I’ll Be Homeless for Christmas

Over 653,000 Americans are homeless this holiday season

Santa Mike of NYC giving presents to the homeless made possible by passerby's donating to his cause. Video link here.

In 1943, Bing Crosby recorded the hit song, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” written at a time when the world was threatened by fascism, and the holocaust had yet to be discovered by liberating troops. The song was written for the soldiers, far from their loved ones. Written nearly two decades before I was born, the song still holds a place in my heart, because going home for Christmas was what the holiday was about, in my family’s case Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Fort Wayne is just an average midwestern city, but for myself and my sister it was a place of constancy and security, as our family was forced to migrate around the Midwest. My father, a former college educator, is a man of compassion, and high ethical standards. He believes in the sacrosanct role of education to improve the human condition, and always felt a deep responsibility for his students. Now in his mid 80s, as is my mother, he continues to teach in a community arts center in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Born in Fort Wayne as was I, although there just briefly as a baby, my parents are classic midwestern stock, stoics with a high sense of responsibility, and unwavering work ethics.

Unfortunately, those admirable characteristics often conflict with those of lower standards. This resulted in numerous moves as a child. I had an education in human nature, long before I left home.

Our entire extended family lived in the Fort Wayne area until I was about twelve, when a handful of aunts, uncles, and cousins began moving to Nevada. Christmas was a shared holiday. When we visited, we stayed in my grandparent’s tiny, charming, 1946 home, with stuccoed plaster, a curved wall, two knotty pine bedrooms, a stone fireplace, and a weeping willow tree I spent hours under on summer days. The house was on my mother’s side. Visits to my father’s parents involved a lake, sunburns, and going out with my grandpa on his modest boat to fish. I can still hear the sloshing of the waves coming to shore, and smell the organic aroma of the lake, in sharp contrast to the pungency of the petrol of the boat.

My grandparents house, a lucky find on a real estate site from a just few years ago, exactly as I remember it.

Christmas Eve was celebrated on my mother’s side, then Christmas Day on my father’s. We celebrated Hanukkah as well, with an aunt and uncle who had converted to Judaism. My grandfather on my mother’s side was born in Canada, to a family of Jews who fled the Russian Revolution. Perhaps unusually, he was the embodiment of the Christmas spirit, reveling in generosity, giving, and family. Are these not universal values, regardless of religious subscription?

I bring these memories up, because having a home is a universal human right. Both sets of my grandparents were depression era people of modest means; the 1946 home was the only one my “Poppo” and Nanny ever owned, purchased in their 40s, and my father’s parents graduated from a primitive trailer on Silver Lake, to a more contemporary one on Blue Lake later in life. It wasn’t easy for them.

However, here at the holidays there are over 653,000 homeless people in America right now, the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. If we gave each of them $1 million, that would be less than the baseball player Shohei Ohtani’s recent ten-year contract to play baseball for the Los Angeles Dodgers, a figure I called out castigating the latest fossil fuel debacle if you’re interested, at COP28. The US military budget just signed by Joe Biden is $816.7 billion. Last December it was reported that the great humanitarian, Elon Musk, lost $200 billion of net worth from a peak of $340 billion in November 2021.

In 2022 more than 30,000 homeless were unaccompanied youth.

The exact figure to end homelessness is debated. A figure often used is $20 billion annually, but that’s based on an outdated and informal remark from Mark Johnston, a former acting assistant housing secretary for community planning and development, working for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 2012. Today, the HUD Housing Choice Voucher program budget is over $30 billion.

This program assists 2.3 million low-income households. More than half are seniors (fixed incomes of course), and people with disabilities, the rest working families with children. 79,000 are previously homeless military veterans. This clearly shows my off-the-cuff million dollar suggestion is inadequate. Money needed to keep roofs over the heads of the currently housed is the bulk of the cost to avoid further homelessness.

Why are so many homeless in spite of this voucher program? Popular myths deny the truth.

• People just need to get a job.

• People choose to live outside in tents or cars.

• Homeless people are dangerous and violent. 

• The homeless have substance abuse and/or mental health disorders.

The real causes of homelessness in America are systemic, not character flaws, a shortage of affordable housing, low wages, poverty and unemployment, or under employment. While workers made some wage progress recently, that progress has not kept up with inflation. The median rent in the US is now is over $2000 a month. This creates a serious obstacle to buying a home. How does one save with rent so high? The soaring cost of education is a factor, too, many saddled with debt that prohibits them from saving, or even affording rent. This is much of the reason so many adult children live in their parent’s home these days.

Today, we have a new group of pigs at the trough, those captains of industry who wish to keep wages as low as possible, and continue to suppress unions. We also have a political class on the right who are their unabashed lapdogs, using racism, homophobia, and fear of immigrants, through a rich diet of disinformation to achieve their goals.

Another factor is investors and corporations buying up houses and turning them into rental properties. Some buy up entire communities. This is adding to the housing shortage, and such investors are interested in maximizing profit, not being good citizens. They are destroying the opportunity for the most basic building block of wealth for the average American, homeownership. This is classic neoliberal, predatory economics at work. Rents have skyrocketed since the pandemic; up 17.5 percent in 2021 and 14 percent through June 2022 as compared to a normal annual inflation rate of 2 to 3 percent. The rate of inflation has fallen to about 3.2 percent in September and October of this year, but this has not equated to a fall in rental prices, and isn’t likely to.

The wealth disparity I touched on is the primary overwhelming problem, a growing issue since the Reagan administration implemented neoliberal economic policy, so-called Reaganomics, (Chicago School economics), unleashing the privatization of industry including military outsourcing, increasingly unaffordable healthcare, privatizing of public schools, and the breaking of unions. These policies were first implemented in South America with the overthrow of President Allende of Chile, who was replaced with the thug murderer General Augusto Pinochet. I wrote about that, here. Chicago School economics displaced Keynesian economics implemented by FDR, that brought the pigs at the trough who caused the Great Depression to heel, encouraged equitable growth and created the social safety nets we have PAID FOR. That’s the reason such programs are called entitlements, because we are entitled to what we paid for. The word entitlements is not the sneer right-wing politicians have turned it into. A humane and just society sets aside funds for those who struggle. Not everyone can or wishes to be a captain of industry.

Today, we have a new group of pigs at the trough, those captains of industry who wish to keep wages as low as possible, and continue to suppress unions. We also have a political class on the right who are their unabashed lapdogs, using racism, homophobia, and fear of immigrants, through a rich diet of disinformation to achieve their goals. Remember when George W. Bush wanted to tie social security to the stock market? Do you think the power brokers would make investments on our behalf? These people want to take everything from us.

The people we depend on in our daily lives, our doctors, nurses and those in the service sector, who were lauded as heroes during the Covid shutdown had no choice but to keep working in life-threatening conditions. Those in the service sector are paid non-living wages, with few if any benefits, and even with recent raises are constantly in danger of falling off the cliff. Those wage gains have not kept up with inflation, and the Fed has done us no favors with multiple interest rate hikes, as any average person knows. Those hikes protect the CEOs who average 400 percent more income than their employees, and their shareholders, to whom they are conveniently beholden by pernicious law. Current economic policy is not about the greater good or a decent society. It’s about stealing wealth and hoarding it.

On December 15, HUD reported homelessness has increased 12 percent since just 2022, an additional 70,650 people in the last year, around 653,104 total on any given night, the highest level since 2007. Even Fox News reported it.

The accusation that mental illness accounts for much of the homeless is another ruse. How about we run some statistics on mentally ill homeowners?

That said, if you are one of those clinging to the last rung of the ladder and fall off, certainly mental illness likely awaits you. How could your life not become dominated by depression and despair? How could you have hope with no mailing address, and not even the ability to shower for an interview? How do you find time to look for work, when every moment is a struggle for survival, in danger of being attacked by psychopaths who hate you for being homeless? This man made a video of himself killing a homeless person on his jog. This person has been charged with shooting and killing four homeless men. By the way, many of the homeless DO work. Their pay is so marginal they can’t afford a dwelling and the dwellings they have, the encampments deemed an eyesore, are often removed by police, the victim’s meager possessions thrown into a garbage truck.

Last winter, which featured a massive, relentless, 48-hour blizzard in Buffalo fueled by the fact that Lake Erie was not frozen over as it should be because of climate change, also featured some brutally cold temperatures. One late afternoon I had finished grocery shopping when a lady approached me in the parking lot. She seemed to want to take my cart, then I realized she was hoping I would give her some money for doing so. Her name was Michelle. She was petite, and older, probably late 60s. It turned out she was in an abusive relationship, and afraid to go home. There was a police cruiser nearby, and I suggested she ask the officers if they could help her. She responded, “They will just take me to the city mission, which will be all filled up.”

I usually don’t carry much cash, but I scraped around and came up with $10, far too little for a hotel room, but hoping it would help. She thanked me earnestly, and walked away. I’m ashamed of myself. I thought about bringing her home and making a bed on the couch, but then allowed my selfishness and fear to take over. “What if she has a mental health issue,” I asked myself. “What if she has Covid, and brings it into my house? What if she keeps coming back, and becomes a problem? What if her abusive boyfriend shows up?”

As you can see, I still think about that encounter.

Homelessness is a reflection on the state of our society, NOT on the homeless. It’s also a reflection on us individually to care, not judge, and to make a difference. Being poor isn’t a crime, but plenty of rich people are criminals. There’s one trying to be president again. A system that breeds poverty and leaves people without adequate retirements is evidence enough. Human worth is not measured in dollars, and those who measure it that way are less than human.