Letter from the Executive Director Barbara Poppe

"America's Great Depression was greatly defined by the newly homeless and their creation of tent cities. As the homeless gathered in shanty towns they began calling them Hoovervilles, after the sitting president, Herbert Hoover. Unemployment grew, rural communities collapsed, industrial cities were economically shaken and both small and large businesses failed, as millions more Americans became homeless for the first time.

Currently, the United States is experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and its associated social ills are surprisingly and shockingly similar. American families are once again experiencing a significant growth in poverty and double digit increases in newly homeless. Just as during the Great Depression, temporary housing has begun to dot the national landscape, from coast to coast. Tent cities can now be found in every state, ranging from large organized communities to makeshift encampments. And just as in the great depression, fair or not, the sitting president's name is now used to describe this symbol of homelessness and economic despair: Obamaville.

The federal government has begun focusing on the prevention of homelessness and the growing need to preserve and increase affordable and accessible housing. Congress created and President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which included 1.5 billion for homelessness prevention and rapid re-housing. The omnibus spending package, for fiscal year 2010, includes new commitments of more than 4 billion in funds targeted for affordable housing and homelessness.

Increased funding for the existing homeless safety net of resources and services, rapid re-housing and homelessness prevention are necessary, welcome and address a vital and ongoing need. But, the scale and the scope of today's homelessness and the profound and lasting impact that the current economic crisis is having on homelessness simply dwarf the current response.

The National Coalition for the Homeless believes that now is the time that we, as a country, must embark on a final campaign to Bring America Home. We must end homelessness once and for all, through a coordinated, comprehensive and scaled national response that addresses the housing, income, health care and civil rights and the causal factors and consequences of extreme poverty.
The National Coalition for the Homeless will soon be releasing a full report on Tent Cities. Keep an eye out at www.nationalhomeless.org"

In light of the national crisis of families and the failure of the health care system to protect the growing lists of the homeless with mental and physical disabilities, the increased crisis in corrections with housing people with mental illnesses, the long term number of those with mental and physical disabilities who cannot work and take care of their children, the expanded number of veterans committing suicide, the loss of housing stock and the growing gulf between communities that refuse to house poor people or develop transit systems that accommodate housing for all economic sectors, the lack of education for all citizens, and living in place for those who are elders, the lack of a clear process for fairly handling immigration and the embattled fronts of the policing of the world at the expense of the poor at home, while creating a tragic grip of the military on starving people of the world, we must rise as activists, and citizens plainly stating that this is not a desperate cry for help for our 1.5 million homeless children, nor a cry for help for the desperate nature of the tide of violence that sweeps across our beleaguered nation.

We had expected change with the new administration and instead we are faced with harrowing problems that will be faced by generations to come and which threaten to sweep our life from the earth.