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PATH PartnersThe unemployment rate is higher — stuck at about 9%. The number of jobless people actively looking has increased from 13.2 million to nearly 13.9 million.
And the economy has shed about 1.3 million more jobs. It would need to create more than 11 million to bring the unemployment rate back down to when the recession set in.
So one reason homeless people don’t get jobs is the same as the reason millions of housed people don’t. There just aren’t enough jobs out there.
In my heart, I’m a Californian, but for the last year and a half I’ve been living in Pittsburgh attending graduate school. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area where housing is scarce, then moved down to Los Angeles for nine years, the homeless capital of the country, before moving out east.
Homeless advocates have long argued that the answer to ending homelessness is straight forward, build more affordable housing. I too subscribed to this dogma before moving to Pittsburgh, where the last thing any neighborhood needs is more housing development.
Another month, another bad jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You’ve probably already read the top-line figures, but maybe not all these.
The unemployment rate is still stuck at 9.1%. Nearly 14 million people officially unemployed last month — about the same as in August.
An additional 1 million who looked for work during the past 12 months but gave up because they felt it was futile. Presumably lots who gave up earlier and so didn’t get counted as “discouraged.”
Mercedes Diane Griffin Forbes, civil rights columnist for the Washington DC Examiner, takes on the Heritage Foundation’s dismissive report on poverty in America.
“No matter how extreme some may think the idea of poverty is,” she writes, “for millions, it is not merely an idea born out of media hype, it is in fact a reality.”
The evidence is surely on her side. But her own idea of poverty seems to me warped by what I guess I’d call a middle-class bias.
The last several weeks, some of us have been keeping up to date with the Occupy Movement . Originating in New York City, and sprouting in various cities across the country, including my beloved Los Angeles, protestors are taking to the street and camping out to demand economic equality.
Los Angeles even approved a resolution to support the protesters, and major unions and organizing groups are supporting them too.
Everyone is talking about jobs, from Steve Jobs resigning from Apple to the dearth of jobs in last month’s jobs report.
As summer comes to an end, political leaders tout their employment success or promote some soft of new jobs program to mask declining employment. This year is no different.
In this stubborn reclining economy, many of our neighbors are falling through the cracks of middle-class living, ending up sleeping on friend’s couches or even worse, becoming homeless.
In the past couple of years, the people walking through the front doors of the homeless programs I oversee would have shocked me years ago.
If you need a job, they don’t want you. Period.
For about a month this spring, NELP reviewed job postings on four of the biggest online sites. It looked for postings identified by employer or staffing agency while also, it says, “seeking a diverse sample from across the United States.” This, I take it, means that it didn’t look at all postings from an identifiable source.
The White House seems well aware that the upcoming Presidential election will pivot on the economy — and more specifically, the unemployment rate. Prospects for a spontaneous burst of growth are too dim to see with the naked eye.
But the President and his people are understandably wary of proposing anything that could be labeled stimulus spending.
The email was sort of cryptic, but certainly from a person who was educated. Of course the grammar was nearly perfect. The origin of the email address was UCLA. Our homeless agency had just received an electronic plea for housing from an about-to-be-homeless student at one of California’s prestigious higher education institutions, home of Nobel [...]
