Day: December 18, 2017

Homelessness in the United States went up slightly this year for the first time since 2010. During a one-night count in January, 553,742 people were found living outside or in shelters across the country, a 0.7 percent increase from the year before, according to new data released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development on Wednesday.

The increase is almost entirely due to a surge in homelessness in Los Angeles and other cities facing severe shortages of affordable housing, say HUD officials. Many of the cities are on the West Coast, including Seattle, San Diego and Sacramento, Calif.

Overall, the nation’s homeless numbers are 13 percent lower than they were in 2010 and some communities have all but eliminated homelessness among veterans, emphasized HUD Secretary Ben Carson.

“Where we’re not making great progress are in places like Los Angeles and New York City. These happen to be places where the rents are going up much faster than the incomes,” said Carson in an interview with NPR.

In fact, Los Angeles reported a nearly 26 percent rise in homelessness this year over 2016. Most of the increase was among individuals living outside on the street.

The number of homeless veterans was also up 1.5 percent nationally, despite major efforts by the government and nonprofit groups to house veterans. Again, officials say that rise is due to the unusually large surge in homeless veterans in Los Angeles. Veterans’ homelessness in the rest of the nation, excluding the city and county of Los Angeles, dropped by 3.2 percent.

Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, was surprised the overall numbers weren’t better.

“Just because I think there’s been a continuing investment in veterans, and an improvement in approaches,” she says. “We might expect to have seen a continuing downward trend. And we’re not.”

Roman says it’s increasingly difficult to find available units in some areas of the country to house the homeless. and she worries the problem could get worse. Housing advocates note that the Trump administration has proposed cutting low-income housing subsidies, which many people rely on to stay housed. They also believe the tax bill working its way through Congress could discourage investment in new affordable housing construction by reducing tax credits used by developers.

Carson insists the administration is committed to helping homeless individuals, but he says that the federal government needs to work more with nonprofits, faith-based communities, state and local governments and the private sector to address the problem.

“We just need to move a little bit away from the concept that only the government can solve this problem by throwing more money at it,” he says.

In fact, much of the progress that’s been made in recent years reducing homelessness has been the result of joint efforts between nonprofits, the private sector and government.

There are also some positive trends. While veterans’ homelessness is up, tens of thousands of homeless veterans have been housed in recent years. This year’s count of 40,056 is 46 percent lower than it was in 2010.

Family homelessness was also down 5.4 percent from last year and 27 percent lower than it was in 2010. Still, there were 58,000 families with children living outside or in shelters earlier this year. The number of unaccompanied homeless youth and children was close to 41,000; more than half were unsheltered.

The number of people experiencing chronic or long-term homelessness was also up 12 percent from the year before.

New results from an NPR survey show that large numbers of Asian-Americans experience and perceive discrimination in many areas of their daily lives. This happens despite their having average incomes that outpace other racial, ethnic and identity groups.

The poll, a collaboration among NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, also finds a wide gap between immigrant and nonimmigrant Asian-Americans in reporting discrimination experiences, including violence and harassment.

“Our poll shows that Asian-American families have the highest average income among the groups we’ve surveyed, and yet the poll still finds that Asian-Americans experience persistent discrimination in housing, jobs and at college,” says Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard Chan School who co-directed the survey. “Over the course of our series, we are seeing again and again that income is not a shield from discrimination.”

In addition to asking about personal experiences with discrimination, we also wanted to find out what people’s perceptions are of discrimination within their own neighborhoods. The numbers for Asian-Americans were lower on this measure than for personal experiences but still show that a notable level of discrimination exists in everyday life.

The survey was conducted among a nationally representative probability-based telephone (cell and landline) sample of 500 Asian-American adults. The margin of error for the total Asian-American response is 5.8 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence interval. Interviews were conducted in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese. Complete methodological information is in the full poll report.

Looking at the split according to immigration status, we found that nonimmigrant Asian-Americans are more than three times as likely to say they’ve experienced violence because they are Asian and more than twice as likely to say they’ve been threatened or nonsexually harassed because they are Asian.

We also saw a similar gap based on immigration status in terms of experiencing sexual harassment. But it’s important to note that our poll was done earlier this year, before the country’s widespread discussions of sexual assault and harassment in the fall. “These national conversations may have affected how people viewed or responded to their own experiences, or on their willingness to disclose these experiences in a survey,” Blendon says.

When it comes to health care, the immigrant-nonimmigrant split was reversed, with immigrants being 17 times more likely than nonimmigrants to report experiencing discrimination because they are Asian.

Overall, Asian-Americans commonly report experiencing insensitive or offensive comments, negative assumptions or slurs. But they infrequently report the experience of having other people be afraid of them because of their race.

Regarding treatment by the police or by the court system, about 1 in 10 Asian-Americans report that they or a family member have been unfairly stopped or treated by the police because they are Asian. But when we sorted the results by ethnicity, Indian-Americans reported unfair stops or treatment eight times more often than Chinese-Americans.

Discrimination takes on many forms, both institutional and personal. In the survey, a large majority of Asian-Americans said discrimination by individuals is a bigger problem than discrimination in laws or the government.

Some important notes on our survey:

We asked people to identify their ethnicity, and our data is sorted as follows. But in several cases, the number of respondents was insufficient to include in our breakouts along ethnic lines. In the full report, “Southeast Asian American” includes respondents who said their families are Filipino, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian or Malaysian. “Chinese Americans” refers to Asian-Americans of Chinese heritage, but not those who identified as Taiwanese. Asian-Americans who say their families are from the Indian subcontinent are referred to as “Indian American,” not to be confused with Native Americans, whose experiences are covered in a separate report in this series. These three groups (Southeast Asian, Chinese and Indian) are not exhaustive of the entire Asian-American sample. Individuals from other subgroups (e.g., Taiwanese Americans) are included in the total sample (“All Asian-Americans”) but are not analyzed separately because of insufficient sample size.

The survey was conducted Jan. 26 to April 9, 2017, among a nationally representative, probability-based telephone (cell and landline) sample of 3,453 adults age 18 or older. The survey included nationally representative samples of African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native Americans and white Americans; men and women; and LGBTQ adults. This report presents the results specifically for a nationally representative probability sample of 500 Asian-American U.S. adults. Separate reports analyze other individual groups, and the final report will discuss major highlights from the series.

Our ongoing series “You, Me and Them: Experiencing Discrimination in America” is based in part on a poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. We have previously released results for African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, whites and LGBTQ adults. We will release results by gender later this month.