From his luxurious twelfth-floor office, nothing was further from the thoughts of bank president John Ross than the problems of the homeless. But in 1986, Ross took a dive of Shakespearean proportions. He was about to understand homelessness from a firsthand perspective.
Ross (a pseudonym) was an American success story, growing up in a medium-sized North Dakota town, working hard, saving his money, and eventually buying out the business for which he worked, the town bank. Investing money frugally all his life, Ross put all of his bank earnings in southwestern oil operations. By 1985 Ross had it all; the largest, fanciest house in town and a balance sheet worth almost two million dollars. Then came the crash.
In 1985 the oil boom in the Southwest burst as America changed from domestic oil to the much less expensive Middle Eastern oil. Towns like Dallas and Houston went from boom towns to depressed areas almost overnight. Ross' fortune was in liquid assets, and unfortunately that liquid was oil. With the loss of his oil wealth, Ross found himself overextended and was forced to sell his bank, and then his home. Eventually, he filed for bankruptcy, and his wife, accustomed to the finer things in life, left him. Ross began drinking heavily to soothe his pain. At his low point last year, Ross woke from an alcoholic stupor to find himself with no money, no friends, no assets other than his car, and no place to sleep. He was forced to seek refuge in an overnight church shelter for the homeless.
Although John Ross' situation is atypical, equally tragic stories occur in America. "About one out of every three people we see has recently had a job and a home, and suddenly lost the job," says Alexa Bradley of the Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless. "Almost a fourth of the people who come to us for help still hold either a full- or a part-time job."
The exact number of the nation's homeless is hard to pinpoint, varying from the government's estimate of around half a million to the National Coalition for the Homeless' estimate of almost three million.
In a survey of 27 of the nation's major cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that in 1988, requests for emergency shelter had increased by 13 percent, while requests for emergency food were up 19 percent. One out of every four homeless people was a child, and a little more than one-third of the entire homeless population was made up of families. An estimated 23 percent of the families asking for shelter had to be turned away because of the lack of facilities.
"The homeless people we see on the streets or in shelters," says Bradley, "are really only the tip of the poverty iceberg. The visible homeless are usually society's most vulnerable poor: the mentally ill, drug-dependent people or those in some way socially misfit. But more and more, that iceberg is rising, and we are seeing the marginally poor joining the ranks of the homeless. In Minnesota alone, the number of homeless people has risen 146 percent in the last few years."
What accounts for this explosion of our nation's homeless population? Experts differ, depending on their political opinions, but a few causes stand out clearly. They include the loss of the country's cheap housing base, a rise in the number of poor, the
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