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This is a troubling but true report on hunger in America we heard on NPR. To listen click here. 

Your comments are always appreciated.

Hunger on the Rise in New York City  by Margot Adler   All Things Considered, December 31, 2006 · Wages are not keeping up with the notoriously high cost of living in New York City. Food bank workers say they’re seeing more working families, single women with children and immigrants.

A LIGHT FOR THE POOR
Through the efforts of one, many in Elizabeth are fed

Sunday, December 31, 2006
 
STORY BY JOE RYAN
 
It was a November night two decades ago that Sister Jacinta Fernandes found her doorway crowded with visitors, cold and bedraggled.
 
They pleaded for food and shelter. And the tiny, dark-eyed Benedictine nun felt overwhelmed.
 
For months, she had been struggling to keep up with Elizabeth’s swelling homeless population, searching for beds and handing out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. All the while, the city’s legendary Mayor Tom Dunn had been insisting the homeless were not his responsibility.Sister Jacinta was fed up.To read the full article online click here.

Although this is about LA, it could be said about all of the continuums that have not yet developed and implemented a Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness.

Your comments will be appreciated.

By Gary Blasi, Michael Dear and Jennifer Wolch
GARY BLASI is a professor of law at UCLA Law School; MICHAEL DEAR is a professor of geography at USC; and JENNIFER WOLCH is a professor of geography and director of the USC Center for Sustainable Citi

December 31, 2006

SKID ROW disproportionately - and unfairly - cares for the region’s homeless because so many other communities in Los Angeles County have few or no services to help them. Currently, only 25 of 88 cities in the county spend money on housing and services for the homeless. Those communities that don’t contribute are, in effect, using skid row as their solution to homelessness.

The problem is that city and county policymakers are reality-resistant - they are unable or unwilling to face up to what needs to be done about skid row. They have settled instead on the “three Cs” to fight homelessness: “contain” it in skid row by adding and concentrating mission-based services around San Julian Park; “control” it through personal property seizures, arrests and incarceration, which is one reason why 50 additional police officers were deployed in the downtown area; and “cleanse” it by closing homeless encampments and altering land-use laws.

To read the full article click here.

This letter to the editor appeared in the December 29, 2006, issue of the Township Journal. Her points are well written. Your comments and suggestions on how we can all work together to end homelessness in NJ will be appreciated.

To the Editor:  A man died in Sparta because he wasn’t warm enough. He was not warm enough, and he died. In Sparta. In America. This is our shame.   Here in Sparta, as in all of Sussex County , there are no shelters for men who are homeless. The police sometimes give our homeless a ride…out of town. But there is no shelter, not one warm, safe place where a man can sleep without fear of dying from the cold.

This man was our neighbor; it doesn’t matter where his last address was or in what town he was born. He was our neighbor and we have failed to take up our responsibility to him, to have in place a safety net. Everyone agrees that it is an awful thing that this man died. But how many of us understand that we are the people he needed? 

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A day to bring good cheer
Tuesday, December 26, 2006

By JAN BARRY and MITCHEL MADDUX
STAFF WRITERS

Monday was a day of good deeds and good cheer. Ricardo Williamson was delighted as he carefully carried leftovers from Christmas dinner along with a bag of winter clothes he’d just gotten at Eva’s Village in Paterson.”The dinner was great. Got some gifts!” said Williamson, 49, an unemployed dry cleaning worker. The gifts included donated gloves, socks, a hat and scarf. Now he had something, he said, to share with his grandchildren.Seventeen-year-old Matthew Renzulli of Wayne was also delighted, as he and 30 other volunteers served dinner and gift bags to more than 460 homeless and low-income visitors at the Catholic social services agency on Main Street on Monday.In prior weeks, Renzulli’s family, friends and fellow students at Wayne Hills High School helped collect many of the donated items through a project he put together called Eva’s Sock Drop.

To read the full article click here.