By The Indypendent

Meet the new homeless.

As the economic crisis continues, families who just got by before are now being pushed into the ranks of the homeless. Records numbers of homeless are entering the shelter system in New York City. The Bloomberg administration’s flawed 5 year plan to combat homelessness has faltered hard.

The Indypendent’s Sarah Secunda reports on the case of one family—the Dillellas—and their experience in the city’s shelter system.

“’Families who were once barely getting by have been pushed into homelessness by the economic recession,’ says Ralph da Costa Nunez, president of the Institute for Children and Poverty, a nonprofit that studies family homelessness. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, from July to November 2008, more than 1,300 new families entered New York City’s shelter system each month, the highest monthly average since the city began recording this data 25 years ago.

‘There are some families that are here because of chronic poverty issues,’ Nunez says. ‘Some are here because something happened and they couldn’t pay the rent.’ He calls this growing population the ‘new homeless.’ ‘These are people that were middle class, that had jobs, that had no other options.’

‘When I first went into the shelter, I thought I could stay there and work and get out,’ Franceska says. DHS had placed the family in the Metro Family Residence on Queens Boulevard, a 45-minute subway ride from the elementary school where Zach attended first grade. Nearby was Nick’s pre-school, which also provided day care for Eden.”

To read the full story, see below for the link to “Growing Up Homeless.” To see an accompany photo essay by Joel Cook, see the link to “Three Kids, No Home: Navigating the Shelter System One Step at a Time.”

Also included in this issue of the Indypendent: Single-payer health care activism; a review of a hip-hop album by Canadian-Iraqi rapper Yassin Alsaman; and an interview with the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union on President Obama’s policies on civil liberties and national security.

Growing Up Homeless || Three Kids, No Home: Navigating the Shelter System One Step at a Time || Pay It Forward || A Mother’s Nightmare: A Senegalese Woman Struggles to Save Her Daughters || A Growing Movement to Take Action || 123 Community Space for Youth Faces Eviction || The People’s Lawyer: Right to Police Persuasion || Domestic Workers Struggle for Rights Amid Senate Confusion || Good Judgment || Fighting to Cure a Sick System || Community Calendar || Reader Comments || Iran Teeters on the Edge of History || Obama’s Tortured Logic || Pro-Development Legislation Repealed in Peru Following Indigenous Protests || Poetic Tension: A Review of Poets for Palestine || The Rhyme Is Mightier than the Sword || Across Continents, Across Generations: A Review of Nancy Foner’s Across Generations: Immigrant Families in America, Plus an Interview with the Author || Web Exclusive Review and Interview: The Green Zone: How a Greening Culture Cannot Ignore the Military

Keywords: News, Global, Government, War & Peace, Nature, Economy, Human Rights, Health, Culture, Media, Political Theory, Alternatives,