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The $3 billion proposed by president Biden is the first time in history that money is being allocated to tackle elder homelessness. This WSJ report shows how older boomers holding onto larger homes for retirement and aging in these homes is worsening the supply of housing. Including for younger boomers who are in their 50's and who because housing is less affordable or because of a life event or healthcare costs are facing a high rate of homelessness. WSJ's report says $3 billion is unlikely to get thorough this Republican Congress but it is not enough to tackle the problem -because people should not be destitute in this way such as these younger boomers in America as an advanced developed Nation.

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Homelessness has become a major problem in American cities. The situation has worsened during the pandemic. This mounting problem is a major issue in the mayoral election for Denver. WSJ shows pictures of the city's homeless areas. After 12 years Mayor Michael Hancock is termed out and there are 16 candidates vying to replace him. All are being pressed to find solutions to the problem. Rising housing costs and Denver's growth have increased homelessness. WSJ reports Denver's homeless population has grown 44% from 3376 in 2017 to 4794 in 2022.

In 2012 the city imposed a camping ban. Business owners say it has not been enforced. Homeless protection groups say sweeps have only moved the homeless elsewhere. The mayor's office says 15,000 people have found homes. With the pandemic there were health issues and economic issues that made it harder to tackle the problem.

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The president's Council of Economic Advisors puts out a report on the homeless in California that makes points that both sides, liberals and Trump supporters can agree on. It says California has 12% of the population of the U.S. and half the unsheltered homeless in the country. The blame for the housing situation in the state is placed on "not-near-me" residents that want to prevent housing being built near them by supporting strict environmental and zoning restrictions. Residents selfishness looking at only their own interests and keeping out newcomers is seen as the problem behind the lack of new housing units. The tech industry pushing up housing prices has further aggravated the availability of affordable housing leading to a worsening of access to decent housing in the state.

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One third of US homeless are in California, 75000 in Los Angles alone. Many live in RV or cars because that is all they can afford, and rents have gone up. Shown in FR24 is the situation for housing in California.

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Governor Newsom of California is joining Republican Governors of Montana and Alabama to allow cities to act to limit encampments of the homeless in American cities, taking the case to the US Supreme Court. The Biden Administration is walking a delicate path by supporting rights of the homeless that lower courts support  yet not wanting to see the spread of homeless encampments affect the overall safety and health of cities where homeless encampments affect quality of life in neighborhoods. Homelessness of 600,000 people in the US, with more than half sleeping outside in open spaces and parks is now before the US Supreme Court. The pandemic, the large increase in housing costs in the western states, and the cost of living have pushed many people over the edge, at an alarming rate for four years. Justices ask city attorneys of Grants Pass, and in effect other cities in the US, where are people supposed to go if no other shelter is offered by the city, that they have a right to sleep, and breathe. "Sleeping is a biological necessity- Justice Elena Kagan. "Are they supposed to kill themselves, not sleeping," Justice Sotomayor.  Justices Kavanaugh and Roberts questioned whether judges should be making decision that should be made by policymakers. US Supreme Court is reviewing a lower court ruling upholding rights of homeless people in the US  under the 8th Amendment that is opposed by the city of Grants Pass, Oregon. A small western town of 40,000 people facing a problem of a significant portion of its population, about 8%, having to sleep in parks and in open public spaces because they have nowhere to go. It has only 138 beds from the Gospel Rescue Mission for homeless situations with strict rules. It faces in today's America rising homelessness- affordability of housing affecting people in many states. In 2022 an three judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which covers western states Oregon, California, and Washington upheld a lower court decision barring the city of Grants Pass from enforcing a citywide ban on sleeping in parks at night if no other shelter was available with fines ranging $75 -$295. As a result of this decision encampments of the homeless are increasing in the western states because restrictions on public camping no longer play a deterring role. Cities say this increases crime and drug use, disease, and hazardous waste.  ...

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Gerard Baker in The Times of London looks at California as some kind of dystopia, a malfunctioning place with rolling blackouts from PG&E the electricity company, drought and water shortages, housing costs soaring making it affordable only to the few at the top, and high taxes. He cites an expert from Chapman University who compares it to some sort of medieval feudal place run by nobility at the top, the investors, lawyers and people in entertainment, with the academy and the media as a kind of clerisy who propagate the ideas that this nobility supports, a small middle and the rest as serfs or minimum wage workers in logistics, retail and farms. Median costs of housing are about $613,000, and the affordability index of people who can afford housing is 32% compared to 56% in the country. Hispanic immigrants now prefer Texas, though with a loss of 6 million people in the last decade and gain of five million, it sees increase in population with high birthrates from the existing population to about 40 million. Half the population of homeless in the U.S. are now in California though it has only one eighth the population of the country. High housing costs and high cost of living hurt people at the low end, the lower middle and the retired the most. With low wages at the bottom and extremes of wealth, homeless, housing zone restrictions, drought and rolling electricity blackouts, this is not what the future should look like.  ...

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Quentin Hardy of the NYT provides this exceptional account of life in the Mid-Market area of San Francisco, close to the Financial District and a few blocks from the offices of Twitter, and of Spotify, Zendesk and other startup companies. Moving just a few blocks from the tech startups offices can take you into a different world with dilapidated housing, drug dealers, and housing for homeless people. Expensive resaurants and markets rub shoulders with poorer shops.

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The Guardian sends its reporters along with UN special envoy on poverty Australian Prof. Alston as he spends two weeks in the world's richest country looking at poverty in urban areas.  They look at some of the 55,000 homeless people in Los Angeles, homelessness exacerbated by the tech boom in California that has sent housing costs skyrocketing. LA saw homeless people increase by 25% in 2017. The safety net is not being reinforced as the Trump administration cuts many social safety net programs. Next they visit the Tenderloin district in San Francisco where homeless people can be found at St Boniface Church sleeping in the pews. As the Guardian points out the cuts to social programs disproportionately hurt people of color who make up 39% of the homeless in the U.S. This report looks at the incongruity between the tax cuts that are likely to hurt poor whites who supported the Trump administration, as well as hurt the social protections that are part of today's democracies across the western world. This is most evident when one looks at the European Union. They were put in there in Europe for a reason- fairness is good for all classes, and most of all it protects democracies. Authoritarian regimes arise out of social dislocation from wars, or from lack of social protections and ineptitude of elites. Which is why a Lincoln or a Theodore Roosevelt from the Republican party supported fairness and social protections as much as FDR and Truman from the Democratic Party. The view expressed in this report in the Guardian is that the U.S. may have moved in the wrong direction under the Reagan and Clinton administrations creating the "me first" culture that prevails in the U.S. today. ...

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Harris supports some of the most far reaching efforts to help workers and families with cost of living action. Teachers would benefit with pay raises, workers earning less than $100,000 a year would benefit with special support of $500 a month to meet cost of living increases, $100 billion would be invested to support housing affordability using a estate tax on the wealthiest households. Harris proposed Rent Relief Act would provided refundable tax credits giving renters who earn less than $100,000 the ability to recoup housing costs in excess of 30 percent of their incomes. One of the more egregious situations today is shown in the WSJ where 25% of people renting apartments in the US- middle and lower income people- pay over 50% of their income on rent leaving less and less for food, transport, childcare. This would make a huge difference for these households. Affordable Housing is a big issue in many states including Nevad and Biden had proposed a 5% cap on rent increases after 20% increase in the last two years of the pandemic. Harris's proposal goes beyond this to help the hardest hit households. Harris supports emergency relief funding for homeless. And she supports spending $100 billion in communities hurt by discrimination in getting housing. ...

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There are about 181,000 homeless in California one third of the total in the US. This $6.4 billion bond issuance for borrowing funds was approved by just over 50% of the vote. It will go to create more affordable housing so badly needed in California's out of control housing prices. People tended to think nothing works and out of apathy did not vote. But the scale of the problem required effort at the state level or federal level with funding in the tens of billions of dollars for affordable housing. This is the first time that this has happened even though Silicon Valley and capital markets have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in dubious companies and projects that have contributed little to the standard of living and ease of living of the American people, including essential infrastructure and health, education services. The dilapidated and crumbling infrastructure, of subways, streets and bridges in New York City is another aspect of the same problem of serious, serious lack of affordable housing in California. It also creates the kind of class divisions in society that FDR-Truman-Kennedy sought to remove since the 1930's. ...

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Germany's homeless problem compares with that in the US, with Federal Working Group Bag-W estimating it at 600,000 of which 50,000 live on the streets. In Germany authorites are expected to give emergency shelters to people on the streets. The Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and Building put out a 31 point Action Plan as a first step. Previous efforts have failed. The Action Plan includes getting financial assistance to state governments to build social housing -18.15 billion euros were allocated for 2022-2027 to build affordable social housing. Yet in the first year 2022 only 22,545 units were built short of the 100,000 goal per year. Affordable housing is at the heart of the fight against homelessness. There is an acute shortage that is driving up cost of housing in the US and in Germany. WSJ recently showed about a third of US housing is tied up by retired boomers hanging on to large homes. Germany's allocation of $3 billion per year is inadequate  for a problem of this magnitude that colors out perceptions of the quality of life in American and European cities. Capital markets are misallocating funds, and doing little for work that is an absolute priority for quality of life in the streets and neighborhoods of America and Europe. Larger investment is needed. ...

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Mr Wolfson and Ms. Gibbs are deputy mayors of New York City. Here they list all the efforts made by Mayor Bloomberg to fight poverty in New York City and help the homeless during his years in office. They cite a 28% reduction in street homelessness since 2005, a 22% drop in school suspensions, a drop in welfare rolls by 25% with 900,000 New Yorkers moved from welfare to work, and a poverty rate that is flat over the last 12 years while the poverty rate in the U.S. is up 28%. They point to the last Bloomberg budget allocation of $9.2 billion for services to the poor and homeless- 83% higher than Bloomberg's first year in office. Of this $981 million was for services to the homeless, double that in 2002. 175,000 units of affordable housing were built.

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Activity in downtown San Francisco remains at about a third of prepandemic levels, with remote work having caught on for tech companies during the pandemic employees are there for only half of the week. Office vacancy rates are 28% for downtown. In a strange twist Silicon Valley that led the shift of manufacturing to China and ignored that this led to loss of tax revenues for the towns across America, and decline of these towns that lost factories, is now facing the same situation in its own backyard. Office based industry provides three quarters of San Francisco tax revenue, and faces a $780 million deficit for the next 2 years. Mentally ill on streets near a Whole Foods, and dealers in Fentanyl, homelessness, lead to closing of a Whole Foods store in downtown San Francisco. Thomas Fuller and Sharon LaFraniere provide this report in WSJ of the situation in downtown San Francisco in 2023. Reports from California show the failure to build enough housing during the tech boom for the average American, and apartments for homeless costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and years behind schedule. The mayor is looking for tougher laws to put mentally ill off the streets. There is no consensus on action. Tech investors people hope for another Tech boom to tackle the situation, yet tech companies are retrenching and face government scrutiny even breakup. Even a speeded up effort to add 20% of the housing stock of the city of San Francisco by adding 83,000 apartments from Mayor Ms. Breed would take 8 years.  ...

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Voters were split in places such as San Diego and Sacramento which have a higher degree of homeless than other places in California. California has one third of America's homeless people. Part of this is that there is a sense that this problem can't be solved, a sense of helplessness that nothing so far has worked. And confusion created about it shifting funds raised from a 1% tax on wealthy for mental health services to be delivered by counties and protests by local mental health organizations that it would prevent prevention efforts. This tax money is shifted to the state level which will put responsibility for solution in one place with a comprehensive attack on the problem in a multipronged way getting to the root of the problem with adequate funding for the first time- the unaffordability of California housing where a 1-2 bedroom house could cost $1 million.

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According to Census Bureau data analyzed by the Pew Research Center, 6.1 million Hispanic children lived in poverty in 2010. The poverty line is defined as a family of four living on $22,314. Of the total poor children in 2010, 37.3% were Hispanic, 30.5% white, and 26.6% black. Hispanics were hit hard by the 2008-2009 recession because many are employed in construction and the hospitality industries or blue collar jobs. A majority of the Hispanic children were born in the U.S. 4.1 million have immigrant parents and 2.0 million have U.S. born parents. Of the total U.S. population Latinos are 16%, yet they comprise 23% of all the children in the country. With a quarter of America's children being Latino -and with these numbers expected to grow in coming years because of higher birth rates- the fact that many of these children are less likely to get a college education or acquire technical skills because of poverty levels, has serious implications for America's future competitiveness.

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U.S. bank Wells Fargo is paying $175 million in a settlement with the Justice Department for "systemic discrimination" in mortgage lending to Blacks and Hispanics. The lawsuit was originally filed by the city of Baltimore over violations of fair lending laws. The Justice Department started its own investigation following the lawsuit. The Justice Department said 4500 black and Hispanic homeowners in the Baltimore and Washington region were targets of loans at unfavorable rates and excessie fees. Federal officials described this as a pattern of unfair lending practices that spanned 36 states and 34,000 minority customers over 5 years. As part of the settlement Wells Fargo is providing $50 million to Washington, Baltimore and six other metropolitan regions to help residents make down payments on new homes. Separately Wells Fargo in its settlement with the city of Baltimore, will provide $3 million in homeowner assistance to residents, and make $125 million in lower cost loans to low and moderate income people for the next 5 years....

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The Journal cites figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture showing 44.7 million participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program in fiscal 2011. This is a big jump from the 28.2 million people in 2008. Texas has 4 million on food stamps, California 3.7 millon, Florida 3.1 million.

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To make custom loan modifications of the type that became necessary overnight on a large scale requires resources, investment in people and technology. On top of this a bank makes about $500 a year on a $200,000 mortgage loan, and if the loan is delinquent the bank may already have lost $2500, say experts, so there is little incentive to do much about custom loan modification. As a result, they used what a former J.P. Morgan executive called "Burger King kids." Or the banks outsourced the operation, some to law firms like David Stern, which in turn used outsourcing firms in Guam or the Philippines. The result is a largely chaotic process according to former mortgage officers of banks, and clerical staff that did not know what they were doing. Now atttorneys general in all 50 states have stated that they will investigate foreclosure practices of banks. It all started with the lone effort of Pine Tree Legal Assistance in Denmark, Maine, in succesfully challenging one of these improperly conducted foreclosures. See the NYT article on Pine Tree. In that case it was about a mother with two children who had her payment go up to $474 after loan modification, who is on food stamps after losing her job as an employment counselor....