Congresswoman sleeps in a homeless shelter - Politics Blog

So, I have highlighted some of the recent negativity surrounding homelessness and how states have been dealing with the issue(s). Let's look how one representative of Congress who is trying to put people behind the statistics, “It would help us appreciate who we are talking about. We rattle off numbers, but it doesn’t speak about the people themselves.”

Just as Neel Kashkari and Chris Murphy before her, Speier wanted to learn first-hand about poverty. Reminiscent of the SNAP challenge she partook in last year, this foray into learning about poverty lasted only one night.

But now, with the most extreme split in generations between rich and poor in America, the issue of want and inequality is more urgent than it’s been in a long time. Democrats have one way of approaching it, Republicans another. Speier thinks both sides of the aisle would find her experience at the Redwood City shelter instructive.

[,,,]
The point, she said, is that there were a lot of working poor with nowhere else to go. You don’t wind up in a homeless shelter because your life is humming along — plenty of homeless have mental, substance abuse or other troubles that threw them off line and need counseling to fix. But it seems an increasing number are landing in the street because, in this economy, they can’t make enough money at their jobs to pay for their own place to live.

“It was such a profound experience to realize that we have just allowed our safety net to fray to the extent that the people in poverty who are homeless are not all drunks on the street,” Speier said. The stereotype was never accurate, she said, and it’s less so now than ever.

{For those of you old enough to remember Speier's name may sounds familiar. In 1978 she was a member of Congressman Leo J. Ryan's entourage that was gunned downed at the beginning of the Jim Jones fiasco in Guyana. Shot 5 times she lay for 23 hours on the airstrip before being rescued. Nine hundred people lost their lives in that tragedy.]


Congresswoman sleeps in a homeless shelter - Politics Blog