The Gulf Coast of the United States is the coastline along the Southern United States where they meet the Gulf of Mexico. The coastal states that have a shoreline on the Gulf of Mexico are Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, and these are known as the Gulf States.
Houston is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Texas, fourth most populous city in the United States, most populous city in the Southern United States, as well as the sixth most populous in North America, with an estimated 2019 population of 2,320,268. Located in Southeast Texas near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, it is the seat of Harris County and the principal city of the Greater Houston metropolitan area, which is the fifth most populous metropolitan statistical area in the United States and the second most populous in Texas after the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, with a population of 7,066,141 in 2019.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), also known as the Agriculture Department, is the U.S. federal executive department responsible for developing and executing federal laws related to farming, forestry, rural economic development, and food. It aims to meet the needs of farmers and ranchers, promotes agricultural trade and production, works to assure food safety, protects natural resources, fosters rural communities and works to end hunger in the United States and internationally.
A skid row or skid road is an impoverished area, typically urban, in English-speaking North America whose inhabitants are people "on the skids". This specifically refers to the poor, the homeless or others either considered disreputable or forgotten by society. A skid row may be anything from an impoverished urban district to a red-light district to a gathering area for the homeless. In general, skid row areas are inhabited or frequented by individuals marginalized by poverty or through drug addiction. Urban areas considered skid rows are marked by high vagrancy, and they often feature cheap taverns, dilapidated buildings, and drug dens as well as other features of urban blight. Used figuratively, it may indicate the state of a poor person's life.
A home, or domicile, is a living space used as a permanent or semi-permanent residence for an individual, family, household or several families in a tribe. It is often a house, apartment, or other building, or alternatively a mobile home, houseboat, yurt or any other portable shelter. A principle of constitutional law in many countries, related to the right to privacy enshrined in article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the inviolability of the home as an individual's place of shelter and refuge.
Homelessness in the United States refers to the issue of homelessness, 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 201 across several major American cities, with 40 percent increases noted in 2017 and in 2019. In January of 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.
Homes Not Jails is an American organization that is affiliated with San Francisco Tenants Union. It describes itself as an all-volunteer organization committed to housing homeless people through direct action. The group was formed in 1992. Homes Not Jails does public actions as well as legislative advocacy and squatting. Homes not jails groups do "housing takeovers", acts of civil disobedience in which vacant buildings are publicly occupied, to demonstrate the availability of vacant property and to advocate that it be used for housing. The group has done many such occupations. Homes Not Jails has also done and assisted with hundreds of "covert" squats in which vacant buildings are broken into so that people in need of housing can move in.
A poorhouse or workhouse is a government-run facility to support and provide housing for the dependent or needy.
Midtown is a central neighborhood of Houston, located west-southwest of Downtown. Separated from Downtown by an elevated section of Interstate 45, Midtown is characterized by a continuation of Downtown's square grid street plan, anchored by Main Street and the METRORail Red Line. Midtown is bordered by Neartown (Montrose) to the west, the Museum District to the south, and Interstate 69 to the east. Midtown's 325 blocks cover 1.24 square miles (3.2 km2) and contained an estimated population of nearly 8,600 in 2015.
The University of Houston–Clear Lake (UHCL) is a public university in Pasadena and Houston, Texas, with branch campuses in Pearland and Texas Medical Center. It is part of the University of Houston System. Founded in 1971, UHCL has an enrollment of more than 9,000 students for fall 2019.
Supportive housing is a combination of housing and services intended as a cost-effective way to help people live more stable, productive lives, and is an active "community services and funding" stream across the United States. Supportive housing is widely believed to work well for those who face the most complex challenges—individuals and families confronted with homelessness and who also have very low incomes and/or serious, persistent issues that may include substance use disorders, mental health, HIV/AIDS, chronic illness, diverse disabilities or other serious challenges to stable housing. Supportive housing can be coupled with such social services as job training, life skills training, alcohol and substance use disorder treatment, community support services, and case management to populations in need of assistance. Supportive housing is intended to be a pragmatic solution that helps people have better lives while reducing, to the extent feasible, the overall cost of care. As community housing, supportive housing can be developed as mixed income, scattered site housing not only through the traditional route of low income and building complexes.
The economy ofHouston is based primarily on the energy industry, particularly oil. However, health care, biomedical research, and aerospace also constitute large sectors. In 2012, the gross domestic product (GDP) of the Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land metropolitan statistical area (MSA) was $449 billion, the fourth-largest of any metro area in the United States. The Houston metropolitan area comprises the largest concentration of petrochemical manufacturing in the world, including for synthetic rubber, insecticides, and fertilizers. It is the world's leading center for oilfield equipment construction, with the city of Houston home to more than 3,000 energy-related businesses, including many of the top oil and gas exploration and production firms and petroleum pipeline operators. As of 2011, 23 companies on the Fortune 500 list have their headquarters in, or around, Houston.
Compass Family Services is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in San Francisco, California that provides a wide variety of human services to homeless and at-risk of homelessness families. In 2019, they served 6,000 parents and children. Its services include intake and referral to shelter, emergency shelter, transitional housing, and childcare—in addition to a broad spectrum of counseling, parenting education, prevention, and support services.
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral is the spiritual home of the largest Eastern Orthodox parish in Houston, Texas. It is located in Montrose and Neartown.
East Downtown Houston (EaDo) is a district in Houston, Texas, United States. The East Downtown Management District (EDMD), manages the area with offices headquartered at START Houston, a co-working space 1121 Delano Street. The community is located east of Downtown Houston and north of Interstate 45. It is between the George R. Brown Convention Center and the East End district.
Homelessness is defined as living in housing that is below the minimum standard or lacks secure tenure. People can be categorized as homeless if they are: living on the streets ; moving between temporary shelters, including houses of friends, family and emergency accommodation ; living in private boarding houses without a private bathroom or security of tenure. The legal definition of homeless varies from country to country, or among different jurisdictions in the same country or region. United States government homeless enumeration studies also include people who sleep in a public or private place not designed for use as a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings. People who are homeless are most often unable to acquire and maintain regular, safe, secure and adequate housing due to an unsteady or lack of income. Homelessness and poverty are interrelated. There is no methodological consent on counting the homeless and identifying their special needs; thus in most cities only estimated homeless populations are known.
The tiny-house movement is an architectural and social movement that advocates living simply in small homes. 2018 International Residential Code, Appendix Q Tiny Houses defines a tiny house. However, a residential structure under 37 m2 is generally considered a tiny home. The tiny-house movement promotes financial prudence, economically safe, shared community experiences, and a shift in consumerism-driven mindsets.
Homelessness is a major issue in India. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights defines 'homeless' as those who do not live in a regular residence due to lack of adequate housing, safety, and availability. The United Nations Economic and Social Council Statement has a broader definition for homelessness; it defines homelessness as follows: ‘When we are talking about housing, we are not just talking about four walls and a roof. The right to adequate housing is about security of tenure, affordability, access to services and cultural adequacy. It is about protection from forced eviction and displacement, fighting homelessness, poverty and exclusion. India defines 'homeless' as those who do not live in Census houses, but rather stay on pavements, roadsides, railway platforms, staircases, temples, streets, in pipes, or other open spaces. There are 1.77 million homeless people in India, or 0.15% of the country's total population, according to the 2011 census consisting of single men, women, mothers, the elderly, and the disabled. However, it is argued that the numbers are far greater than accounted by the point in time method. For example, while the Census of 2011 counted 46,724 homeless individuals in Delhi, the Indo-Global Social Service Society counted them to be 88,410, and another organization called the Delhi Development Authority counted them to be 150,000. Furthermore, there is a high proportion of mentally ill and street children in the homeless population. There are 18 million street children in India, the largest number of any country in the world, with 11 million being urban. Finally, more than three million men and women are homeless in India's capital city of New Delhi; the same population in Canada would make up approximately 30 electoral districts. A family of four members has an average of five homeless generations in India.
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% in Los Angeles, and 38% in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55%, 41%, and 39% respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to rent a two-bedroom apartment.
Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA), is a nonprofit national career and technical student organization for young men and women in Family and Consumer Sciences education in public and private school through grade 6-12. FCCLA is the only national career and technical student organization with the family as its central focus. Since 1945, the goal of FCCLA members has been to make a difference in their families, careers, and communities by addressing personal, work, and societal issues through Family and Consumer Sciences education.
