Homeless Pc Game

[Skye Severy]

Inrecent years, federal policy has been driven by narrow interest groups instead of demanding that funding address homelessness on a national scale. Join NCH as a member to be a part of pushing for the resources we actually need to house our communities!

If you are not homeless yet, it may be possible to avoid becoming homeless by finding out about prevention or emergency assistance programs in your area. Often these programs can help in paying rent, utilities, or bills.

Donald Hugh Whitehead Jr. is recognized as a leading expert on homelessness, having served as the Executive Director of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless, Assistant Director at St. Vincent de Paul of Baltimore, Program Director at Ohio Valley Goodwill, Grant Manager at Goodwill of Greater Washington, and Director of Communications at Greenpeace Ohio. Donald served two terms as President of the Board of Directors for the National Coalition for the Homeless, two terms on the Board of Directors for Faces and Voices of Recovery, and two terms on the Georgetown Center for Cultural Competency.

Kelvin was raised in a middle class family in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Life challenged him early. The death of his mother sent Kelvin into a very dark space fueling a drug addiction. Nearly three years of homelessness challenged him further. Just when Kelvin considered giving up, a minister entered his life that believed in him and decided to help him. Reverend J.C. Melvin worked with Kelvin and helped him with recovery. In 2009, Kelvin began his homeless advocacy with the National Coalition for the Homeless. He also wrote and self-published two self-help books. Kelvin and his wife of 15 years currently reside in Washington, DC.

HMIS is a local information technology system used to collect client-level data and data on the provision of housing and services to individuals and families at risk of and experiencing homelessness. Each CoC is responsible for selecting an HMIS software solution that complies with HUD's data collection, management, and reporting standards.

Camp Homeward Bound, now in its 40th year, will welcome about 360 children who are living in shelters or were formerly homeless to its annual summer camp about 45 miles north of the city. There, kids between 7 and 15 years old spend about two weeks swimming, biking, cooking, dancing and playing.

The Asheville-Buncombe Homeless Initiative Advisory Committee (HIAC), a joint committee of Asheville City Council and Buncombe County Commission, is composed of not more than 16 members representing various focus areas or agencies related to homelessness. The term of office is 3 years.

The Homeless Initiative Advisory Committee served as the governance board for the NC-501 Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care (CoC) until the CoC restructure in 2024. Visit the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care page to learn more about this community-wide collaborative effort.

This committee worked closely with the National Alliance to End Homelessness throughout their project on Understanding Unsheltered Homelessness and has active work groups developing implementation plans in response to recommendations delivered by the Alliance.

Public comment is accepted live during the meeting from in person attendees or virtually in advance. To submit a public comment in advance, email C88...@publicinput.com or leave a voicemail by calling 855-925-2801 and entering code 9836 when prompted. Advance comments will be shared with committee members but not read aloud during the meeting.

At a late January Bernie Sanders rally in Iowa, 46-year-old Carrie Aldrich described through tears what it was like struggling to survive on less than $12,000 a year. I watched and shook my head knowingly, having survived on $8,000 each of the past two years. Such low income, combined with a perfect storm of unaffordable rent, incompatible roommates, non-living wages, and an inability to find full-time work, resulted in three bouts of homelessness that forced me to live in my car. And in a few days, it will happen a fourth time for the same reasons.

I was born into a middle-class family, but I've hovered near poverty level all of my adult life because my line of work doesn't pay much. My career consisted of administrative roles in high-tech offices and government agencies, with most of it contract work because it paid more and provided more flexibility and mobility than permanent secretarial work.

I attended college pay-as-you-go for a couple years while working, then left because I couldn't afford to continue and knew better than to take on student debt. My moderate savings was destroyed in my 30s by health care costs that insurance wouldn't cover. Within the past several years, full-time work that pays a subsistence wage has been hard to come by. Now I'm pushing 50, and am aging out of a workforce that for the most part gave me a subsistence-level existence at best.

Three times within the past four years I've lived in my 36-year-old car that has more than 400,000 miles on it, because I could not find affordable rental housing or a job that paid a living wage. Though I reside in the Pacific Northwest, the situation is the same all across the country. Impoverished, working single women without children do not get top priority on long waitlists for subsidized housing, rapid rehousing, or other government services or benefits. I don't have family or a spouse to turn to for help or support. Friends can't or won't help for their own various reasons and circumstances. I am totally on my own.

The second time I became homeless, in the summer of 2014, I was working a part-time, temporary job for a small municipality while waiting for a full-time position to open up. My roommate gave me notice to leave so her daughter could move into the room I was renting. I had a grand in the bank at the time but couldn't find a rental situation I could afford. So once again, my cat and I lived in the car. This time, we went to a small, wealthy, temperate-climate Pacific Coast town, because the weather was in triple digits where I had come from, which turns the car into an unlivable oven. Each day I was harassed by police and park rangers because of the town's aggressive policies that criminalize homelessness. Though I found a new roommate after that horrible week, I lost the city temp job not long after I returned. I'd asked for a raise from $12 an hour to $13. When the city gave me a 23-cent raise, and when out of sheer disbelief I sought an explanation, I was told I should be grateful for any raise at all, because "temps don't usually get them." Then I was fired. "We don't want you here if you're not happy," they said.

The longer you're homeless, the more basic expenses such as gas money, car insurance, storage unit costs, laundromats, and gym memberships or park fees for showering deplete your savings. Without car insurance, your vehicle can be ticketed and impounded. Gas hovers close to $4 a gallon in the summer, so just driving around trying to find a safe place to park for the night, or to do routine things like laundry or going to a job interview across town, can rapidly burn up your cash. Laundromats are expensive. So are storage unit payments if you don't have enough room in your car for your belongings, especially the ones you might need again if you find a place to live.

In 2010, more than a third of all working adults with jobs that did not pay a living wage had at least some college education or a degree. According to 2014 census data, the poverty rate for college-educated Americans jumped from 4.4 to 5 percent. And post-recession, many older workers were forced to take positions they were overqualified for at less pay than before. Many government-funded job retraining programs are for trade careers (nursing assistant or pharmacy technician, paying on average $12 and $14 an hour respectively) that pay better than minimum wage but are still not living wages in most areas. Not "wanting" or "choosing" to work several different low-wage jobs for a total of 60 to 80 hours a week just to survive doesn't make anyone lazy: It points to the unfairness and inefficiency of the economic system, and the inequality inherent in it.

People also believe if you're homeless, it's due to moral failure or "poor choices" on your part, rather than a broken economic system, as if nearly 40 years of stagnant wages in America were your own personal doing. Blaming personal failures for your circumstances merely provides an excuse for not responding to the real causes of homelessness.

Poor households, naturally, took the brunt. I started feeling the rental squeeze in 2010, when at the age of 40 I moved in with a roommate to try to stay above water. Research shows that a $100 increase in rent is associated with a 15 percent increase in homelessness. As the Atlantic recently reported:

The housing-cost squeeze faced by the poorest households is deeply disturbing. The share of income devoted to rent by the lowest-income households increased from an already whopping 55.7 percent to a staggering 62.5 percent. No other income group spends more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Lower-middle-class households saw their rent burdens grow from 27.4 percent to 30 percent. Upper-middle-class households went from 18.5 percent to 20 percent, and the richest households from 12.5 percent to 13.5 percent.

Simply picking up and moving to a state with more affordable housing isn't a solution. Many states with cheaper housing also pay lower wages, offsetting any savings and keeping the proportion of income to rent high. Low-wage workers in places with higher minimum wages, such as Seattle or San Francisco, earn far less than an affordable housing wage for their area, but the situation is similar in cheaper places, too: It's just as difficult to afford $700-a-month rent on $10 an hour as it is to pay $1,200-a-month rent making $14 an hour.

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