obese.)

    INEQUALITY OF THIRD WORLD PROPORTIONS

    Vicki Escarra, head of Feeding America, a hunger relief charity that runs 200 food banks in the U.S., has likened the growing difficulties of those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder to conditions in the Third World. She is right in more ways than one.

    The USDA report reflects inequality of Third World proportions. While the Great Recession has culled the ranks of American millionaires — by 22 percent according to a September study by the Boston Consulting Group — the gap between rich and poor is not shrinking.

    Last year, according to a report by the census bureau, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans made 11.4 times more than those living on the poverty line. The year before, the ratio was 11.2. At the far end of the economic scale, America’s six largest bank holdings have set aside $112 billion in salaries and bonuses during the first nine months of the year. By year’s end, bonuses might exceed the almost $164 billion paid in 2007, before the credit bubble banks had helped to inflate burst and millions of Americans lost their jobs and savings.

    Banks and other financial institutions were rescued by a $700 billion infusion of taxpayer money and news of the bonuses coincided with reports that U.S. wages were at a 19-year low. Which helps explain growing anger among a public long famous for lacking the resentment of the rich that is common in other parts of the world.

    After all, a bedrock belief in America held that this is the land of unlimited opportunities where every citizen has an equal chance to succeed and become rich. That requires an assumption that the system is fair. How many Americans still believe that? Last summer, a pair of political scientists, Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs, published a study whose findings included that just 28 percent thought the present distribution of wealth is fair.

    More evidence that the gap between myth and reality is shrinking comes from the American Human Development project, a research group which found that “social mobility is now less fluid in the United States than in other affluent nations…a poor child born in Germany, France, Canada or one of the Nordic countries has a better chance to join the middle class in adulthood than an American child born into similar circumstances.”

    A better chance to avoid food insecurity, too.
    http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2009/11/24/a-paradox-of-plenty-hunger-in-america/