In 2013 homelessness in the US reached its highest levels
since the Great Depression, according to a federal Housing Department report
that said 610,042 people experienced homelessness that year. More than a third
were in unsheltered locations.
For hundreds of thousands of homeless men, women and
children, winter is a matter of life and death. The current cold snap sweeping
the midwest and east coast has packed tens of thousands into emergency housing
in small towns and major cities alike.
In Boston, where nearly 17,000 people were homeless last
year and the wind-chill temperature dipped below 0F (-18C) on Thursday,
shelters were at full capacity. The Salvation Army Cambridge Shelter for Men, ran
out of beds on Wednesday night. “We used all our overflow cots. We had people
sitting, heads on the tables, just to stay warm here.”
There are as many as 138,575 homeless people in Chicago –
where the highest temperature on Thursday was forecast to be about 13F (-11C) –
according to an estimate by the city’s Coalition for the Homeless. Stephen
Welch, executive assistant to the president of the Pacific Garden Mission, said
between 1,100 and 1,200 people slept at the “overburdened” shelter on Wednesday
night, on beds, cots and foam mats.
New York has some 60,000 homeless people in and out of
shelters, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. The city’s Department of
Homeless services enacts a “Code Blue” procedure for severe cold. During a Code
Blue, the city relaxes the usual intake process for people who want to access
shelters and “drop-in” centers and doubles the number of teams that search for
homeless people at risk.
It isn’t the cold that kills – it’s capitalism. The
charities do an admirable job trying to cope with poverty but deal with the
cause: the economic system and the underlying beliefs which create it. Anybody
who dies in the cold is a failure of capitalism to look after people and
society.
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