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There are already private companies eager to invest in low cost housing. Improvements in technology make housing production much quicker and cheaper. We have the engineering technology to build a cheap, energy efficient, sustainable dwelling in little over two days. All low-income earners need are accessible housing finance mechanisms.
A long-term commitment to turning informal settlements into liveable communities involves ensuring security, improving infrastructure, and creating strong links between informal and formal cities.
It also involves a commitment to participatory planning, an openness to policy experimentation, the realisation that one big plan cannot solve it all. Informal settlements are not a temporary problem. There is no easy solution and no quick fix. We live in an urban world where turning the makeshift and the informal into the liveable and sustainable is our greatest challenge.
Screen music and the question of originality - Miguel Mera — London, Islington. UEA Inaugural lecture: Alternative performance measures: do managers disclose them to inform us, or to mislead us? Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. The infamous Makoko slum in Lagos, Nigeria.
Going forward A long-term commitment to turning informal settlements into liveable communities involves ensuring security, improving infrastructure, and creating strong links between informal and formal cities. You might also like Heavy traffic in Lagos, Nigeria. Lewis Abedi Asante. Traffic in Accra, Ghana. With more people moving into cities, careful town planning is critical for sustainable development.
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Nov 22, Barry rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction. Excellent positive book. A good read. Makes the case for relocalising economies, shows some of the ways we might do it. Makes alternatives seem possible. Author Alastair Boone participated in an official count, covering a section of Oakland, California, in the early hours of January 30, HUD requires cities and counties to complete the count, on this day, every two years, in order to receive federal funding for homeless programs.
But canvassing the streets of any city during the pre-dawn hours during the coldest month of the year is bound to miss a lot of people. They want to stay out of sight in general for their own safety. Knowing just how many Americans are homeless is further complicated by competing definitions of homelessness. But NCES defines the homeless as not only those who are unsheltered or in homeless shelters, but those sharing housing due to loss of their own home, or living in hotels or motels. But reports from around the state dispute the HUD assessment. Nobody seems to know whether these flaws and ambiguities in how the homeless are counted mean that the crisis is in fact worse now than ever, despite official numbers showing a decline.
How the homeless are treated, and where the homeless are concentrated, has changed a great deal in the past ten years. This is the real reason the homeless crisis today is worse than ever.
Viewed in this context, the states where homelessness increased dramatically over the past ten years, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, nonetheless confront a relatively insignificant challenge. As of , the estimated homeless population of all three of those states combined totaled only 2, people. Most homeless, on the other hand, are concentrated in states that share one or more of three characteristics; a mild winter climate, large urban centers, and liberal politics. Sunny California, in first place with an estimated homeless population exceeding , in , fulfills all three.
Whether the numbers of homeless people are up or down in California is only half the story. An assortment of policy failures can be directly linked to why homelessness in California is a bigger problem than ever, even in the unlikely event the numbers of homeless have not dramatically increased. Court Decisions : The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, unsurprisingly, is the author of at least three rulings that have tied the hands of law enforcement in dealing with the homeless.
City of Los Angeles , decided in , addresses a related issue—due process requirements for the removal of unauthorized encampments on public property. Prior to clearing encampments, local governments must provide notice to camp resident hour minimum notice is common. It is also important to have outreach personnel present during encampment removal, whose job it is to help individuals in an encampment identify shelter options or alternative locations to go to. Personal property found during the encampment removal must be held for a certain amount of time so that it can be claimed by the owner.
The practical impact of these cases is to create private space wherever a homeless person camps on publicly owned property. Apart from trying — often ineffectively — to prevent the homeless from blocking passage on roads and sidewalks, if a homeless person wants to camp in a public space, they cannot be removed. With respect to the homeless, passage of this initiative has made it a waste of time for police to arrest anyone for openly using illegal drugs or for petty theft.
Only very serious crimes are still investigated.
Hopefully most of these released inmates reintegrated successfully into society. As with Prop.
For example, through self-assessment learners can identify what they need help with and then discuss this with their teacher. To some, particularly children and old people, it appears a self-evident reality, familiar and homely, providing daily needs and a community of shared experience and mutual support. In the United States, Underwriters Laboratories UL certifies equipment ratings, called Series Ratings or "integrated equipment ratings" for circuit breaker equipment used for buildings. Refine more Format Format. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.
Every single time they interact with a citizen officers have to input 17 variables into a form that is either paper four pages, requiring reentry into a database , or onto a tablet, cell phone, or in-car laptop. The mere fact that this is a time consuming process will prevent a police officer from making as many stops during a normal shift, and may deter them from even making some stops.
No summary of counterproductive state legislation would be complete without mentioning the laws that make it nearly impossible to get treatment for mentally ill homeless people. Ronald Reagan. Ever since, and especially in recent years as the percentage of homeless who suffer from mental illness has increased, attempts to reform the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act have been tenaciously resisted by the ACLU and other homeless advocacy groups.
Their effect has been to increase the proportion of mentally ill, drug addicts, and criminals as a percentage of the homeless, at the same time as police and social service workers have far less ability to detain, relocate, or even offer help to the homeless. The reason for this legislation was to protect endangered species who feed on the poisoned rats and themselves become poisoned.
Most people agree that using poisons this potent should be restricted in suburban areas bordering wildlife habitat. But the consequences of denying its use in the downtown core of Los Angeles could be catastrophic to the human population. And the mountains of trash that create rat habitat are not just coming from homeless people, they are a product of a disastrous decision by the Los Angeles City Council that has led to mountains of uncollected trash from businesses and residences. Putting small haulers out of business in the name of saving the streets from excessive traffic, the measure was sold as a way to create economies of scale.
Instead, these companies were unable to smoothly absorb the additional work, at the same time as in many cases they doubled or tripled their collection fees. We have multiple rodent-borne, flea-borne illnesses, plague, typhus. Measles could break into that population. We have tuberculosis exploding. All of this is easily confirmed.
Shigella , a communicable form of diarrhea, is now common among the homeless. To-date, except for those people living and working in proximity to the many encampments, the homeless crisis in America has been an abstraction. But now there is a possibility that this perfect storm of neglect, indulgence, and corruption may lead to disease outbreaks on a scale not seen in this country for over a century. The homeless problem has become a timebomb. When it comes to mismanaging the homeless, California may be leader of the pack, but other major urban centers are not far behind.
An estimated 78, homeless are living on the streets of the Big Apple. In fact, nearly a quarter of all people sleeping unsheltered did so in either New York or Los Angeles. But how is it that New York City manages to get 95 percent of their homeless into overnight shelters, whereas Los Angeles only gets 25 percent of their homeless into shelters? The approach was first to simply build more shelter beds. The correlation between the number of available shelter beds and the number of sheltered homeless is high across the nation, as the graphic below illustrates.
What New York City did was to prioritize getting people under a roof for the night.
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But New York City has gone a step further, offering reasonable conditions and incentives to their sheltered population even at this most basic first step of assistance. All facilities have access to laundry and showers, and residents receive 3 meals a day. San Francisco and Los Angeles, by contrast, have a rate of unsheltered homeless ten times higher; Seattle, five times higher.
One obvious challenge facing cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other West Coast cities facing a homeless crisis is the high cost of housing. But other policies have helped cause the problem, and are making the problem worse. Not only is it harder to compel the homeless to seek shelter, or get them into treatment for addiction and mental illness, or prosecute them for criminal offenses, but the emphasis on permanent supportive housing takes money away from funds that could be used for overnight shelters.
Up north, Seattle faces similar policy failures.