A tarp-covered homeless person's camp in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles, with luxury towers being built in the background, in downtown L.A.. I shot this photo from the Blue Line train, which runs from downtown Long Beach, through Compton, Watts, and South Central L.A., to downtown Los Angeles. Steve Emig photo.
The Atlantic has a new article, "The Great Affordability Crisis," which chronicles the financial elephant in the room in today's "soaring" economy. The vast majority of people can barely afford to live a "normal" life. When catastrophic medical bills, or some other unplanned event, hits them financially, many people go quickly into a crisis mode. If they can't quickly recover, some wind up homeless.
While the stock market may be hitting new highs, the financial markets have detached from the everyday, "real world" economy, in our current world. They even mention this divergence in the business media, like CNBC, from time to time. This can best be termed a fragility in most people's "personal economy." The vast majority of people deal with historically high levels of housing costs, enormous student loan debt, historically high medical expenses, historically high child care expenses, and then, car loan debt, credit card debt, and maybe mortgage debt. The vast majority of us know this because of our own struggles, but as this article points out, this goes unmentioned in most written and televised talk about the "economy."
This struggle to afford basic life expenses is one of the biggest underlying causes for today's huge growth in the amount of homeless people in major cities. We can't "solve the homeless crisis" long term, without dealing with this underlying issue: the majority of our population can barely afford to live.
