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Tag: Poverty

The Work Behind Work: Combatting Homelessness with Jobs

February 14, 2024 / By Seth Pickens, Daniel Flaming, Manuel Gomez and Ana Alvarez

The most common reason unhoused individuals give for why they do not have a place of their own to live is unemployment and lack of income. Homelessness is primarily a problem of income. Upstream interventions that lead to employment will significantly reduce the number of men, women and children who experience homelessness.

Exhausting Our Air: Environmental and Human Costs of Diesel Trucks

September 28, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Sierra Club

California’s mandates to replace diesel trucks with zero-emission electric trucks will bring cleaner air and better jobs – if they stay on track. Slow action by electric utilities and fierce opposition by trucking companies are real threats. Displacement of brick-and-mortar retail stores by online retailing and sprawling warehouses has come at the cost of climate change, bad air, low wages.

Demolishing Homes for Air Cargo: San Bernardino Airport Gateway Plan

June 19, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Sierra Club

The Inland Valley Development Agency plans to convert a 678-acre residential and mixed-use area north of San Bernardino International Airport into 9.2 million-square feet of warehouse and industrial space to create “a thriving jobs center.” This gesture at economic development has already been shown to create poverty-level jobs, economic hardship, and precariously housed workers.

Hungry Cooks: Poverty Wages and Homelessness in the Fast Food Industry

May 1, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

The fast food industry is a poverty employer, with a larger share of its workers in poverty than any other industry. All low-wage workers face some level of risk that they will become homeless. This risk is compounded in the fast food industry by the combination of low wages, part-time work and employee churn. These interlocking hazards undercut workers’ ability to pay their rent.

Recognizing and Helping High-Need Homeless Individuals: Five Homeless Predictive Screening Tools

March 2, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming / Economic Roundtable

Preventive vs. Remedial Screening Tools The Economic Roundtable has developed five predictive screening tools to identify and prioritize high-need homeless individuals who will have high future public costs because of ongoing crises in their lives that are resolved in expensive institutional settings, including jails and hospitals. 

Breaking the Fall: Successful Homeless Interventions in the Covid Pandemic

December 14, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming, Seth Pickens and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable

Breaking the Fall – Covid Interventions Prevented Homelessness Struggling workers are either everyone’s responsibility now or everyone’s problem later. When poorly paid workers become jobless at the thin edge of the job market and then unable to pay rent, homeless destitution follows. In fact, we are equipped with the tools we need to protect workers from the sharper edges of joblessness and to combat homelessness. 

Locked Out: Unemployment and Homelessness in the Covid Economy

January 11, 2021 / By Daniel Flaming, Anthony W. Orlando, Patrick Burns and Seth Pickens / Economic Roundtable

COVID-driven loss of jobs and employment income will cause the number of homeless workers to increase each year through 2023. Without large-scale, government employment programs the Pandemic Recession is projected to cause twice as much homelessness as the 2008 Great Recession. The Economic Roundtable used data from the 2008 Great Recession to estimate the linkage between job loss and homelessness and forecast the amount and type of pandemic-driven homelessness in Los Angeles, California and the United States. 

Rapid Re-employment Offers an Escape from Cardboard City: Homelessness Is an Income Problem as well as a Housing Problem

June 6, 2019 / By Daniel Flaming / Los Angeles Times

More taxpayer dollars are being spent on homeless housing and services, yet homelessness in Los Angeles County increased 12% last year and chronic homelessness is up 17%. Society needs to do better. Homelessness is an income problem as well as a housing problem — and both need to be addressed to solve L.A.’s 

Restoring Altitude: Economic Impacts of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Minimum Wage Proposal

June 18, 2018 / By Patrick Burns, Halil Toros and Daniel Flaming / Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ

The Port Authority that oversees LaGuardia, the John F. Kennedy and Newark Liberty international airports is considering a proposal that would raise the minimum wage for 40,000 low wage workers at regional airports to $19 per hour by 2023. If passed, it will create the highest publicly mandated minimum wage in the nation and will deeply impact local communities. An economic stimulus is projected in the communities where workers live. Their increased household spending is projected to increase economic output by over $465 million in 2023 and every year thereafter, creating 2,700 new jobs.

Escape Routes: Meta-Analysis of Homelessness in L.A.

April 24, 2018 / By Daniel Flaming, Patrick Burns and Jane Carlen / the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation

We can’t navigate without a map. If we can't see the whole picture of homelessness, we can't begin to solve the problem. This meta-analysis brings together 26 point-in-time data sets to provide a single panoramic description of people without homes who are living in places not meant for human habitation. In addition to building affordable housing, the path for ending Los Angeles County’s crisis of chronic homelessness is through identifying individuals with a high risk of becoming chronically homeless early after the onset of homelessness and intervening with coordinated system-wide assistance that supports a permanent exit from homelessness before the problem is catastrophic.

Who Counts: Assessing Accuracy of L.A.'s Homeless Count

November 20, 2017 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable

Within the past year, Los Angeles County and City voters approved $4.75 billion for services and housing to combat homelessness. The Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count is crucial for identifying how this money should be used to help people escape homelessness. The Count is an increasingly comprehensive effort to count and describe Los Angeles’ homeless residents, but it is not yet sufficiently accurate to identify year-to-year changes in homelessness. 

Silicon Valley Triage Tool: Identifying and Housing High-Cost Homeless Residents

February 17, 2016 / By Halil Toros and Daniel Flaming / County of Santa Clara, Destination: Home

Why the Silicon Valley Triage Tool is Important: The number of homeless people needing housing far exceeds the available housing supply, and there is not a fair, objective system for prioritizing who gets to be housed. The triage tool addresses this problem by identifying individuals for whom the solution of housing costs less than the problem of homelessness.  

Long Beach Rising: A City that Works for Everyone

October 13, 2015 / By Daniel Flaming, Halil Toros and Patrick Burns / AFL-CIO, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor

Over 54,000 workers employed in Long Beach’s formal economy will be affected by increasing the minimum wage to $15. The annual earnings of workers will increase by about $405 million. The largest share of increased wages—almost $130 million—will go to workers who also live in the City of Long Beach The greatest number of affected workers and the largest payroll increases will be in restaurants, retail trade, education, transportation and warehousing, and health care. The economic stimulus from increased consumption by workers' households will create an estimated 3,186 new jobs and generate $442 million in increased sales in the region.

All Alone: Antecedents of Chronic Homelessness

August 25, 2015 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation

Public assistance programs are Los Angeles’s primary interface with individuals experiencing homelessness and can be a catalyst for connecting at-risk and homeless recipients with crucial services and reducing the massive public costs associated with chronic homelessness. The vital role is to identify tripwire events among all recipients, particularly children and transition-age youth, and quickly connect at-risk individuals with needed employment, behavioral health and housing services.

Home Not Found: The Cost Of Homelessness In Silicon Valley

May 26, 2015 / By Daniel Flaming, Halil Toros and Patrick Burns / Destination: Home

This report identifies the characteristics of the most vulnerable, distressed and costly homeless residents of Santa Clara County to guide strategies for stabilizing their lives through housing and supportive services, improving their wellbeing and reducing public costs for their care. The county spent $520 million a year providing services for homeless residents over the six years covered by this study. Costs are heavily skewed toward a comparatively small number of frequent users of public and medical services. Individuals with costs in the top 5% accounted for 47 percent of all costs and had average costs of over $100,000 per year.

Los Angeles Rising: A City That Works for Everyone

March 19, 2015 / By Daniel Flaming, Halil Toros, Yvonne Yen Liu, Patrick Burns, Lucero Herrera, UCLA Labor Center, Tia Koonse, UCLA Labor Center, Saba Waheed, UCLA Labor Center and Robert Habans, UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment / Los Angeles County Federation of Labor

Raising L.A.'s minimum wage to $15.25 per hour will put $5.9 billion new dollars into the pockets of workers and families, and provide stimulus benefits for under-invested communities. Paying fair wages is an adjustment for some businesses, but the result is a bigger, more sustainable, and more inclusive economy for Los Angeles.

Hospital to Home: Triage Tool II for Identifying Homeless Hospital Patients in Crisis

November 18, 2012 / By Daniel Flaming, Patrick Burns, Gerald Sumner, Manuel H. Moreno and Halil Toros / Economic Roundtable

Different conditions of body and mind found among homeless adults provide a basis for predicting who will have very high public costs – in the 10th cost decile. This report presents a triage tool developed specifically for use in hospitals or clinics where there is not access to data from other agencies about the use of non-medical public services. 

Getting to Work: Unemployment and Economic Recovery in Los Angeles

February 1, 2012 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable, the Pat Brown Institute

Unemployment and underemployment currently represent $25.8 billion in annual wages not earned in Los Angeles County, $28.2 billion in lost private sector economic activity and $4 billion in tax revenue not generated. Over a fifth of Los Angeles County’s labor force is unemployed or underemployed. Over a third of the county’s population lives in a household where one or more breadwinners are under-employed.

Crisis Indicator: Triage Tool for Identifying Homeless Adults in Crisis

August 1, 2011 / By Daniel Flaming, Patrick Burns, Gerald Sumner, Manuel H. Moreno and Halil Toros / the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Corporation for Supportive Housing

The triage tool, or crisis indicator, identifies homeless individuals in hospitals and jails who have continuing crises in their lives that create very high public costs. This redesigned tool is four times more accurate than the earlier screening tool released in 2010. The tool is developed for use in jails, hospitals and clinics where homeless individuals with high levels of need and high public costs are most likely to be found. Discovery of the exceptionally high public costs for people in the 10th cost decile has led to interest in identifying these individuals and giving them high priority for access to permanent supportive housing. This group accounts for well over half of all public costs for homeless adults, and their costs decrease by 86 percent when they live in permanent supportive housing.

Dividends of a Hand Up: Public Benefits of Moving Indigent Adults with Disabilities onto SSI

March 1, 2011 / By Daniel Flaming / the Health Consumer Alliance of California

Counties bear large hidden costs for individuals with disabilities who are indigent or homeless. This includes costs for health care, jails and probation in addition to readily identifiable county costs for public assistance. A large share of this cost is health related – costs that the federal and state governments would pay through Medi-Cal if the individuals were receiving Supplemental Social Security Income (SSI). 

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