US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3673

During the last decade, Houston, the nation’s fourth most populous city, has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses. The overwhelming majority of them have remained housed after two years. The number of people deemed homeless in the Houston region has been cut by 63 percent since 2011, according to the latest numbers from local officials. Even judging by the more modest metrics registered in a 2020 federal report, Houston did more than twice as well as the rest of the country at reducing homelessness over the previous decade. Ten years ago, homeless veterans, one of the categories that the federal government tracks, waited 720 days and had to navigate 76 bureaucratic steps to get from the street into permanent housing with support from social service counselors. Today, a streamlined process means the wait for housing is 32 days.

Houston has gotten this far by teaming with county agencies and persuading scores of local service providers, corporations and charitable nonprofits — organizations that often bicker and compete with one another — to row in unison. Together, they’ve gone all in on “housing first,” a practice, supported by decades of research, that moves the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and without first requiring them to wean themselves off drugs or complete a 12-step program or find God or a job.

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A decade ago, Houston had one of the highest per capita homeless counts in the country. Its homeless response system was in shambles. The city was squandering millions of public dollars and police officers’ time by jailing homeless Houstonians for intoxication. Residents living on the streets, under bridges and along the bayous were using ambulances to get basic medical care because they had no other way to do so.

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Economists disagree about how to measure the costs of housing first to taxpayers. Estimates point to significant savings — from $4,800 to more than $60,000 per year per person in supportive housing. But advocates contend that programs to reduce homelessness should not be measured by whether they save taxpayers money, particularly given that government subsidies are heavily tilted toward homeowners.

A new Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday shows the Texas gubernatorial race has tightened between Gov. Greg Abbott and Democratic nominee Beto O’Rourke in the wake of the mass shooting in a Uvalde elementary school where 19 children and two adults were killed.

The poll, the first to come out since the May 24 shooting, found that 48% of registered Texas voters polled prefer Abbott while 43% prefer O’Rourke. That has narrowed slightly from a December Quinnipiac poll in which 52% of the registered voters who responded said they would vote for Abbott, versus 37% who chose O’Rourke.

“The race tightens,” Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy said in a press release Wednesday. “Abbott, considered strong on leadership, slips. O’Rourke, considered long on empathy, rides the momentum of support from women and young Texans in the horse race to Austin.”

On June 17 2022 08:07 Djabanete wrote:

The best way to sound like a senator speaking to the press is to ask yourself a question that nobody knows the answer to and then answer yourself ;-)

On June 17 2022 08:34 StasisField wrote:
I hope Beto can keep gaining ground and win the race. Living in this conservative hellhole is feeling less and less like an option for me and my girlfriend as time passes. We've been on the verge of flipping for a while now and every election cycle we inch that much closer despite Republicans enacting stricter, more oppressive voting laws that hurt left-leaning demographics.