Victoria is the capital city of the Canadian province of British Columbia,on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific coast. The city has a population of 91,867,and the Greater Victoria area has a population of 397,237. Victoria is the 7th most densely populated city in Canada with 4,405.8 inhabitants per square kilometre (11,411/sq mi).
The Downtown Eastside (DTES) is a neighbourhood in Vancouver,British Columbia,Canada. One of the city's oldest neighbourhoods,the DTES is the site of a complex set of social issues including disproportionately high levels of drug use,homelessness,poverty,crime,mental illness and sex work. It is also known for its strong community resilience,history of social activism,and artistic contributions.
Annette Louise Greenfield Strauss was an American philanthropist and politician who served as the 55th mayor of Dallas. The Annette Strauss Artist Square in the Arts District of downtown Dallas,Texas is named in honor of her. She was the second female mayor and the second Jewish mayor of Dallas. She was also the first woman elected to the post in her own right;Harrison served as a caretaker for the last months of Wes Wise's term after Wise resigned to run for Congress.
Homelessness in Canada was not a social problem until the 1980s. Canadian government housing policies and programs in place throughout the 1970s were based on a concept of shelter as a basic need or requirement for survival and of the obligation of government and society to provide adequate housing for everyone. Public policies shifted away from rehousing in the 1980s in wealthy Western countries like Canada,which led to a de-housing of households that had previously been housed. By 1987,when the United Nations established the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless (IYSH),homelessness had become a serious social problem in Canada. The report of the major 1987 IYSH conference held in Ottawa said that housing was not a high priority for government,and this was a significant contributor to the homelessness problem. While there was a demand for adequate and affordable housing for low income Canadian families,government funding was not available. In the 1980s a "wider segment of the population" began to experience homelessness for the first time—evident through their use of emergency shelters and soup kitchens. Shelters began to experience overcrowding,and demand for services for the homeless was constantly increasing. A series of cuts were made to national housing programs by the federal government through the mid-1980s and in the 1990s. While Canada's economy was robust,the cuts continued and in some cases accelerated in the 1990s,including cuts to the 1973 national affordable housing program. The government solution for homelessness was to create more homeless shelters and to increase emergency services. In the larger metropolitan areas like Toronto the use of homeless shelters increased by 75% from 1988 to 1998. Urban centres such as Montreal,Laval,Vancouver,Edmonton,and Calgary all experienced increasing homelessness.
Homelessness in the United States refers to the issue of homelessness in the United States,a condition wherein people lack "a fixed,regular,and adequate nighttime residence" as defined by The McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act. Point-in-time single night counts prepared by shelter providers differ greatly from federal government accounts. In 2014,approximately 1.5 million sheltered homeless people were counted. The federal government statistics are prepared by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development's Annual Homeless Assessment Report;as of 2018,HUD reported there were roughly 553,000 homeless people in the United States on a given night,or 0.17% of the population. Annual federal HUD reports contradict private state and local reports where homelessness is shown to have increased each year since 2014 across several major American cities,with 40 percent increases noted in 2017 and in 2019. In January 2018 the federal government statistics gave comprehensive encompassing nationwide statistics,with a total number of 552,830 individuals,of which 358,363 (65%) were sheltered in provided housing,while some 194,467 (35%) were unsheltered.
Arthur Christ Agnos is an American politician. He served as the 39th mayor of San Francisco,California from 1988 to 1992 and as the Regional Head of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1993 to 2001.
Affordable housing is housing which is deemed affordable to those with a household income at or below the median as rated by the national government or a local government by a recognized housing affordability index. Most of the literature on affordable housing refers to mortgages and a number of forms that exist along a continuum –from emergency homeless shelters,to transitional housing,to non-market rental,to formal and informal rental,indigenous housing,and ending with affordable home ownership.
Gregor Angus Bethune Robertson is a Canadian entrepreneur and a progressive politician,who served as the 39th mayor of Vancouver,British Columbia,from 2008 to 2018. As the longest serving Mayor in Vancouver's history,Robertson and his team led the creation and implementation of the Greenest City 2020 Action Plan and spearheaded the city's first comprehensive Economic Action Strategy.
In the Seattle King County area,there were estimated to be 11,751 homeless people living on the streets or in shelters. On January 24,2020,the count of unsheltered homeless individuals was 5,578. The number of individuals without homes in Emergency Shelters was 4,085 and the number of homeless individuals in Transitional housing was 2,088,for a total count of 11,751 unsheltered people.
The continuum of affordable housing in Canada includes market,non-market,and government-subsidized housing.
The Greenpoint Renaissance Enterprise Corporation (GREC) is a consortium of neighborhood organizations in North Brooklyn that serves to facilitate and advocate the activities for city initiatives,as well as coordinate community involvement in the neighborhood of the former Greenpoint Hospital Complex.
Homelessness in Vancouver,British Columbia,Canada is a social crisis that has been rapidly accelerating over the last decade. According to the United Nations,homelessness can either be relative or absolute. Absolute homelessness describes people living in absence of proper physical shelter. Relative homelessness describes people living in poor conditions of health or security,including an absence of both personal safety and steady income despite having physical shelter to reside in. As of 2011,roughly 2,651 people in Vancouver are subject to one of these types of homelessness,or are transitioning between them. Homelessness as a social issue in Vancouver originated from federal funding cuts to affordable housing. After market housing increased,the cost of housing became one of Vancouver's main causes of homelessness,alongside lack of income. The homeless population in Vancouver is subjected to high amounts of crime-related victimization. There have been several approaches to reducing the homeless population in Greater Vancouver by the city and other organizations. As of 2011,the rate of homelessness in Vancouver has stopped increasing,but it is not being reduced either.
Samuel Theodore Liccardo is an American attorney and politician from California and mayor of San José,California,a position he has held since January 1,2015. A member of the Democratic Party,Liccardo was elected mayor in November 2014. He was reelected in 2018 with 75.8% of the vote. As the leader of the California Big City Mayors Coalition,Liccardo has advocated on statewide issues including homelessness and COVID-19 response.
The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains four of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs,but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units,it has resulted in an extreme housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage,with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019,the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco,40 percent in Los Angeles,and 38 percent in San Diego,because rents would fall by 55 percent,41 percent,and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco,a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.
Lisa Helps is a Canadian politician,the current mayor of Victoria,British Columbia,with her inauguration taking place on December 4,2014. She narrowly defeated incumbent mayor Dean Fortin in the 2014 municipal election. She is the second woman,after Gretchen Brewin,to be elected mayor of the city.
Community Housing Partnership is a nonprofit organization in San Francisco,California,that provides housing,job training and other services to people formerly living in homelessness. Founded in 1990,it owns and operates 14 residential buildings and collaborates with other organizations in its goals.
Homelessness is a growing problem in Colorado and is considered the most important social determinants of health. Homelessness is very difficult for many Coloradoans to escape due to the continuous increase in costs for housing in Colorado along with mental health treatments and other factors. When people are forced to live without stable shelter,they are then exposed to a number of risk factors that affect physical and mental health. Although it is difficult to pin point any one cause of homelessness,there is a complicated combination of societal and individual causes.
The Seattle head tax,officially the employee hours tax (EHT),was a proposed head tax to be levied on large employers in Seattle,Washington,United States. The head tax was proposed in 2017 to fund homeless services and outreach and was set at a rate of $275 annually per employee,with hopes of raising up to $50 million annually.
Affordable housing is a housing which is deemed affordable to those with a median household income as rated by the national government or a local government by a recognized housing affordability index. A general rule is no more than 30% of gross monthly income should be spent on housing,to be considered an affordable for the challenges of promoting affordable housing varies by location.
In September 2021,an average of 47,916 people slept in New York City's homeless shelters each night. This included 18,236 single adults,14,946 children,and 14,734 adults in families. The total number peaked in November 2018,with 63,636 people sleeping in homeless shelters. Since March 2020,the number of people sleeping in shelters has declined significantly,likely an effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. The city reported that in 2019,3,600 individuals experienced unsheltered homelessness.
