Homeless Mostly Invisible as Washington Celebrates

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As Americans celebrate President Bush's second inauguration, the capital city's 8,000 homeless people will be mostly invisible.

City officials and voluntary agencies are making efforts to get homeless people off the streets and out of the high security zone where inauguration events are taking place.

Most mobile soup kitchens and feeding centers will not be operating within the zone on Thursday, while many shelters are staying open for 24 hours to keep the homeless indoors -- welcome news for the homeless in sub-freezing temperatures.

Like all members of the public without tickets, homeless people are not allowed in the restricted area. But agencies providing food have obtained special clearances to operate their vans in the no traffic zone in the city center.

Alvin Dixon, who earns a few dollars selling "Street Sense," a newspaper written by and about the homeless, said he hoped to boost sales during the inauguration, though not to the Republican loyalists spending thousands of dollars on hotel rooms and thousands more attending glittering balls.

At a meeting of Street Sense vendors last Friday, Dixon and others were advised to focus their selling efforts on demonstrators coming to town to protest the inauguration.

The District of Columbia estimates that between 16,000 and 17,000 city residents are homeless at some point each year, and about half that on any given day. During the warmer months, some 500 people live on the streets.

At the Franklin School men's shelter, located around four blocks from the White House, there is rarely a spare bed, said Chapman Todd of Catholic Charities, which operates 11 shelters in the city.

"If it's not full, it's very close to full every night. We've seen high usage in all our shelters. Demand seems to be higher than it's been in recent years," he said.

In 2002, the first Bush administration adopted a goal of ending chronic homelessness within 10 years. However Congress has failed to authorize funds to advance the program.

Nationally, homelessness is rising, according to a report last month from the U.S. Conference of Mayors which found that 70 percent of 27 cities it surveyed reported a 6 percent increase in requests for emergency shelter in 2004. In 2003, the report found a 13 percent increase.

"President Bush has not talked very much about this issue," said Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. "It has not been one of his signature issues."

White House officials have said Bush will propose deep cuts in this year's budget to be unveiled Feb. 7 in the $4.7 billion federal community development block grant program, which cities rely on to help pay for low-cost housing among other programs.

But with housing prices constantly rising in the city, the problem continues to grow.

"We're seeing more families becoming homeless. That's folks who have jobs or part-time employment but can no longer afford homes," said Cornell Chappelle of the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness.

He, like virtually all those working on the issue, said the only solution to homelessness was developing affordable housing for low-paid working people.

Dixon said he lost his home after suffering a nervous breakdown following the death of his son.

"I stayed with friends and relatives and spent some nights sleeping in a car on the streets," he said. "The hardest thing is the feelings of inadequacy, not being self-sufficient and having to rely on other people."

Did a Google search for clinton inauguration homeless.

One article by David Hackworth mentioned Clinton was spending 37 million for his inaugruation but Hackworth wants it spent on vets:

http://www.hackworth.com/5feb97.html

Try to follow this. I'm going to clean out the kitchen cabinets.

Full article:
http://secure.mediaresearch.org/news/mediawatch/1996/mw19960201stud.html

.....snip........So now that Bill Clinton has been in office for three years, has the ever-growing problem of homelessness continued to burden the White House? Or did the problem recede from the media's agenda? MediaWatch analysts used the MRC Media Tracking System to count the number of network evening news segments on homelessness in America on the four evening newscasts (ABC's World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and CNN's Prime News or World News). Analysts found the problem faded from the list of priorities. In the Bush years (1989-1992), the number of homeless stories per year averaged 52.5, but in the first three years of the Clinton administration, the average dropped to 25.3 stories a year.

During the Bush administration, the story count grew from 44 in 1989 to a peak of 71 in 1990, followed by 54 stories in 1991 and 43 in 1992. By contrast, stories on America's homeless dipped slightly to 35 stories in 1993, and 32 in 1994. In 1995, the number fell dramatically to just nine. When the count is broken down by network, CNN had the widest gap in reporting during the Bush years and Clinton years (90-30), closely followed by ABC (45-16), CBS (41-15), and NBC (36-15).

But the numbers alone do not tell the whole story. The decline in homeless coverage coincided with the lessening of unsupported statistics about the size of the homeless population. CNN anchor Lou Waters announced on August 8, 1989: "A new research report is warning that homelessness in this country could easily double or triple if there is a mild recession...there now are up to 40 million Americans living on the knife edge of homelessness, just one paycheck, one domestic argument from the streets."

The willingness to wildly extrapolate the number of America's homeless began to change slightly in 1991, when the Census Bureau's partial count of the homeless in shelters and on the street reported an estimate of 220,000 homeless Americans. All four networks reported on the Census count the night it occurred (March 20, 1990). But when the Census Bureau released its official report announcing a count of 220,000 on April 12, 1991, only CNN reported it. ABC referred to the estimate on May 9, but only to note that congressional sources claimed the estimate was "meaningless."

While the stories in the Bush era regularly blamed Republican administrations, not one of the 75 homeless stories in the last three years has placed any blame on the Clinton administration. On January 21, 1993, ABC featured a report on the gaudiness of the Clinton inauguration, which reporter Judy Muller concluded: "The Republicans were criticized for their show of wealth in the face of need. The Democrats seemed to have avoided such criticism. Perhaps because President Clinton has promised to help those less fortunate. For now, not many people seem to begrudge Bill Clinton his night on the town, considering the sobering realities he faces the morning after." ..........

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