THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

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