How did most affluent generation in U.S. history become homeless?
Baby boomers are becoming homeless at rates not seen since the Great Depression. That’s according to fresh statistics from the Biden administration’s own Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“Bidenomics” has delivered a world where working and saving for 45 years still leaves you without a roof over your head in retirement. Here in America.
While homelessness has been steadily growing in our once-great cities, older adults have historically been a very small percentage of this population. In the early 1990s, only about one-tenth of the homeless were over 65. Today, it’s half, and rising quickly.
How did the baby boomers go from being the most affluent generation in American history to being homeless? The answer is catastrophically bad public policy, which has intensified under Bidenomics.
First, since 1990, recession after recession — 1991, 2001, 2008, 2020 and counting — repeatedly wiped out the savings of millions. After each crash, the Federal Reserve manipulated interest rates to make cheap money, which then inflated housing prices to the point people could not save up to buy a home. The treadmill kept going, and more people were left behind. Even when they did manage to buy a home, they could lose it as each recession rendered millions jobless.
The 2020 recession was particularly brutal. Millions of jobs were lost while housing was sent to the stratosphere, but new policies were implemented that, this time, targeted landlords. Rent moratoriums across the nation meant millions of renters stopped paying, but landlords had to keep paying their mortgages in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. They couldn’t even evict the deadbeat renters who were costing them their life savings.
When the Supreme Court in August 2021 finally struck down the Biden administration’s moratorium extensions as unconstitutional, landlords had the green light to recoup their losses. Rents promptly soared, and the evictions began.
Landlords also had to be much pickier regarding to whom they would rent in order to avoid further losses. Minimum credit scores and income requirements ratcheted up quickly. Working-class older adults were effectively priced out of entire cities as rents doubled to cover the risks and income requirements rose to, in some cities, three times the rent. --->READ MORE HERE
‘Unconscionable’: Baby boomers are now becoming homeless at a rate ‘not seen since the Great Depression’ — here’s what's driving this terrible trend:
Many baby boomers across the country are now coming to terms with the hard reality that working for your entire adult life is no longer enough to guarantee you’ll have a roof over your head in your later years.
Thanks in part to a series of recessions, high housing costs and a shortage of affordable housing, older adults are now the fastest-growing segment of America’s homeless population, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, based on data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“The fact that we are seeing elderly homelessness is something that we have not seen since the Great Depression,” University of Pennsylvania social policy professor Dennis Culhane told the Journal.
Here’s what has triggered what some experts are calling a “silver tsunami” — and what they say needs to change to reverse the tide.
Baby boomers are increasingly becoming homeless
Dr. Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Vulnerable Populations and Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), has observed an escalating rate of homelessness among older Americans.
In a 2020 journal article for the American Society on Aging, Kushel wrote that of all the homeless single adults in the early 1990s, 11% were aged 50 and older. By 2003, she says that percentage grew to 37%.
Now, the over-50 demographic represents half of the homeless single adults in the U.S. — with no sign of their numbers slowing, leaving baby boomers (those aged 57 to 75) particularly vulnerable. --->READ MORE HERE
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