A PLACE AT THE TABLE (an excerpt)

Three years after the 2007 publication of Feeding Intolerance: Prohibitions on Sharing Food with People Experiencing Homelessness, cities still choose to implement measures that criminalize homelessness and, at times, penalize those who serve homeless persons.

These measures, such as anti-camping laws, often target activities homeless people are forced to do in public spaces because of their lack of a home or shelter.

This report specifically focuses on ordinances, policies, and tactics that
discourage or prohibit individuals and groups from sharing food with homeless persons. Uncomfortable with visible homelessness in their communities and influenced by myths about homeless people’s food access, cities use food sharing restrictions to move homeless people out of sight, an action that often exacerbates the challenges people experiencing homelessness face each day just to survive.

The report also highlights constructive alternatives to food sharing restrictions, in the form of innovative programs that both adults and youth are implementing to share food with people experiencing homelessness in their communities.

Increasing Homelessness and Hunger Across the U.S.
Many people are confronting homelessness and hunger in the current economic recession, some for the first time. The 2009 Hunger and Homelessness Survey conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found:
*82% (22 of 27) of cities surveyed, in 2009, reported having to make adjustments to
accommodate an increase in the demand for shelter over the past year.
*25% of requests for emergency food assistance went unmet in 2009.
*26% was the average increase in demand for assistance reported by cities in 2009, which represents the largest average increase since 1991.

Growing Restrictions by Cities on Food Sharing
More cities have chosen to target homeless individuals by restricting groups or individuals who share food with homeless people in private and public spaces, since 2007. Examples of these measures include:

*Gainesville, Florida began enforcing a rule limiting the number of meals that soup
kitchens may serve to 130 people in one day.

* Phoenix, Arizona used zoning laws to stop a local church from serving breakfast to
community members, including many homeless people, outside a local church.

*Myrtle Beach, South Carolina adopted an ordinance that restricts food sharing with
homeless people in public parks. Although permits are free, groups may only obtain a
permit four times a year.

Legal Challenges and Human Rights Implications
Such restrictions raise legal issues, and some have been challenged in court. For example:

▪ In Orlando, Florida the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the City of Orlando on behalf of local organizations, challenging a 2006 law requiring a groups sharing food with 25 or more people to obtain a permit that was only available twice a year per park. A federal district court found the law to be unconstitutional and in violation of Free Exercise of Religion and Freedom of Speech in October of 2008. The city has appealed the decision and the appeal is pending.

▪ In San Diego, California the zoning department attempted to prohibit a local church from serving a weekly meal to community members, many of them homeless. In 2008, attorney Scott Dreher successfully defended the church's First Amendment right to practice its religion. The weekly meal continues to take place on church property and serves 150 to 200 people each week. Such restrictions also raise human rights concerns. The right to food is a recognized human right, explicitly addressed in over 120 instruments of international law since 1920 and included in the
domestic constitutions of 22 nations. The International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) explains that states have an obligation to respect, protect and fulfill certain rights. For the right to food this means a state, or nation, must not take action resulting in preventing access to food, must ensure that enterprises or individuals do not deprive someone of their access to food, and must take proactive action to increase access to food.

*Taken from "A Place at The Table" - A Report by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, July 2010

SAYING GOODBYE TO THE MIDDLE CLASS

The following are 15 shocking poverty statistics that are skyrocketing as the American middle class continues to be slowly wiped out....

#1 Approximately 45 million Americans were living in poverty in 2009.

#2 According to the Associated Press, experts believe that 2009 saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.

#3 The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

#4 According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on a year-over-year basis, household participation in the food stamp program has increased 20.28%.

#5 The number of Americans on food stamps surpassed 41 million for the first time ever in June.

#6 As of June, the number of Americans on food stamps had set a new all-time record for 19 consecutive months.

#7 One out of every six Americans is now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.

#8 More than 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid, the U.S. government health care program designed principally to help the poor.

#9 One out of every seven mortgages in the United States was either delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter of 2010.

#10 Nearly 10 million Americans now receive unemployment insurance, which is almost four times as many as were receiving it in 2007.

#11 The number of Americans receiving long-term unemployment benefits has risen over 60 percent in just the past year.

#12 According to one recent survey, 28% of all U.S. households have at least one member that is looking for a full-time job.

#13 Nationwide, bankruptcy filings rose 20 percent in the 12 month period ending June 30th.

#14 More than 25 percent of all Americans now have a credit score below 599.

#15 One out of every five children in the United States is now living in poverty.

As millions more Americans continue to climb on to the "safety net", how long is it going to be before it breaks?

The reality is that the system can only support so many people. We are now at a point where our anti-poverty programs are clearly unsustainable in the long-term, but nobody has a solution for how we are going to get all of these people off of these programs or how we are going to provide good jobs for all of them.

The cost of every U.S. government anti-poverty program is absolutely soaring. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is already running a budget deficit that is approaching 1.5 trillion dollars every year. If you cannot understand that we have a very serious problem on our hands then you are probably not awake.

[TAKEN FROM THE ARTICLE LINKED BELOW]
HERE

MIND THE GAP: DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RICH AND POOR GETS WIDER

WASHINGTON — The recession has hit middle-income and poor families hardest, widening the economic gap between the richest and poorest Americans as rippling job layoffs ravaged household budgets.

The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans — those making more than $138,000 each year — earned 11.4 times the roughly $12,000 made by those living near or below the poverty line in 2008, according to newly released census figures. That ratio was an increase from 11.2 in 2007 and the previous high of 11.22 in 2003.

Household income declined across all groups, but at sharper percentage levels for middle-income and poor Americans. Median income fell last year from $52,163 to $50,303, wiping out a decade’s worth of gains to hit the lowest level since 1997.

Poverty jumped sharply to 13.2 percent, an 11-year high.

“No one should be surprised at the increased disparity,” said Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University. “Unemployment hurts normal workers who do not have the golden parachutes the folks at the top have.”

Analysts attributed the widening gap to the wave of layoffs in the economic downturn that have devastated household budgets. They said while the richest Americans may be seeing reductions in executive pay, those at the bottom of the income ladder are often unemployed and struggling to get by.

Large cities such as Atlanta, Washington, New York, San Francisco, Miami and Chicago had the most inequality, due largely to years of middle-class flight to the suburbs. Declining industrial cities with pockets of well-off neighborhoods, such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Buffalo, also had sharp disparities.

Up-and-coming cities with growing middle-class populations, such as Mesa, Ariz., Riverside, Calif., Arlington, Texas, and Henderson, Nev., were among the areas showing the least income differences between rich and poor.

It’s unclear whether income inequality will continue to worsen in major cities, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. Many Americans are staying put for now in traditional cities to look for jobs and because of frozen lines of credit.

“During the years of the housing bubble, there was middle-class movement from unaffordable metros with high-income inequality,” Frey said. “Now that the bubble burst, more of the population may be headed back to the high-inequality areas, stemming their middle-class losses.”

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Does poverty make people obese?

Does poverty make people obese, or is it the other way around?
As a matter of public health, it might be more important to help poor people than fat people. According to epidemiologist Peter Muennig, the relative risk of mortality for being obese is between 1 and 2. That means that, controlling for other factors, someone who's really fat is up to twice as likely to die early as someone whose body mass index is in the normal range. But if you compare people from the top and bottom of the wage scale (with everything else held constant), the risk ratio goes up to about 3.5. In other words, it's much better for your health to be rich and fat than poor and thin.

Those in greatest need, furthermore, tend to be both poor and fat. We know, for instance, that the lower your income, the more likely you are to inhabit an "obesogenic" environment. Food options in poor neighborhoods are severely limited: It's a lot easier to find quarter waters and pork rinds on the corner than fresh fruit and vegetables. Low-income workers may also have less time to cook their own meals, less money to join sports clubs, and less opportunity to exercise outdoors.

If poverty can be fattening, so, too, can fat be impoverishing. Paul Ernsberger, a professor of nutrition at Case Western Reserve University, lays out this argument in an essay from The Fat Studies Reader, due out in November. Women who are two standard deviations overweight (that's 64 pounds above normal) make 9 percent less money (PDF), which equates to having 1.5 fewer years of education or three fewer years of work experience. Obese women are also half as likely to attend college as their peers (PDF) and 20 percent less likely to get married. (Marriage seems to help alleviate poverty.)

When it comes to public health, the relationship between poverty and obesity gets more convoluted. Being fat can make you poor, and being poor can make you sick, which means that being fat can make you sick irrespective of any weight-related diseases. Fatness (or the lifestyle associated with obesity) also creates its own health problems, regardless of how much money you have—and health problems tend to make people poor, through hospital bills and missed days of work. So fat can be impoverishing irrespective of any weight-related discrimination.

The point here is that sickness, poverty, and obesity are spun together in a dense web of reciprocal causality


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NEARLY 40 MILLION AMERICANS NOW AT POVERTY LEVEL

Our Recession: More in poverty, without health coverage

WASHINGTON -- The early impact of the worst recession since the 1930s pushed median incomes down, forced almost 40 million more people into poverty and left more Americans without health care in 2008, according to new annual survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Poor people, working people, blacks, Hispanics and children bore a disproportionate share of the hardship. The new figures, however, likely understate the severity of the economic downturn because a large portion of nation's job losses and unemployment rate increases occurred after the Census survey data was collected in March as part of the annual Current Population Survey.

-Along the way, the nation's real median income - the point at which half the nation earns less and half more - fell 3.6 percent from $52,163 in 2007 to $50,303 in 2008. That was the first such decline in three years and the worst in the first year of any recession since Census Bureau began collecting the data during World War II, said Lawrence F. Katz, an economics professor at Harvard University.

-Men and women were both affected. Full-time working men saw their median incomes fall by 1 percent from $46,846 to $46,367, while female earnings declined by 1.9 percent, from $36,451 to $35,745.

-The worst is yet to come. "This is just the beginning, or the tip of the iceberg, because 2008 was not nearly as bad an economy as 2009," Katz said. The average unemployment rate in 2008 was 5.8 percent, up from 4.6 percent in 2007. That pales in comparison with the 9 percent average unemployment rate so far this year, and it's likely to increase. August unemployment was 9.7 percent, and it's expected to peak above 10 percent in the months to come.

The national poverty rate also hit its highest level since 1997, jumping to 13.2 percent in 2008 from 12.5 percent in 2007. The increase dragged 39.8 million people below the poverty line, the most since 1960. That's up from 37.3 million in 2007. For children, the poverty rate hit 19 percent, or 14.1 million youngsters in 2008. That means 35.3 percent of the nation's poor in 2008 were under age 18.

Meanwhile, the number of people without health insurance increased from 45.7 million in 2007 to 46.3 million in 2008, even though the percentage of uninsured Americans didn't change, at 15.4 percent. About 46 percent of the nation's uninsured are non-Hispanic whites, but as a group, 11 percent of non-Hispanic whites lack coverage, compared with 19 percent of blacks and 31 percent of Hispanics. About 45 percent of noncitizens lack coverage.

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NEW STUDY: POOR GIVE MORE TO CHARITY

The less you have the more likely you are to give; that's what new research from the McClatchy group shows, backing up this long-held belief with hard data.

According to the group's research, the poorest Americans give above their capacity, donating more in comparison than the most well off upper fifth of society.

FULL STORY
HERE

Recession Increasing Interest In Homelessness

This week the homeless population of the United States received a profile boost. On Tuesday, during President Obama's primetime press conference, a reporter from Ebony magazine asked about the rise of tent cities across the country and a new study showing that every fiftieth American child is homeless.

"Part of the change in attitudes that I want to see here in Washington and all across the country," the president said in response, "is a belief that it is not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours."

A change in attitudes may be underway. While the recession has exacerbated homelessness, it has not created a new phenomenon. Take it from Obama: "The homeless problem was bad even when the economy was good," he told the Ebony reporter.

The headlines about shantytowns and homeless children may reflect more of an increase in interest in homelessness than the impact of the recession. Those tent-dwellers sunk their stakes before this recession started, and the child homelessness study is based on data from three years ago. The tents and the homeless kids are indicative not of the current economy, but of a long-standing problem.

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