Above: "God's Shadows," a wood engraving print by Todros Geller (1889-1949), created while he was in the WPA's art program, 1940. According to his Wikipedia page, Geller "regarded art as a tool for social reform... His work was commissioned for stained glass windows, bookplates, community centers and Yiddish and English books." Image courtesy of the General Services Administration and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
According to a recent brief by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, "On any given night, over 175,000 people are unsheltered, sleeping outside or in places not meant for human habitation. On a positive note, unsheltered homelessness has been declining nationally for several years, but some jurisdictions, particularly some large cities, report increases." The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that "Despite money and effort, homelessness in SF as bad as ever," with area residents complaining about "tent encampments, needles and human feces." One San Franciscan in the article said:
"The Powell Street BART Station is basically a homeless shelter, and not a well-maintained one. There are homeless people sprawled all over the place, sometimes shooting up, sometimes with clothes not completely covering their backsides. Some people have seen people masturbating. There's the smell, the dirt. The needles, the human waste, the garbage. I just don't understand why we think it's OK."
Actually, of course, probably very few people think homelessness is okay, but our collective, rigid, and even religious devotion to "free markets" and "job creators"--coupled with the brainwashing we've been subjected to about the evils of "big government"--prevents us from effectively dealing with the problem. Rates of homelessness go up and down, depending on the number of band-aid solutions at any given time, but the core problems underlying homelessness, for example, lack of affordable housing, lack of good-paying jobs, income & wealth inequality, right-wing attacks on the social safety net, mental health problems, and so on, are likely to continue for many years to come.
During the New Deal, there were many policies and programs that effectively dealt with the homeless and the near-homeless, for example, more affordable housing opportunities; transient and homeless work camps for the willing & able-bodied; and a jobs program--the Civilian Conservation Corps--for young men who were wandering around the countryside, on trains or hitchhiking, in a fruitless search for work. We could do the same things today, if we had enough energy and empathy.
"Seeing who is walking into soup kitchens and who we're seeing when we do outreach, they're barely hanging on... they're recently released from the hospital with colostomy bags. There are people with cancer on the streets, severe diabetes, heart disease, a lot of really severe mental illness combined with addictive disorders."
--Jennifer Friedenbach, Director, Coalition of Homelessness, "Despite money and effort, homelessness in SF as bad as ever," San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 2017
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