States prepare to use Medicaid for rental assistance for the first time. With rents growing to their most unaffordable levels ever, some states are preparing to use federal Medicaid dollars in the hopes that health will improve as housing stabilizes.
“There are Americans sleeping all over the streets in urban America,” Samuelsen says. “People have jobs and can’t afford homes. Never in my life have I seen a situation where America’s cities have looked like this."
"When rents skyrocket amidst a severe shortage of affordable housing and a shredded safety net, more people become homeless. It really is that simple—and preventable."
Housing is increasingly treated as both a speculative or an investment commodity for the rich and satisfied, and a charitable donation for the poor and precarious, in a system of corporate capitalist rule obfuscated by the language of human rights.
Homelessness and poverty are the tragic results of unfettered capitalism and raging inequality, whether it’s in rural West Virginia or in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.
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