PBS: The story of American poverty, as told by one Alabama county

[yallerdawg]

[Hoyt]

1. Worth watching. Thanks. I fell in a cesspool as a kid in 50s

Never would have expected areas where cesspools were that common, even in such areas of poverty.

trump admin should have their rears kicked for even considering dropping out of UN poverty efforts.

[SamKnause]

2. Thanks for posting.

[Sophia4]

3. Thanks for posting this video. It's really important that we all watch it and think about

it. Poverty in America should be our number one issue here on DU.

In Los Angeles, something like 55,000 people are homeless per night.

On any given day, as many as 20 people take to the City Hall lawn, across the street from LAPD headquarters. They're there to "escape the madness" in downtown streets, a 53-year-old homeless man named Lazarus said last week. At night, they fan out to doorways or deserted plazas to wait for daybreak.

The growth of a homeless day camp at the halls of civic power speaks to the breadth of Los Angeles' burgeoning homelessness problem.

The number of those living in the streets and shelters of the city of L.A. and most of the county surged 75% — to roughly 55,000 from about 32,000 — in the last six years. (Including Glendale, Pasadena and Long Beach, which conduct their own homeless counts, the total is nearly 58,000.)

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-homeless-how-we-got-here-20180201-story.html#

This is not a specifically California problem although housing here is very expensive.

It's warm here. (Unbearably hot last weekend.) Easier to live outside. People come to California from around the nation and world because they hope to "make it" or just have a better life.

And housing is so expensive here that just having a job and working every day does not guarantee that you can afford a place to live and still get to work.

As a nation, we need to at least work on solving this problem. But it is rare to see even a news report on it

Thanks to the United Nations and PBS for bringing the facts to our attention.

And I assure you, people living in trailers, tents or just sleeping on the street or under a bridge or in a sort of park somewhere do not have septic tanks or toilets.

Homelessness is not a problem over there that doesn't affect you and me as we sit with our computers. It is a national problem that affects all of us.

[SWBTATTReg]

4. Yes, this is a horrible problem and all cities have it...we have it in ...

St. Louis MO (the city itself), and has taken some steps to try and help these folks out w/ shelters and the like, but it is overwhelming. It also doesn't help when the surrounding cities and counties ship their homeless to St. Louis City by taking them and dumping them in the city limits (they don't want to handle/address their homeless, so the affluent communities (some of them, not all of them) will ship their homeless to the city and dump them).

This is a nationwide problem, of course, but in more warmer climates, it is worse. And what is more amazing about it, is that it doesn't seem to be getting better (the situation). As long as we have such a disparity of income equality, and desire to help from the wealthy, we won't ever get rid of this problem, for the ultra rich has already said their piece and thus, don't want anything to do w/ these unfortunate souls. Thus, the rest of us gets stuck dealing w/ the problem (e.g., look at all of the gated communities in this country, Ladue, Clayton, etc.).

[barbtries]

5. it's a travesty

that people in the richest country in the world live this way. it does not have to be like this.