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Rather than provide housing for the homeless, cities offer showers, day care centers and bag checks.

We have decided to live with the fact that some of our fellow Americans will die on the streets.

“There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen,” Leilani Farha, then the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, said after a 2018 visit to Northern California.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve done outreach on every continent,” Dame Louise Casey, who directed homeless policy for several British prime ministers, said after touring homeless encampments in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other American cities.

almost 40 percent of workers in households making less than $40,000 a year have lost work. Women in Need NYC, which runs shelters, warned this week that New York faces a “mass increase” in homelessness

Countries confronting homelessness with greater success than the United States, including Finland and Japan, begin by treating housing as a human right

the first law of real estate applies to homelessness, too: Location, location, location. The nation’s homeless population is concentrated in New York, the cities of coastal California and a few other islands of prosperity.

Well-educated, well-paid professionals have flocked to those places, driving up housing prices. And crucially, those cities and their suburbs have made it virtually impossible to build enough housing to keep up.

The government calculates $600 is the most a family living at the poverty line can afford to pay in monthly rent while still having enough money for food, health care and other needs. From 1990 to 2017, the number of housing units available below that price shrank by four million.

While there are roughly 80,000 homeless people in New York on any given night, more than 800,000 New Yorkers — more than 10 times as many people — are scraping by, spending more than half their income on rent.

According to one analysis, a $100 increase in the average monthly rent in a large metro area is associated with a 15 percent increase in homelessness.

In 2018, eight out of every 10,000 Michigan residents were homeless. In California, it was 33 per 10,000. In New York, it was 46 per 10,000.

in recent decades, wealth and homelessness have both increased — a stark illustration of the inequalities that pervade American life.

Having failed to address homelessness during the longest economic expansion in American history, the nation now faces a greater challenge under more difficult circumstances

The federal government already provides housing vouchers to help some lower-income families. The families pay 30 percent of their monthly income toward rent; the government pays the rest. But instead of giving vouchers to every needy family, the government imposes an arbitrary cap. Three in four eligible families don’t get vouchers.

The program costs about $19 billion a year. Vouchers for all eligible households would cost another $41 billion a year

Where to get the money? Well, the government annually provides more than $70 billion in tax breaks to homeowners, including a deduction for mortgage interest payments and a free pass on some capital gains from home sales. Let’s end homelessness instead of subsidizing mansions.

Without a significant expansion in the supply of housing, adding vouchers would be like adding players to a game of musical chairs without increasing the number of chairs.

Market-rate construction can help: More housing would slow the upward march of housing prices. New York and San Francisco are the nation’s most tightly regulated markets for housing construction,

Tokyo, often cited as an international model for its permissive development policies, has expanded its supply of homes by roughly 2 percent a year in recent years, while New York’s housing supply has expanded by roughly 0.5 percent a year. Over the last two decades, housing prices in Tokyo held steady as New York prices soared.

In California, for example, construction of a five-story apartment building that meets minimum standards costs an average of $425,000 per unit,

Without public aid, the apartments would need to be rented for several times more than the $600 a month affordable to a family living at the poverty line.

Proposals for a big increase in affordable housing construction inevitably call to mind the troubled public housing projects of the mid-20th century. They offer one clear lesson: Avoid housing that concentrates poverty

there is a solution — to build subsidized housing as part of mixed-income developments and to spread the developments out, putting them not just in cities but also in the surrounding suburbs.

Helsinki, Finland, a city of just 600,000 people, builds about 7,000 units of mixed-income housing a year. That’s a big reason Finland is the rare European country where homelessness is in decline.

Extending this approach to the entire homeless population would be expensive. To take one example, King County, which encompasses Seattle, would need to increase annual spending on homelessness to roughly $410 million from $196 million to help each of the county’s 22,000 homeless families, according to a study by McKinsey. That’s about $19,000 per family.

Even if the cost per person were twice as high, the nation’s homeless population could be housed for $10 billion a year — less than the price of one aircraft carrier.

there is worse to come. Homelessness rises during recessions, the federal funding is temporary and state and local governments face huge drops in tax revenue.

Reframing the debate — asking what is necessary to end homelessness — is an important first step for New York and for other places that are failing this basic test of civic responsibility.

Americans must decide whether we are willing to let elementary school students spend nights in guarded parking lots

We must decide whether it’s worth spending just a little of this nation’s vast wealth to ensure that no 60-year-old woman needs to sleep on the same bench in downtown Santa Monica

more than 106,000 children were homeless during the once-a-year count,

While the majority of homeless children were in shelters or transitional housing, almost 11,000 were living outside.

"I think it's tragic that we have increasing unsheltered numbers," said Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. "We know that unsheltered people have horrible health conditions."

Twenty-three percent of those who were homeless last year identified as Hispanic or Latino.

California was home to the largest number of people experiencing homelessness — 161,548 — according to the 2020 count. A quarter of all homeless individuals in the United States were living in either New York City or Los Angeles.

As has been the case for years, a disproportionate share of those experiencing homelessness were Black

For the first time since the government began doing the annual count, the number of single adults living outside — 209,413 — exceeded the number of individuals living in shelters — 199,478.

Some individuals have been worried about contracting COVID-19 staying inside, and many shelters have been forced to limit bed space to meet health and safety protocols. This has led to an increase in street homelessness in communities that were unable to provide alternative housing, although some have taken advantage of hotel space left empty during the pandemic.

Becky Gligo, executive director of Housing Solutions Tulsa, said her Oklahoma county raised money to move more than 400 unsheltered individuals into a hotel or other housing after a major storm hit the area this winter, leaving fewer than a dozen people on the streets.

John Mendez, executive director of Bethesda Cares, a service provider in Montgomery County, Md., said his group was able to permanently house some individuals who had lived outside for more than a decade

"I think we're going to see homelessness increase," said Sean Read,

Homelessness is "generally a delayed response" to economic setbacks,

Read and other providers are hopeful that billions of dollars in housing aid included in a recent $1.9 trillion COVID relief package will go a long way toward alleviating the crisis. The amount of aid is unprecedented. The bill provides $5 billion in homelessness assistance, more than $20 billion in emergency rental aid and $5 billion in new housing vouchers.

Roman, of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, noted that the measure also includes direct payments for families, which could keep many in their homes. She said some communities are also planning to use the funds to buy empty hotels that can be used to house more individuals, both temporarily and permanently.

he past two years, the homeless population in the city of Los Angeles has grown by 12%, and Los Angeles County as a whole has seen an 85% uptick in the number of people scraping by without a solid roof over their heads.

The city already uses about $100 million on issues related to homelessness, but a vast majority of that goes to breaking up encampments and keeping homeless people on the move.

Cedillo's comments came as the city passed two controversial ordinances that sought to deal with the issue of homelessness mainly by way of making the lives of the homeless more difficult. The ordinances made it easier for the city to clean out homeless encampments and remove personal property that people leave out on sidewalks and in parks. They also shortened the warning notice the city is required to give someone before confiscating property they leave out in public from 72 hours to 24 hours, and eliminated notice for anything that can't fit in a 60-gallon city trash receptacle. Most critically, violation of the ordinances are punishable by citation or misdemeanor charges.

In August, the Department of Justice harshly criticized anti-homelessness laws like the ones that LA passed this summer.

"I absolutely acknowledge the tremendous anger and frustration in the community and in the neighborhood, and it's warranted," said County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, whose district includes the trail.

"We're legally mandated to provide alternatives to every single resident along the trail before we move forward with clearing the encampment," Hopkins said. "We really need to get an encampment opened in a place that is actually appropriate for it."

the encampment still is rife with open drug use, violence and crime, local officials said. Drug needles recently littered the path amid the piles of trash and junk.

"Yes, there are thieves and there are addicts,"

"But there are also people struggling that just lost their job. You have to take each case individually."

Edwards, who said she worked as a nurse's aide in her home state of Nebraska, followed a boyfriend to California, she said. A bad breakup left her homeless."I hate to think that I will die out here and didn't make anything of myself," she said.

But like a lot of people on the trail, Edwards seemed to have no plan or path, indicative of broader challenges associated with the homeless crisis.

Using meth, she said, helped ease her mental anguish.

That percentage was up to 37 by 2003. Today, half of America's homeless are over 50.

In fact, people born in the second half of the baby boom (1955-1964) have had an elevated risk of homelessness compared to other age groups throughout their lives.

funded by the National Institute on Aging, has been asking 350 participants in a study we've been conducting since July 2013 in Oakland, California.

In the United States, more than 30 percent of renters and 23 percent of homeowners aged 50 and older spend more than half of their household income on rent.

California has the highest housing costs of any large state, and they are rising faster than elsewhere. It is not surprising that Oakland has a large homeless population.

common perception of homelessness is that it is a problem that afflicts only those with mental health and substance use problems.

They are also disproportionately people of color: Oakland's population is 28 percent African American, but 80 percent of our study participants are.

One of our participants spoke of the shock of losing his job after 27 years:

As research shows, homeless people in their 50's and 60's have similar or worse health problems than people in the general population who are in their 70's and 80's.

The point our study highlights is that the systems set up in the 1980s were not designed to serve an aging population.

An individual who has spent 30 years rotating between institutional care and the streets requires different services than a 54-year-old man who has become homeless for the first time after a period of extended unemployment.

With respect to crime, poverty and homelessness, Brown argued,One thing that may occur is that disinvestment in city downtowns will alter the spatial distribution of these elements in cities — i.e. in which neighborhoods or areas of a city is crime more likely, and homelessness more visible. Urban downtowns are often policed such that these visible elements of poverty are pushed to other parts of the city where they will not interfere with commercial activities. But absent these activities, there may be less political pressure to maintain these areas. This is not to say that the overall crime rate or homelessness levels will necessarily increase, but their spatial redistribution may further alter the trajectory of commercial downtowns — and the perception of city crime in the broader public.

“The more dramatic effects on urban geography,” Brown continued,may be how this changes cities in terms of economic and racial segregation. One urban trend from the last couple of decades is young white middle- and upper-class people living in cities at higher rates than previous generations. But if these groups become less likely to live in cities, leaving a poorer, more disproportionately minority population, this will make metropolitan regions more polarized by race/class.

the damage that even the perception of rising crime can inflict on Democrats in a Nov. 27 article, “Meet the Voters Who Fueled New York’s Seismic Tilt Toward the G.O.P.”: “From Long Island to the Lower Hudson Valley, Republicans running predominantly on crime swept five of six suburban congressional seats, including three that President Biden won handily that encompass some of the nation’s most affluent, well-educated commuter towns.

In big cities like New York and San Francisco we estimate large drops in retail spending because office workers are now coming into city centers typically 2.5 rather than 5 days a week. This is reducing business activity by billions of dollars — less lunches, drinks, dinners and shopping by office workers. This will reduce city hall tax revenues.

Public transit systems are facing massive permanent shortfalls as the surge in working from home cuts their revenues but has little impact on costs (as subway systems are mostly a fixed cost. This is leading to a permanent 30 percent drop in transit revenues on the New York Subway, San Francisco Bart, etc.

These difficulties for cities will not go away anytime soon. Bloom provided data showing strong economic incentives for both corporations and their employees to continue the work-from-home revolution if their jobs allow it:

First, “Saved commute time working from home averages about 70 minutes a day, of which about 40 percent (30 minutes) goes into extra work.” Second, “Research finds hybrid working from home increases average productivity around 5 percent and this is growing.” And third, “Employees also really value hybrid working from home, at about the same as an 8 percent pay increase on average.

three other experts in real estate economics, Arpit Gupta, of N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, Vrinda Mittal, both of the Columbia Business School, and Van Nieuwerburgh. They anticipate disaster in their September 2022 paper, “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse.”

“Our research,” Gupta wrote by email,emphasizes the possibility of an ‘urban doom loop’ by which decline of work in the center business district results in less foot traffic and consumption, which adversely affects the urban core in a variety of ways (less eyes on the street, so more crime; less consumption; less commuting) thereby lowering municipal revenues, and also making it more challenging to provide public goods and services absent tax increases. These challenges will predominantly hit blue cities in the coming years.

the three authors “revalue the stock of New York City commercial office buildings taking into account pandemic-induced cash flow and discount rate effects. We find a 45 percent decline in office values in 2020 and 39 percent in the longer run, the latter representing a $453 billion value destruction.”

Extrapolating to all properties in the United States, Gupta, Mittal and Van Nieuwerburgh write, the “total decline in commercial office valuation might be around $518.71 billion in the short-run and $453.64 billion in the long-run.”

the share of real estate taxes in N.Y.C.’s budget was 53 percent in 2020, 24 percent of which comes from office and retail property taxes. Given budget balance requirements, the fiscal hole left by declining central business district office and retail tax revenues would need to be plugged by raising tax rates or cutting government spending.

Since March 2020, Manhattan has lost 200,000 households, the most of any county in the U.S. Brooklyn (-88,000) and Queens (-51,000) also appear in the bottom 10. The cities of Chicago (-75,000), San Francisco (-67,000), Los Angeles (-64,000 for the city and -136,000 for the county), Washington DC (-33,000), Seattle (-31,500), Houston (-31,000), and Boston (-25,000) make up the rest of the bottom 10.

Prior to the pandemic, these ecosystems were designed to function based on huge surges in their daytime population from commuters and tourists. The shock of the sudden loss of a big chunk of this population caused a big disruption in the ecosystem.

Just as the pandemic has caused a surge in telework, Loh wrote, “it also caused a huge surge in unsheltered homelessness because of existing flaws in America’s housing system, the end of federally-funded relief measures, a mental health care crisis, and the failure of policies of isolation and confinement to solve the pre-existing homelessness crisis.”

The upshot, Loh continued,is that both the visibility and ratio of people in crisis relative to those engaged in commerce (whether working or shopping) has changed in a lot of U.S. downtowns, which has a big impact on how being downtown ‘feels’ and thus perceptions of downtown.

The nation, Glaeser continued, isat an unusual confluence of trends which poses dangers for cities similar to those experienced in the 1970s. Event#1 is the rise of Zoom, which makes relocation easier even if it doesn’t mean that face-to-face is going away. Event#2 is a hunger to deal with past injustices, including police brutality, mass incarceration, high housing costs and limited upward mobility for the children of the poor.

Progressive mayors, according to Glaeser,have a natural hunger to deal with these problems at the local level, but if they try to right injustices by imposing costs on businesses and the rich, then those taxpayers will just leave. I certainly remember New York and Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s, where the dreams of progressive mayors like John Lindsay and Jerome Patrick Cavanagh ran into fiscal realities.

Richard Florida, a professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto, stands out as one of the most resolutely optimistic urban scholars. In his August 2022 Bloomberg column, “Why Downtown Won’t Die,”

His answer:

Great downtowns are not reducible to offices. Even if the office were to go the way of the horse-drawn carriage, the neighborhoods we refer to today as downtowns would endure. Downtowns and the cities they anchor are the most adaptive and resilient of human creations; they have survived far worse. Continual works in progress, they have been rebuilt and remade in the aftermaths of all manner of crises and catastrophes — epidemics and plagues; great fires, floods and natural disasters; wars and terrorist attacks. They’ve also adapted to great economic transformations like deindustrialization a half century ago.

Florida wrote that many urban central business districts are “relics of the past, the last gasp of the industrial age organization of knowledge work the veritable packing and stacking of knowledge workers in giant office towers, made obsolete and unnecessary by new technologies.”

“Downtowns are evolving away from centers for work to actual neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs titled her seminal 1957 essay, which led in fact to ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities,’ ‘Downtown Is for People’ — sounds about right to me.”

Despite his optimism, Florida acknowledged in his email thatAmerican cities are uniquely vulnerable to social disorder — a consequence of our policies toward guns and lack of a social safety net. Compounding this is our longstanding educational dilemma, where urban schools generally lack the quality of suburban schools. American cities are simply much less family-friendly than cities in most other parts of the advanced world. So when people have kids they are more or less forced to move out of America’s cities.

What worries me in all of this, in addition to the impact on cities, is the impact on the American economy — on innovation. and competitiveness. Our great cities are home to the great clusters of talent and innovation that power our economy. Remote work has many advantages and even leads to improvements in some kinds of knowledge work productivity. But America’s huge lead in innovation, finances, entertainment and culture industries comes largely from its great cities. Innovation and advance in. these industries come from the clustering of talent, ideas and knowledge. If that gives out, I worry about our longer-run economic future and living standards.

The risk that comes with fiscal distress is clear: If city governments face budget shortfalls and begin to cut back on funding for public transit, policing, and street outreach, for the maintenance of parks, playgrounds, community centers, and schools, and for services for homelessness, addiction, and mental illness, then conditions in central cities will begin to deteriorate.

There is reason for both apprehension and hope. Cities across time have proven remarkably resilient and have survived infectious diseases from bubonic plague to cholera to smallpox to polio. The world population, which stands today at eight billion people, is 57 percent urban, and because of the productivity, innovation and inventiveness that stems from the creativity of human beings in groups, the urbanization process is quite likely to continue into the foreseeable future. There appears to be no alternative, so we will have to make it work.

which have been locked for years in tense battles on everything from environmental regulations to immigration. Homelessness has become a particularly sore spot, with President Trump repeatedly criticizing California cities for their management of the issue.

Mr. Trump ordered that San Francisco be cited for an environmental violation because of human waste on the city’s streets, a problem that administration officials linked to homelessness. “They have to clean it up,” Mr. Trump said. “We can’t have our cities going to hell.”

tolerability of sleeping on the streets.”

The state has identified more than 1,300 state-owned properties that could potentially be used to shelter homeless people

The hotel now has capacity for about 400 people and offers 24/7 access through the county’s Code Purple operator, Friendship House.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, government officials have used hotels and motels to house those who are either experiencing homelessness or have nowhere to distance from family members who have been exposed to COVID-19.

In announcing the purchase in November, officials said front-line workers have found hotels to be an effective place to isolate and quarantine vulnerable populations while allowing workers to bring resources directly to a large group of people and learn more about their needs.

On varying scales and with varied results, states and municipalities across the country have launched programs to buy hotels and motels to convert to homeless shelters for use during the pandemic and beyond.

Long term, county officials envision the hotel serving as a place for social services. The state’s mental health and substance use services team will be at the hotel at all times.

A few dozen demonstrators gathered peacefully Thursday evening outside O’Farrell’s nearby office with a large banner that said “services not sweeps.”

A police statement said there were verbal confrontations but that the protest was largely peaceful and demonstrators voluntarily departed. One person was arrested for failing to comply with an officer’s orders, and officers twice used force that was characterized as minor, police said.

Kelvin Martinez, an organizer with the advocacy group Street Watch LA, accused city officials of “bad faith communication.” He said requests for services during the past year were largely ignored until the sudden announcement that the park would be closed.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority said its outreach workers had moved 44 people into housing on Monday and Tuesday, mostly into hotel rooms under the state-funded Project Roomkey program aimed at providing shelter for those most at risk during the coronavirus pandemic.

The location of the encampment in the fast-gentrifying Echo Park neighborhood gave it a high profile, but it was not unique for the metro Los Angeles area. Tents can be found throughout the city and region despite an array of state and local programs aimed at sheltering people and transitioning them to permanent housing.

A January 2020 count by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported that there were more than 66,400 homeless people living in Los Angeles County — by far the largest single concentration in the state. That included more than 41,000 people within Los Angeles city limits. Both figures were up more than 12% from the previous year. The annual count was canceled for 2021 because of the pandemic.

The lawsuit accuses the city and county of failing to comprehensively address the desperation that homeless people face — including hunger, crime, squalor and the coronavirus pandemic.U.S. District Judge David Carter, who is overseeing the case, called parties to a hearing in a Skid Row parking lot last month and said that if politicians can’t provide solutions, he wants to explore what powers the court has to order and oversee remedies.

“People up and down the country are having to make impossible decisions on whether to cut back on food for their family or heat their home just to make up the shortfall between their benefit and rent,” she said.

There is no longer any room for teachers, medical technicians, firefighters or construction workers, who may drive two or more hours and sleep in their cars for an hour before work to avoid longer commutes.

Gardeners, cleaning people, babysitters and dog walkers cram into small apartments, sometimes 12 in two bedrooms, according to Marroquin.

In East Palo Alto, once a low-income community where many people of color lived, the median price of homes is $953,000. The school district has reported that more than half of its students are homeless, and some teachers commute more than two hours each way because they cannot find affordable local housing.

illionaires of Silicon Valley play real-life monopoly, buying up houses on their blocks and down the street for family, staff, art collections, or to hold political and philanthropic events.

Zuckerberg’s people, for instance, knocked on doors in his neighborhood and offered “well over the fair market value of the house, some would argue at double the value”, said Repka of DeLeon Reality, which did over $800m in sales last year. “He did it as a privacy buffer around his house.”

When the former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer throws a party at her Palo Alto house for hundreds of guests, residents brace for the delivery trucks, caterers, decorators, electricians, and valets. At Mayer’s annual Christmas party, a generator the size of a shipping container buzzes for days to maintain her ice skating rink.

For the vast majority of the workforce, “single-family homes have become untouchable”, said the prominent urban planner Peter Calthorpe, who grew up in Palo Alto.

“What’s this going to mean for future communities, if only totally affluent, young people can afford to move in?”

Cooper pressed Goodman on how she would ensure coronavirus was not spread at the city’s hotels and casinos, describing the tourist attractions as a “Petri dish” for possible infection.

The talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel referred to the interview as “bonkers” and said she “should resign before lunch arrives today”.

That’s up to them to figure out.”

“the single most embarrassing thing” he had seen from a state politician in 35 years.

Goodman said it should be up to casinos to weigh the odds of spreading the virus.

The casino workers’ Culinary Union, which represents about 60,000 bartenders, cooks, housekeepers and other employees, said Goodman’s remarks were “outrageous considering essential frontline workers have been dealing with the consequences of this crisis firsthand”.

“Workplaces need to be safe and healthy, not a petri dish,” said Geoconda Arguello-Kline, the union’s secretary-treasurer. The union said 11 of its members so far have died of Covid-19.

Brian Knudsen, a Las Vegas City councilman, said Goodman “does not speak for all of us”, and reopening now “is reckless and completely contrary to the overwhelming consensus of medical experts”, while Dina Titus, a Democratic congresswoman who represents the Las Vegas Strip, said the mayor doesn’t represent the area “literally or figuratively” and the advice of scientists telling people to stay home should be heeded.

“Assume everybody is a carrier,” Goodman said on Tuesday on MSNBC. “And then you start from an even slate. And tell the people what to do. And let the businesses open and competition will destroy that business if, in fact, they become evident that they have disease, they’re closed down. It’s that simple.”

In late March, images of homeless people sleeping in a converted parking lot prompted widespread condemnation after officials turned the outdoors lot into a temporary shelter.

The shelter consists of a series of tents for homeless people who have coronavirus but are not sick enough to go to the hospital.

Goodman’s comments came a day after public health officials in Nevada reported 119 new cases of Covid-19 and nine additional deaths overnight in Clark county, where Las Vegas is located. Statewide, officials have tallied more than 4,000 coronavirus cases and 172 deaths.

Donald Trump has fanned the flames, suggesting some places have gone too far in issuing restrictions.

“From my perspective, I think that the Amazon money was a big distraction when we were trying to make our closing arguments with voters,” said Orion.

ome top local-based global giants such as Amazon, Boeing and Microsoft also contributed to Orion’s campaign.

“We have run a historic grassroots campaign, with working people, community members rejecting Amazon and billionaires’ attempt to buy this election, and that doesn’t mean we’re going to win every battle against the billionaires,” said Sawant..

At a time when many Seattleites are already critical of Amazon’s influence in the city – with many pointing to the role it has played in Seattle’s rising cost of living and growing income inequality – the contributions left an unsavory taste in some residents’ mouths.

“It’s supposed to be a democratic process and it’s not a democratic process when Amazon can contribute that much to basically a small election,” she said.

But her battle against the influence of big business came to a head with her push last year for the Head Tax. The proposal would have implemented a per-employee tax on corporations making more than $20m each year to fund housing and services for the homeless in a city that has the third largest homeless population in the US, according to a 2018 federal report. With about 45,000 workers in Seattle, Amazon would have probably had to pay millions each year through the tax.

The nine-member council unanimously approved the tax. But after Amazon, another locally based global giant, Starbucks, and other companies contributed financially to the campaign to kill it, called No Tax on Jobs, all but two members of the council then quickly voted to repeal it.

the signs of a crisis that looks like the Great Depression are impossible to hide. In Anaheim, Calif., home to Disneyland, cars formed half-mile-long lines in two different directions, waiting to pick up free food. In San Antonio, 10,000 cars waited for hours to receive food from a food bank. Even still, Republicans balk at expanding access to food stamps while hunger is on the rise. Nearly one in five children 12 and younger don’t have enough to eat.

That “way of life” may also begin to look like mass homelessness. Through the first five days of April, 31 percent of tenants nationwide had failed to pay their rent

Forty-three million households rent in the U.S., but there is no public rental assistance for residents who lose the ability to afford their rent.

Many elected officials in the Republican Party have access to Covid-19 testing, quality health care and the ultimate cushion of wealth to protect them. Yet they suggest others take the “risk” of returning to work as an act of patriotism

While the recent stimulus bills doled out trillions of dollars to corporate America and the “financial sector,” the smallest allocations have provided cash, food, rent or health care for citizens. The gaps in the thin membrane of a safety net for ordinary Americans have made it impossible to do anything other than return to work.

This isn’t just malfeasance or incompetence. Part of the “American way of life” for at least some of these elected officials is keeping workers just poor enough to ensure that the “essential” work force stays shows up each day

In place of decent wages, hazard pay, robust distribution of personal protective equipment and the simplest guarantees of health and safety, these lawmakers use the threat of starvation and homelessness to keep the work force intact.

In the case of the meatpacking industry, there is not even a veil of choice, as those jobs are inexplicably labeled essential, as if life cannot go on without meat consumption

The largely immigrant and black meatpacking work force has been treated barely better than the carcasses they process. They are completely expendable. Thousands have tested positive, but the plants chug along, while employers offer the bare minimum by way of safety protections, according to workers. If there were any question about the conditions endured in meatpacking plants, consider that 145 meat inspectors have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and three have died.

Discipline in the U.S. has always included low and inconsistent unemployment and welfare combined with stark deprivation. Each has resulted in a hyper-productive work force with few benefits in comparison to America’s peer countries.

if the social distancing and closures were ever going to be successful, it would have meant providing all workers with the means to live in comfort at home while they waited out the disease. Instead, they have been offered the choice of hunger and homelessness or death and disease at work.

The governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, made this painfully clear when she announced that not only was Iowa reopening, but that furloughed workers in private or public employment who refused to work out of fear of being infected would lose current unemployment benefits. She described these workers’ choices as a “voluntary quit.”

This is exacerbated by the reluctance of the Trump administration to bail out state governments. That the U.S. government would funnel trillions to corporate America but balk at sending money to state governments also appears to be part of “the American way of life” that resembles the financial sector bailout in 2008.

These are also the bitter fruits of decades of public policies that have denigrated the need for a social safety net while gambling on growth to keep the heads of U.S. workers above water just enough to ward off any real complaints or protests.

During the long and uneven recovery from the Great Recession, the warped distribution of wealth led to protests and labor organizing. The crisis unfolding today is already deeper and much more catastrophic to a wider swath of workers than anything since the 1930s. The status quo is untenable.

“In 2012, real median household income was 8.3 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.”

Forbes’s list of the world’s billionaires has added more than 200 names since 2012 and is now at 1,426. The United States once again leads the list, with 442 billionaires.

Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, recently released a study finding that a staggering 5.8 million young people nationwide — one in seven of those ages 16 to 24 — are disconnected, meaning not employed or in school, “adrift at society’s margins,” as the group put it.

developers are turning 57th Street in Manhattan into “Billionaires’ Row,” with apartments selling for north of $90 million each.

“During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”

“The 1,168,354 homeless students enrolled by U.S. preschools and K-12 schools in the 2011-2012 school year is the highest number on record, and a 10 percent increase over the previous school year. The number of homeless children in public schools has increased 72 percent since the beginning of the recession.”

“These new poverty estimates released on Sept. 19, 2013, suggest that child poverty plateaued in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but there is no evidence of any reduction in child poverty even as we enter the fourth year of ‘recovery.’ ”

the number of households living on $2 or less in income per person per day in a given month increased from about 636,000 in 1996 to about 1.46 million households in early 2011, a percentage growth of 130 percent.”

“Cash assistance benefits for the nation’s poorest families with children fell again in purchasing power in 2013 and are now at least 20 percent below their 1996 levels in 37 states, after adjusting for inflation.”

The number of Americans now enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is near record highs, and yet both houses of Congress have passed bills to cut funding to the program. The Senate measure would cut about $4 billion, while the House measure would cut roughly ten times as much, dropping millions of Americans from the program.

Rorty sympathizes with the reasons that an ascendant Leftist faction lost faith in American institutions. He is as horrified as they are by the historic treatment of indigenous people and African Americans, and by America’s behavior in the Vietnam War.

But like John Dewey, he rejects self-loathing as “a luxury which agents––either individuals or nations––cannot afford,” and finds other aspects of American history and national character to celebrate.

Today’s Left would more effectively advance social justice if its adherents possessed a historical memory that extended farther back than the 1960s, he argued, to a movement more than a century old “that has served human liberty well.” It would help, for example, “if students became as familiar with the Pullman Strike, the Great Coalfield War, and the passage of the Wagner Act as with the march from Selma, Berkeley free-speech demonstrations, and Stonewall.”

If more Leftists saw themselves as part of that history, with all its achievements, they might continue to lament that “America is not a morally pure country,” but might better understand that “no country ever has been or ever will be,” and that no country will ever have “a morally pure, homogeneous Left” to bring about social justice.

he criticizes the identity politics of the left for developing a politics “more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed,” because many of the dispossessed are thereby ignored.

Surveying academia, for example, he observes that “nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not the ‘other’ in the relative sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.”

For Rorty, a Left that neglects victims of economic selfishness will not only fail; its neglect of class will trigger a terrible backlash that ultimately ill-serve the very groups that Leftist identity politics are intended to help. “The gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will very likely be wiped out,” he worried. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

To avoid that future, to compete in national politics, Rorty believed that the Left would have to find a way to better address the consequences of globalization, and that it could only do so by “opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions.

What’s more, the Left “would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma.” In service of that transition, he advised the Left to “put a moratorium on theory … to kick its philosophy habit” and  to “try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans.”

The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique…

it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy.

disengagement from practical politics “produces theoretical hallucinations,” he added. “The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called ‘power.’” This obsession with power elicited scathing words:

in committing itself to what it calls “theory,” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.

The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-sate is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.

This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions

Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place … Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms.

Instead, “the cultural Left has a preference for talking about ‘the system’ rather than specific social practices and specific changes. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic.

its abandonment of the melting-pot approach to racial justice, its substitution of multiculturalism, has destroyed the solidarity needed to advance justice in any manner

The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the “platoon” movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side.

the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than to ignore it… If the Cultural left insists on continuing its present strategy––on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noting those differences––then it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.

The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites.

These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it. I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy.

This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.

Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women’s Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress.