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LA encampment cleared

May 12 2011
Living conditions were a health issue, say authorities


The clearing of a homeless ‘encampment’ in Los Angeles two weeks ago once again illustrates the scale of the homelessness problem in the United States. Since October of last year, the Los Angeles city authorities have been clearing areas where large numbers of rough sleepers had begun to congregate. Twenty people were removed from a camp underneath a motorway bridge in last December after the local authorities said their living conditions had become a health and safety concern.

In 2009, the last time the US Government’s Annual Homeless Assessment Report was published, the number of rough sleepers was estimated to be around 700,000 on any given night. Among that figure were 124,000 people described as “chronic homeless”.

Another striking statistic was that one fifth of all rough sleepers in the United States in 2008 could be found in Los Angeles, New York and Detroit. The scale of the encampments in Los Angeles gives some idea of the number of rough sleepers in that city, the largest by population in the US. A December report in the Los Angeles Times said there were around 48,000 homeless people in the city. By comparison, the UK’s Department for Communities and Local Government estimated that there were 1,247 rough sleepers in the whole of Britain in 2010.

Although there is considerable disagreement on who is and is not considered ‘homeless’, and estimates vary from organisation to organisation, it is clear that a significantly higher proportion of Americans are sleeping rough than here in the UK. The problem in the US has been made worse since the financial crisis, with a rise in unemployment and a lot of people unable to afford their mortgage repayments. In the first six months of last year, for example, 1.9 million homes in the US were put up for sale because their occupants could no longer afford their repayments. California is among the states with the highest rate of ‘foreclosure’ of houses - and one of the highest rates of homelessness.

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