At this point in time, America is struggling with a record-breaking amount of job losses. These jobs losses are affecting multiple fractions of America. These effects include: higher percentage of homelessness, rising consumer product prices, fewer establishments, stagnant or even declining realty market and elimination of small, private businesses. There are definitely more affects than are listed here, but these are the ones that seem to be affecting our community and nation the most. Although the most daunting of these affected areas is the exorbitant amount of homelessness, which has never been higher in history, unemployment has affected each and every one of these areas in some way. The importance of this situation displays itself when it’s understood that when unemployment increases so rapidly, it could predispose our country to an early downfall.
Generally in a person’s life, the world seems to expand only to where they see and feel, depending on the situation. Of course the newspaper divulges more of what’s going on in the world outside of a person’s bubble, but it’s still hard to imagine how other people are living unless we can see it with our own eyes. And even after seeing how it affects their world, some are still impervious to how it might affect them personally. Currently in California the situation has worsened from the start of the year; in the middle of the 2009 the state was hovering around a 9.7% unemployment rate but once we entered January 2010, the unemployment rate e href="http://www.insidebayarea.com/news/ci_14519962">scalated to 12.5%. After realizing just how serious the situation of unemployment is in California, it’s fair to say one might jump to the conclusion about soaring homelessness. Just in California 1.6 million people are living on the streets and shelters. At this point, living in shelter seems to be the silver lining of the matter, but the sad fact of this situation is that after 1.6 million people are homeless, there is just simply no more room to fit any more people in the shelters; and with the country’s deficit, there is no money to spend on building more shelters. It is a paradoxical situation in which we seem to be stuck.
Another strain that unemployment rates indirectly effect is that it puts a high demand of government specified facilities. “The more people we have on the streets, the more they are making demands of our emergency shelter system, emergency rooms, detox centers and jails”, says Mr. Marx, the executive director of Common Ground (nonprofit shelter organization). So not only are our shelters overbooked, now our government facilities that help people in even worse shape are now becoming full. However, this unemployment issue reaches farther than just California. In our nation, the job losses have reached over 8.4 million and are still continuing to expand. In California, we might think that our percentage of homeless people is high, but in New York the percentage of homelessness has just reached over 34%. Even more surprising about this fact is, “New York officials said the city still had a relatively small population of homeless people on the streets when compared with other large American cities. There is one homeless person for every 2,688 people in the general New York population, compared with 1 in 154 for Los Angeles, 1 in 1,810 for Chicago and 1 in 1,844 for Washington.”Obviously the larger cities seem to be affected by this deep recession more than any other type of county subsection. In our nation, now that the number of unemployed people has now surpassed 8.4 million and conditions have worsened drastically, we are now competing with the scars of the Great Depression. How could we as a nation, who went through an awesome event like the Great Depression, have not learned from our mistakes, and how could we even be going through a depression that matches the immensities of the last one? This is shocking and because of our current mistakes, we might fall as a country.
The housing market has also been greatly affected because of the recession, and naturally the amount of homeless people has risen. We seem to be at an impasse; to have over 20 million empty homes, completely uninhabited, and to have over 8 million people in need of homes, there seems like an easy solution to me. Apparently the government believes otherwise. On one hand, understanding why the government does not take advantage of this situation is not hard; they hope that by some miracle people will suddenly start buying these houses, which in turn will help us rise from this recession and once again become the most powerful country in the world. If not give the people these houses, which would not help us out of the recession, why not make these houses into shelters then, why not make these houses into shelters. Still, the government does not make use of these houses. Tending to the needs of the citizens of our country should preside over our reputation; and since the realty market is currently slow, we can afford to spare a few of these empty homes for the needy. In fact, many homeless people who were turned away from the already filled shelters began to squat in these empty homes.
As of right now, the government is grasping for any ground they have on this situation. For a while the unemployment rates were just shooting up too fast for the government to take any action and have it be immediately effective. Although, while jobs were still being cut, Geithner, U.S. Treasury Secretary states, “The U.S. unemployment rate may not peak until the second half of 2010, even as the broader economy shows signs of improvement” . Even, though Geithner forecasts this, his peers do not completely agree with his statement. Alan Greenspan makes a statement which eases the countries mind as he says, “collapse, I think, is now off the table…I’m pretty sure we’ve seen already seen the bottom". Some might say that Greenspan and Geithner are on the same page, it’s clear that although they agree on some levels, their views on the sustenance of the unemployment run are different. For our country’s sake let us hope that Greenspan has the truer vision of what’s to come.
Overall, 17% of our nation is unemployed and over 15% of the manufacturing business jobs have been wiped our, plus non-manufacturing jobs; each of these factors contribute the mess our country is in because of our phenomenal deficit. Over the past two years, America has been exterminating jobs at an alarming rate. At least 2 million of these jobs in the manufacturing business will never be able to be reinstated; therefore our nation is going to have to come up with new opportunities for jobs. However, our government did not completely fail us. In March of 2010, an additional 162,000 jobs were added to nonfarm payrolls. This was substantially different from the prior month of February when 14,000 jobs were lost. Although it may seem like the 162,000 is a great addition, only 114,000 were actually permanent jobs. “ ‘U.S. Census jobs are very temporary, mostly part-time, and there are a lot of them. They obviously don't count for as much as a real, private-sector job, so you have to look at them separately," says David Wyss, the chief economist at Standard & Poor's. "On the other hand, I suspect people who are taking those jobs are probably getting paid 20 hours per week for a couple months."’
Those 20,000 jobs working for the census were only temporary, so really the number of permanent jobs is less than the public might assume. But, really over the past year the nation has added quite a few jobs summative. A small number of jobs were added both in November of 2009 and in January of 2010.
The community service I aided with wasn’t governmentally financed or controlled. For the first year, the Mount Diable Unitarian Universalist Church of Walnut Creek hosted the Winter Nights Program. This program allows for homeless families to come and stay at churches for an eight month span. Winter Nights is a program shared throughout many different churches. Each church signs up for a two-week span and the guests move from haven to haven. Our stop was second to last in the eight-month durations, so by the time the guests got to our church we had hoped that most of them would be gone, able to get jobs/homes, but this year that was not true. We still had over half the adults and three-fifths the amount of children. It’s hard to talk to these people who have nothing, they carry boxes of their possessions, unable to add any unnecessary item to their box and only being able to live out of that box. They sleep in tents in our church, they can’t even have their own rooms. We do what can to help these people in need, but however much we do it always seems like its just not enough to satisfy. The guests probably feel a huge amount of gratification towards us, and are happy just to have a roof over their heads, but to those who are in better condition, their living conditions seem bare. The program is more extensive than just having people reside on our campus. In fact we prepare all the meals for them, with the exception of lunch (we give them the materials to make their own lunches). I was in charge of a dinner; I had to plan the entire meal, who prepared each piece and I had to make sure the meal came together and was consumable. I also was the milk and juice runner for the prior week. These jobs seem minute compared to the problems at hand, but the true experience was the actual interacting with the guests. The volunteers eat and talk with the guests. Since the guests are all parts of a family, most of them have children. I helped tutor and play with the younger ones. Actually, we had eight adults and twelve children, so the number of children was greater and the need for help was also greater. Talking to these people who are living in such bare conditions was very personal and greatly affected me. I can in no way say that I know how they feel, but after my experience with them, I know more how they feel than the average person. And by being able to associate more with these homeless people, I feel like I have more of a responsibility to help them survive through this. This has also expanded my view on just California’s unemployment issue. Being able to connect with homeless people and how they see it, gives more of a worldly view on the whole issue in itself.
Although the Winter Nights program is in no way associated with the government, the government still holds responsibility over many shelters and care centers. The government also is responsible for helping create new jobs for these 27 million people. There is in no way that we can easily recover from this disaster, emotionally and physically. Many people have been cast out on their own, in a way they might have felt as if their country was not supportive. Although there is no quick recovery, there is the long process of just creating more and more jobs, as the government has been doing. The true key to this matter will be time, of course many other factors are included in that such as spending more money (whether or not we feel we have it), taking larger risks and taking the jobs that are available.
This unemployment issue not only strikes a note within me for a national anger, its also very personal. A member of my family has been unable to get a job for almost a year now. Although, he/she has been applying for unemployment and receiving it, it’s emotionally hard to just have to stand by and watch. I can do all I can to hunt for jobs and find openings, but I too feel the struggle to find a job in this world, not for my own sake, but for a loved one’s.
