The Homeless Are Back

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Unk's Wild Wild West : One Thread



The Link to the story here

The Homeless Are Back

The homeless are back! The homeless are back! On Sunday night, just three weeks after George W. Bush assumed office, ABC News won the race to be the first network to re-discover homelessness.

World News Tonight/Sunday anchor Carole Simpson intoned: "After one of the longest periods of prosperity in U.S. history, America’s robust economy is slowing. Layoffs and the high cost of housing are creating hardships. Homelessness, which is estimated to effect from two and a half to three and a half million people, is again on the rise."

Bob Jamieson began his story by showing people at the Hesed House homeless shelter in Aurora, Illinois. He claimed: "The 175 bed shelter in the city of 130,000 has recorded a steady increase in homeless for the last year, particularly families with children."

Diane Nilan, Director of Hesed House: "It’s been mind-boggling. We don’t even have time to think about how many folks we’re serving and more come in. So it’s numbers have increased in ways we could never even imagine."

Jamieson extrapolated: "What’s happening in Aurora reflects a national trend. The U.S. Conference of Mayors reports a 17 percent increase in the number of families asking for help because of homelessness. In part, the long economic boom is blamed for causing rents to skyrocket. Since 1994 housing costs have increased at a rate 40 percent greater than inflation every year. In New York City the number of homeless in the shelter system has risen above 25,000 a night for the first time since the late 1980s. More than three quarters of the homeless are families or single women."

The most since the late 1980s. What a coincidence. And wow, Bush’s policies sure do work fast. It took just three weeks to return us to Reagan-era misery.

Liberal advocate Barbara Duffield of the National Coalition for the Homeless asserted: "In many shelters over half of the residents are working but they can’t afford housing. And in fact there’s no state in this entire country where a minimum wage job would allow a person to rent a two bedroom apartment."

Ever think of working more than 40 hours a week?

Jamieson continued: "Federal funding for shelters has more than doubled to a billion dollars in the last eight years, but there’s only money to provide housing assistance for one in four low income families that qualifies."

Another unlabeled liberal not balanced with a conservative voice got a chance to sound off. Dennis Culhane, identified on screen as with "Social Welfare Policy" at the University of Pennsylvania, argued: "More emergency shelters means we have more homeless people. We don’t have more housing. And the solution, obviously, is to increase the supply of subsidies so housing is more affordable to people who need it."

The solution is not so "obviously" more spending but eliminating rent control in big cities so more housing can be made available.

Jamieson concluded: "Elise Baker-Harrington wants to leave the shelter in Aurora as soon as she can, but with affordable housing in such short supply she, like other homeless in other parts of the country, may be in a shelter for months."

Even worse, the homeless will get nothing out of Bush’s tax cut.

The media’s lack of interest in homelessness since January 20, 1993, except to occasionally illustrate the evils of welfare reform, was confirmed in a 1996 study in the MRC’s MediaWatch newsletter. The February 1996 study, compiled by Tim Graham, began:

The poor may have always been with us, but the network news has often presented homelessness as a problem created by the Reagan administration.

"In the 1980s, the Reagan years, the amount of government money spent to build low-income housing was cut drastically. Then the homeless began to appear on streets and in doorsteps and housing became a visible human problem," proclaimed then-NBC anchor Garrick Utley on November 3, 1990. ABC's John Martin told the same tale in reporting a 1989 homelessness march: "They staged the biggest rally on behalf of the homeless since the Reagan revolution forced severe cutbacks in government housing programs."

It mattered little that budget experts John Cogan and Timothy Muris noted in The American Enterprise in 1990 that "while budget authority for subsidized housing programs declined 77 percent (from 1981-89), the number of subsidized units and the number of families living in those units increased by one-third."...

So now that Bill Clinton has been in office for three years, has the ever-growing problem of homelessness continued to burden the White House? Or did the problem recede from the media's agenda? MediaWatch analysts used the MRC Media Tracking System to count the number of network evening news segments on homelessness in America on the four evening newscasts (ABC's World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and CNN's Prime News or World News). Analysts found the problem faded from the list of priorities. In the Bush years (1989-1992), the number of homeless stories per year averaged 52.5, but in the first three years of the Clinton administration, the average dropped to 25.3 stories a year.

During the Bush administration, the story count grew from 44 in 1989 to a peak of 71 in 1990, followed by 54 stories in 1991 and 43 in 1992. By contrast, stories on America's homeless dipped slightly to 35 stories in 1993, and 32 in 1994. In 1995, the number fell dramatically to just nine. When the count is broken down by network, CNN had the widest gap in reporting during the Bush years and Clinton years (90-30), closely followed by ABC (45-16), CBS (41-15), and NBC (36-15).

END Excerpt

Now that a Republican is back in the White House you can be sure that ABC’s story is not an aberration but the first of many network looks at a problem they somehow managed to overlook during the Clinton years.

-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), February 13, 2001

Answers

"So now that Bill Clinton has been in office for three years, has the ever-growing problem of homelessness continued to burden the White House? Or did the problem recede from the media's agenda?"

Three years? When was the origional of this written anyway?

-- Cherri (jessam5@home.com), February 13, 2001.


Three years? When was the origional of this written anyway?

I was wondering the same thing...

-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), February 13, 2001.


Homeless in Aurora? Party on Garth! Party on Wayne!

-- (nemesis@awol.com), February 13, 2001.

Will Bush address this problem with a "communitarian" solution? A communitarian would say, "So, you can't afford housing with only a minimum wage job? Then a bunch of you must ban together and rent common living space..."

One problem with a solution like that is that zoning in some communities restricts the number of people who can live in a rental unit, and for good reason: some neighbors would be annoyed if there were twelve unrelated adults living in a three bedroom house. But that's the communitarian solution. I suspect a lot of zoning boards aren't going to go for it.

-- kb (kb8um8@yahoo.com), February 13, 2001.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ