The Boston Herald put some numbers around the homeless population and the lack of subsidized housing in today’s online edition.
Hurricane Katrina evacuees have been pushed to the head of the line by the Boston and Worcester Housing Authorities, and possibly others as well.
Forty evacuees have applied to the BHA, but the state doesn’t know how many of the 745 evacuees who came to Massachusetts have applied for public housing overall.
Meanwhile, 20,000 people in Massachusetts are on public-housing waiting lists, “12,000 in Boston alone”. Depending on the community, waiting lists range from two to 15 years.
The Herald interviewed a woman who’s been living in shelters with her 2 kids for over a year. She asked, “…if we can find places for (the Katrina evacuees), why am I still on all these waiting lists?”
Good question.
We are told that homelessness is a complicated problem. It’s even difficult to get good numbers, since many individuals and families live with relatives, or are without shelter only temporarily.
We do know that some 25% of homeless people are children. Roughly the same number are veterans. The homeless include women and kids who have escaped abusive relationships.
The number of homeless is climbing, a result of an increase in the cost of housing and an economy which seems to be “growing” only for the well-off.
I mention these facts because apparently it’s been easy for the state and federal governments to ignore the suffering of people who have been victimized by circumstances beyond their control, every bit as much as the Katrina victims.
Nobody has come up with an answer for this, but here’s some facts:
- the Iraq war now costs taxpayers $5.6 billion a month
- according to Forbes, the US has 374 billionaires, a number of whom made their money from real estate
- currently, the most expensive house in the US is a 60-acre estate in the Hamptons with an asking price of $75 million
- 60 acres is equivalent to 30 city blocks, or about 1 million square feet of office space
- According to the Federal Housing Finance Board, the average price of a single-family home was $301,900 in August 2005; these data are skewed because they do not include FHA and VA loans