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Wednesday, September 18th, 2019

The New American Homeless

Author:     BRIAN GOLDSTONE
Source:     The New Republic
Publication Date:     August 21, 2019
 Link: The New American Homeless
Stephan:   According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Annual Homeless Assessment Report, "as of 2018 there were around 553,000 homeless people in theUnited States on a given night." When you hear a politician tell you how wonderful the economy is, how low unemployment is, you should know that you are listening to either a moron or a liar who is probably a corporate zombie. If you are employed at $7 an hour, and the minimum cost in your city for housing requires an income of $21 an hour, employment figures are just a cloak to hide reality. In the U.S., where profit is the only social priority, we literally create homelessness as a social program.

Cokethia Goodman and her children outside their former home in Forest Park, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. The house was condemned shortly after they moved in.
Credit: The New Republic

Last August, Cokethia Goodman returned home from work to discover a typed letter from her landlord in the mailbox. She felt a familiar panic as she began to read it. For nearly a year, Goodman and her six children—two of them adopted after being abandoned at birth—had been living in a derelict but functional three-bedroom house in the historically black Peoplestown neighborhood of Atlanta. Goodman, who is 50, has a reserved, vigilant demeanor, her years trying to keep the kids out of harm’s way evident in her perpetually narrowed eyes. She saw the rental property as an answer to prayer. It was in a relatively safe area and within walking distance of the Barack and Michelle Obama Academy, the public elementary school her youngest son and daughter attended. It was also—at $950 a month, not including utilities—just barely affordable […]

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