Last year, the United States saw its biggest increase in homelessness in decades. The 12 percent spike was dramatic—but maybe not shocking. Homelessness in America has risen steadily for years, and local and state governments have struggled to respond. Some have provided more housing while others have cracked down on encampments. Across the U.S., more than 650,000 people are now homeless. And in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cities could ban them from sleeping in public.
Just a decade ago, the outlook wasn’t so bleak. Between 2010 and 2016, U.S. homelessness dropped as 87,000 people got off the streets. What’s happened since?
Dennis Culhane, a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania, researches homelessness and assisted-housing policy. As Culhane explains, last year’s unusual rise was largely the result of the crisis that resulted in Texas authorities bussing large numbers of migrants to states with shelter systems that were already near their breaking points. But, he says, it’s also a symptom of government failures. Western states’ unpreparedness and inability to respond were obvious—other problems, less so … |
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From Dennis Culhane at The Signal:
- “Seventy-five percent of the jump in the American homeless population was in just four jurisdictions: New York, Massachusetts, Chicago, and Denver—with New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Colorado being the four states where Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent large numbers of migrants. … Demand was huge. Immigrants were living on the streets. So, these governments had to create massive facilities for people to stay in—often big tents. … all of it driven by the migrant crisis.”
- “Homelessness in California has surged since around 2014. And it’s really not unique to California. The same has happened in Oregon. It’s happened in Washington state. It’s happening now in Nevada and Arizona. If you look at the trend line across America, what you see is that homelessness declines from 2009 until 2016, and then it looks pretty flat from 2016 to 2018—but that’s in spite of it going up at double-digit rates on the West Coast.”
- “To respond to a homelessness crisis, there have to be existing shelter and housing systems that can be scaled up—but on the West Coast, these systems weren’t in place. That’s because the states on the West Coast had largely relied on private, charitable relief systems. Basically, these states weren’t ready—and they didn’t respond quickly enough. Now, they’re trying to catch up. They’re getting more shelters and implementing new housing programs. But the growth is so slow that it’s hard for it to make much of an impact. Last year in Los Angeles, only 12 percent of people in homeless services entered any kind of housing placement.”
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Of everything Donald Trump could have been doing this past weekend, the former U.S. president and current Republican Party nominee traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to speak at the Bitcoin 2024 conference. Having once called Bitcoin “a scam,” Trump is now promising that, if reelected in November, he’ll make America the “crypto capital of the planet—and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.”
While Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s now-presumptive nominee, was not there, her campaign has reached out to top crypto executives to “reset” her party’s relations with them. This followed 14 Democratic members of Congress signing a letter urging their party’s leadership to be more open toward cryptocurrency, to combat what they called “a public perception” that their party “holds a negative viewpoint on digital assets.”
It’s all in stark contrast with the U.S. administration of President Joe Biden—whose chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, has called the crypto industry “rife with fraud, scams, bankruptcies, and money laundering.” Under Gentler, the SEC has won a string of lawsuits against crypto companies.
Why, seemingly all of a sudden, has crypto become so politically salient in the U.S.?
It’s true, there’s money in it, at a moment when money really matters. Citing OpenSecrets, The Washington Post estimates that crypto companies and investors have already donated some $121 million this election.
But there are voters in it, too—a lot of them. Upward of 52 million Americans own digital assets—Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, or other kinds of digital property altogether, like music or art. Overwhelmingly, these voters are young; they’re politically motivated; and about half of them say they’d be less likely to vote for a candidate who has negative views on crypto. These voters evidently believe in cryptocurrency as an asset category to help stake their futures on. But from across the speeches at Bitcoin 2024 alone, they also evidently believe in it as a crucial element of humanity’s future as a whole.
—Gustav Jönsson |
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Coming soon: Rebecca Hamlin on why global migration is at a record high … |
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