Housing project for hard-core homeless pays off, By Alexandra Zavis, June 8, 2012, Los Angeles Times: “An ambitious program to provide permanent housing to some of Los Angeles County’s most hard-core homeless more than paid for itself, yielding a net savings of $238,700 over two years, officials said Thursday. The long-awaited findings, presented to a countywide panel on homelessness, support a growing consensus across the country that getting the most entrenched street dwellers into permanent homes and providing them the services they need to stay off the streets can save municipalities money. More than 51,000 people are homeless on any given night in the county, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. About a quarter of them are considered chronically homeless, meaning they have been homeless for at least a year and suffer from a serious physical, mental or substance abuse problem…”
Day: June 8, 2012
Federal Minimum Wage
Bill pushes for increase in wages, By Rebecca Berg, June 6, 2012, New York Times: “Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr. tried to give new vitality to the issue of the federal minimum wage on Wednesday, coming at the debate with a fresh angle: that raising it might encourage Americans to spend more and, thus, help stimulate the nation’s struggling economy. At a Capitol Hill news conference, he said the economy would be bolstered by increasing “the purchasing power of millions of low-income and low-wage workers, and one proven and effective way of doing that is to raise the federal minimum wage.” He has introduced a bill that would immediately increase the minimum wage by $2.75, to $10 an hour from $7.25…”