Child Homelessness Surges in America

As the Republicans seek to destroy the social safety net and self-proclaimed "family values" spend millions of dollars to oppose gay rights, especially gay marriage - all because they claim to be concerned about "the children" - child homelessness is surging in America.  While all these funds are spent on anti-gay efforts, these same "family values" organizations spend nothing on aiding children or families.  The hypocrisy is absolute.  An article in The Daily Beast looks at the surging problem of child homelessness.  The referenced report can be found here. Here are highlights:

The number of homeless children in the U.S. has surged in recent years to an all-time high, amounting to one child in every 30, according to a comprehensive state-by-state report. The report, which will be issued Monday, blames the nation’s high poverty rate, the lack of affordable housing, and the effects of pervasive domestic violence. The report by the National Center on Family Homelessness calculates that nearly 2.5 million American children were homeless at some point in 2013.

The number is based on the Department of Education’s latest count of 1.3 million homeless children in public schools, supplemented by estimates of homeless preschool children not counted by the DOE. The problem is particularly severe in California, which has one-eighth of the U.S. population but accounts for more than one-fifth of the homeless children with a tally of nearly 527,000.

[T]he federal government has made progress in reducing homelessness among veterans and chronically homeless adults.  "The same level of attention and resources has not been targeted to help families and children," she said. "As a society, we're going to pay a high price, in human and economic terms."

Child homelessness increased by 8 percent nationally from 2012 to 2013, according to the report, which warned of potentially devastating effects on children's educational, emotional and social development, as well as on their parents' health, employment prospects and parenting abilities.

[N]either federal nor state housing assistance nor incentives for developers to create low-income housing have kept pace with demand.  "We need more affordable housing or we need to pay people $25 an hour," she said. "The minimum wage isn't cutting it."

"Fixing the problem starts with adopting an honest definition," said Bruce Lesley, president of the nonprofit First Focus Campaign for Children. "Right now, these kids are sort of left out there by themselves."

Lesley's group and some allies have endorsed a bill introduced in Congress, with bipartisan sponsorship, that would expand HUD's definition to correlate more closely with that used by the Education Department. However, the bill doesn't propose any new spending for the hundreds of thousands of children who would be added to the HUD tally.

Yet another example of "American exceptionalism" that the right wing likes to extol.