... Michigan needs to learn the lessons of other states. California allows
strict local zoning and tries to solve its housing problems through
large government subsidies. The result is sky-high housing costs, a
large homeless population and people moving elsewhere. ...
Local governments aren't to blame for federal legislation which turned homes into HELOC piggy banks and mere commodities to be pumped and dumped to escape capital gains taxation.
Fewer than 775,000 people are homeless in the United States, most of them by choice because of mental illness and drug abuse. Meanwhile there are 149,006,000 total housing units in the United States, 15,305,000 of which are unoccupied.
Things are already changing enough to make Michigan more attractive as a place to live. Michigan is a net in-migration state for the first time in 30 years in 2025.
There are no compelling reasons to take away local control of zoning authorities, unless you want the freedom to turn quiet neighborhoods where people want to live into Airbnb hellholes like Austin, Texas where many no longer do.
The Journal’s count includes about 550,000 homeless people so far, up about 10% from what these places reported last year. The trend thus far means the U.S. is likely to top the roughly653,000 homeless people estimated in 2023—the highest number since the government started reporting comparable data in 2007. The final count will depend on outstanding data from places that haven’t yet divulged their 2024 numbers, especially New York City, which reported the highest count last year.
She feels the attacks
are emblematic of an issue no one wants to address: the mental health
and drug crisis among the unhoused residents of Venice.
"It's
not like they're horrible people," Klein said. "It's just we need to
stop being in denial about our family members and our community members
who are in desperate need of mental health help — especially those who
are really struggling on the streets."
More than 650,000 people are estimated to be homeless.
This is a small problem of incompetent liberalism in places like California, Oregon, and Washington state, where the drug laws are lax and the weather is good. It is pathetic that the Supreme Court has to be pestered with the consequences of liberalism's never-ending quest to turn every place into a shithole.
For the second straight month, immigration leads Americans’ unprompted
answers about what most ails the nation, with inflation also figuring
prominently. ...
Immigration Is Americans’ Top Unprompted Concern
Gallup also measures Americans’ views of
national concerns monthly by asking them to name, unprompted, what they
believe is the most important problem facing the country today. This
question format is asked before the list of issue concerns in the survey
and yields a slightly different conclusion, finding immigration ranking
ahead of inflation. Overall, 28% of Americans, the same as in February
and the most for any issue, name immigration as the top problem. That
essentially ties the 27% reading from July 2019 as the highest since
Gallup started compiling mentions of immigration in 1981.
Late last month, the venerable Gallup company released a survey
listing the most pressing concerns in the United States. Predictably
topping the list were inflation and crime, followed by hunger and
homelessness, the economy broadly, and the high cost of health care.
Farther back were things like illegal immigration, drug use, and the
environment.
When Gallup asks Americans to rank their concerns about a list of problems, immigration is placed seventh in the list. By the time your average person gets to number seven, he's already forgotten what he said about one, two, three, four, and five.
But you can see from that list what really concerns most people: their weight.
Take the combined "worrying a great deal" and "a fair amount" about any of the fourteen problems and you will see that NUMERO UNO is . . . hunger and homelessness at 80%.
Yet homelessness affected fewer than 600,000 people in 2022.
And hunger? Hunger is now about "food insecurity", not starving. My fat cat is food insecure if I fail to keep her food bowl full. Two-thirds of adults are overweight, 40% of whom are obese, and there's a weight-loss-drug mania out there.
No, Americans are worried about the obscenely high cost of housing and that they'll end up on the street begging for the food Joe Biden's inflation made unaffordable if they lose their jobs, which is highly likely with 10 million illegals he let in competing for their positions.
But yeah, worry about nuclear war with The Boston Globe.
OpEd: Black People Lost Their Section 8. Pritzker Gives it to Illegal Immigrants Under the Disguise of Asylum Seekers
(Chicago, IL) – This week Lori Lightfoot announced that she is accepting a bus load of illegal immigrants from Texas. This comes as Biden ordered the non enforcement of borders in Texas. Governor Abbott could not detain or do anything about these illegal immigrants breaking the law and illegally entering Texas. Since Chicago is an illegal “sanctuary city” (as they provide federal funds to people who are actively violating federal law), Governor Abbott made the move to send those people to Chicago.
Black People Have Housing Confiscated to Give to Illegal Immigrants
The Mayor, as well asGovernor Pritzker,will take the money from public housing and from the black community to provide housing for illegal immigrants. The Mayor, Governor, and Tracey Scott (the head ofCHA) have taken away emergency section 8 vouchers for black people. They are even trying to prosecute black people in public housing who own businesses and received pandemic loans. They are even threatening to take away these black folks’ public housing. The number of black people that they say they are looking to put out of their homes is “6,000”.
We find that this isn’t a coincidence. Because this same head of CHA, Tracey Scott in Chicago was being investigated in Minnesota for putting black people out of public housing. The same head of CHA replaced those black people with Somalians. Now Minnesota has a very large Somalian population and the result is a huge increase in black homelessness.
When CHA CEO Tracey Scott was leading the Public Housing Units in Atlanta, she was consistently under investigation. According to the Defend Glendale and Public Housing Coalition in Minnesota, the Atlanta Housing Authority displaced roughly 50,000 residents, handing them Section 8 vouchers which became increasingly hard to use in a quickly gentrifying city. The Guardian reported:
She has a history of putting black people in a situation where their vouchers don’t mean anything. Now she’s in a situation claiming that 6,000 black Chicago CHA residents need to be put out of their housing because they merely received a federal pandemic loan. This is a violation of their 4th and 14th amendments. It is not illegal for residents of public housing to have a business. According to federal law, specifically section 3, by law, CHA contracts are supposed to go to residents of CHA that in fact own businesses.
CHA CEO Tracey Scott breaks federal law in regards to section 3 by not giving those public housing residents that own businesses their contracts. Now she’s trying to evict them from their homes to give their home to illegal immigrants, while using the fact that they own businesses and received loans as an excuse. This is an outrageous travesty that needs to be investigated.
How is it that illegal immigrants are violating federal law, yet receive emergency vouchers. Why can’t black people get their emergency vouchers? Why are black people being kicked out of public housing?
Tracey Scott has a history of messing over black people. From Atlanta to Minnesota, and now Chicago.
It is obvious that Governor Pritzker has colluded with Mayor Lightfoot on this. Governor Pritzker alluded to this on twitter today:
Federal Funds Supporting Displacement of Black People
These people are coming to Chicago. The emergency housing money can only come from CHA. SNAP benefits are federal funds. All these funds that these illegal immigrants are receiving are unconstitutional. He’s taking money from black people on the South and West sides of Chicago. He’s then giving the money to people he thinks will vote for him. There has never been an emergency plan by this Governor to give out emergency section 8 vouchers and low income housing that have housing insecurity in the black community. Where is Tammy Duckworth? This is a federal issue.
This will affect thousands of people in the Southland who own houses and have section 8 residents. Section 8 helped these Southland lanldords keep their properties throughout the pandemic.
OpEd: Black People Lost Their Section 8. Pritzker Gives it to Illegal Immigrants Under the Disguise of Asylum Seekers
In 2021, only 486 people died using California's assisted suicide program, but that same year in Canada, 10,064 died used MAID to die that year. MAID has now grown so popular that Canada has both anti-suicide hotlines to try and stop people killing themselves, as well as pro-suicide hotlines for people wanting to end their lives. ... MAID has fallen into further scrutiny over claims that people are now seeking assisted suicide due topoverty and homelessness or mental anguish, as opposed to the traditional method of the terminally-ill seeking a painless death.
One family, which presumably lived in a home where they presumably wrote the obituary and where the woman could have stayed temporarily, blames "the system" for the death of their homeless sister:
When a 62-year-old mentally ill woman named Shawna Wright died last
summer in a hot alley in Salt Lake City, her death only became known
when her family published an obituary saying the system failed to
protect her during the hottest July on record, when temperatures reached
the triple digits.
Her sister, Tricia Wright, said making it
easier for homeless people to get permanent housing would go a long way
toward protecting them from extreme summertime temperatures.
“We
always thought she was tough, that she could get through it,” Tricia
Wright said of her sister. “But no one is tough enough for that kind of
heat.”
Here at home, we see the ever-widening gap in our wealthiest cities — New York, San Francisco, LA — which are suffering from homeless crises of epic proportions. Forty percent of Americans don’t have $400 saved in case of emergency. Last year, 68 percent couldn’t afford a recreational activity — from a vacation to concerts to a professional sporting event to even dinner or a movie — for lack of funds.
This year, the Census Bureau reported that the gap between the rich and poor has hit its highest level in the 50-plus years since they began marking it. Adjusting for inflation, the average household income is the same as it was 20 years ago. The average American can’t afford to buy a house in 70 percent of the country.
UCSF researchers estimate that half of the single homeless adults are age 50 or older, compared to 11 percent in the early 1990s — a 354 percent uptick. This data is emblematic of a graying homeless population across the nation: America’s homeless elderly population is projected to nearly triple by 2030, according to new research encompassing New York City, Boston and Los Angeles County. And this problem spans the globe: A 2017 report on the U.K.’s homeless population found that the population of homeless people over 60 had increased 111 percent since 2009, and for those over 75 it had increased by 155 percent — compared to an increase of 48 percent in the general population.
The deadliest anti-Semitic attack occurred in 1939 when FDR refused to let the MS St. Louis of the Hamburg America Line dock with its over 900 Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany.
The ship eventually had to return to Europe and it is estimated that over 200 of its Jews ended up being exterminated in the camps.
