Rents over the last two decades have risen much faster than employee pay, contributing to an escalating homelessness crisis in the U.S.

A growing number of Americans are ending up homeless as soaring rents in recent years squeeze their budgets.

According to a Jan. 25 report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, roughly 653,000 people reported experiencing homelessness in January of 2023, up roughly 12% from the same time a year prior and 48% from 2015. That marks the largest single-year increase in the country’s unhoused population on record, Harvard researchers said.

    • iain@feddit.nl
      6·
      9 months ago

      On the scale of doing nothing to socialist revolution, this is a pretty minor change. But I’d love to hear some improvements that are not fantasies. Or do we just have to give up?

        • stembolts@programming.dev
          3·
          9 months ago

          It has already been introduced in various places. In those places there was someone, just as you are doing now, declaring it was impossible. Then it occurred.

          Doom and gloom is easy, you see yourself win all the time because the conditions for victory are nothing happening. Hope is hard and full of heartbreak. I chose a hard outlook, but I can understand why you would choose an easy one.

            • stembolts@programming.dev
              1·
              9 months ago

              Yes I do believe it can occur, with each election the generational clock is ticking forward in a detectable way. Though I personally live in a very conservative area so it tends to happen in the west and northeast before it occurs here.

            • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
              11·
              9 months ago

              I don’t live in US so for it’s not a matter of hope or gloom. It’s just my opinion based on what I see happening there.

              I don’t want to suppress you expressing your opinions (at this point assuming you’re not astroturfing for one/both of the parties) but you do need “to be closer to the ground zero” if you want to be taken as someone who understands the subject matter fully, versus being dismissed out of hand for spewing rhetoric.

              Ranked Choice Voting is truly the only way out of this mess, and it should be fought for, no matter its chance of actual implementation.

              Right now politicians are not even being asked about it, so it’s a little early to waive the white flag.