“Homelessness” is a human crisis with the same cause as the climate crisis: wealth consolidation. It’s a winner-take-all economy and if you’re not accumulating, then you are a job loss or chronic illness away from poverty.
The lowest earners are evicted from housing daily. Our elected land developers and realtors in the Legislature know this. Operation Rio Grande pushed the “porch pirates,” “scrap pickers,” and all their problems away from an efficient node of food, shelter and health care services and into adjacent neighborhoods, including my Glendale.
During the Great Recession, I exhausted my unemployment pay and owed more than my West Side Salt Lake City house was worth.