Bernard Lietaer - The Future of Money - Full Book

Figure 4.5 shows that the number of homeless children in the San Francisco Bay Area alone passed the 40,000 mark in 1995: 325% higher than it was eight years earlier. These numbers reflect by definition only 'eligible recipients', so the actual numbers must be higher.

There may be many reasons why the parents of these children became homeless, but the simplest is straightforward arithmetic. The average household income in the California Bay Area increased by 34.3% between 1980 and 1990. The cost of living went up during that time by 64%, almost double that amount. The average rent for a twobedroom unit increased by 110% over the same time period, while rent for a vacant studio increased by a whopping 288%. This explains why 20% of the homeless families have at least one parent with a fulltime job. In short, the fastest-rising component of the homeless is the families of the 'working poor' of yesteryear.

San Francisco is in no way a strange anomaly. Because the US Department of Education funds a project tracking schooling problems of homeless children in San Francisco Bay Area experienced by homeless children, it has prepared a report for the US Congress identifying the different ages of homeless children. Here again, only eligible recipients are counted, which means these children still have to be 'in the system' enough to actually try to go to school. For instance, it is unlikely that any of Katherine's friends would be picked up by these statistics. Here too the graph illustrates really a minimum level of the problem at hand. The most striking aspect of these statistics is the dramatic increase of homeless children in the lowest age brackets (less than six years old).

'Trickle down theory' or 'hoping for better economic times' is clearly not addressing the problem. In parallel, the number of families getting federal housing help dropped from 400,000 in the 1970s to