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Gainesville’s prolific chicken processing facilities contribute to a low unemployment rate in the northeast Georgia community.

But with many factory workers unable to afford rent and other bills, the Hall County city is also a microcosm of the homelessness crisis in Georgia and throughout the nation.

When resources dry up and affordable housing becomes harder to pay for with working-class jobs, government leaders and organizations grapple with policies that criminalize the homeless for sleeping under bridges or setting up camp in public spaces. Compounding the problem are a shortage of resources that are available for housing and mental and substance abuse treatment for long-term issues, a problem that worsened during the pandemic.

Gainesville’s small neighboring city 10 miles to the north, Lula, added criminal penalties aimed at people experiencing homelessness at its city council meeting Monday night by banning so-called urban camping. People who violate the ordinance could be fined up to $1,000 and be jailed for up to six months for camping in parks, roads, or bridges, a strategy critics say further criminalizes homelessness without working to fix the root causes.

Lula, home to about 3,000 people, is officially dealing with homelessness for the first time after locals complained of an increase in panhandling, public drunkenness, and people sleeping on public property.

Lula City Manager Dennis Bergin said the ordinance aims to address concerns about transient people while the city also works with social services organizations and churches to provide support for people experiencing homelessness.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — In California’s capital, massive tent encampments have risen along the American River and highway overpasses have become havens for homeless people, whose numbers have jumped a staggering nearly 70% over two years.

Among the 9,300 without a home is Eric Santos, who lost his job at a brewery and was evicted from his apartment in July. Now he carries a list of places where free meals are available and a bucket to mix soap and water to wash his hands, and to sit on.

“The bucket is part of my life now,” the 42-year-old said, calling it his version of Wilson, the volleyball that becomes Tom Hanks’ companion in the film “Castaway.”

Cities big and small around the country are facing a similar experience to Sacramento.

Fueled by a long-running housing shortage, rising rent prices and the economic hangover from the pandemic, the overall number of homeless in a federal government report to be released in coming months is expected to be higher than the 580,000 unhoused before the coronavirus outbreak, the National Alliance to End Homelessness said.

The Associated Press tallied results from city-by-city Point in Time surveys conducted earlier this year and found the number of people without homes is up overall compared with 2020 in areas reporting results so far.

Some of the biggest increases are in West Coast cities such as Sacramento and Portland, Oregon, where growing homelessness has become a humanitarian crisis and political football. Numbers are also up in South Dakota, Prince George’s County, Maryland, and Asheville, North Carolina.

Research has shown places seeing spikes in homelessness often lack affordable housing. Making matters worse, pandemic government relief programs — including anti-eviction measures, emergency rental assistance and a child tax credit that kept people housed who may have been on the streets otherwise — are ending.

In Sacramento, where rents are soaring and officials disagree on how best to deal with the problem, homelessness has jumped 68% from 2020 to 2022 — the most among larger cities reporting results so far.

Henry Jones felt like he was at the end of the line in the summer of 1991.

"There was no way out," he remembered thinking. "I prayed and was tired, but I couldn't see no way out."

Jones had been homeless in Washington, DC for 11 years, and the years had taken their toll. "I started to get sicker and sicker," he said. "I could feel my health failing."

One hot morning in June, Jones was in particularly rough shape — his legs ached, his stomach hurt, and his arms were trembling. A security guard had to give him a ride from the hospital parking lot to the ER because he could barely stand.

The hospital wouldn't admit him, but a social worker referred him to a place called Christ House, a facility for homeless men who were too sick to be on the streets or in a shelter, but not sick enough to require hospital-level care.

Today, there are a growing number of programs like Christ House that provide short-term medical care for homeless people, known as medical respite or recuperative care. The growth is fueled in part by a push from state Medicaid programs to provide support to patients to prevent avoidable health care use, like emergency room visits.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Homeless encampments that have proliferated in nearly every neighborhood of Los Angeles will no longer be allowed within 500 feet (152 meters) of schools and day care centers under a sweeping ban approved Tuesday during a City Council meeting disrupted by protesters who said the law criminalizes homelessness.

The council voted 11-3 to broadly expand an existing prohibition on sitting, sleeping or camping that previously only applied to schools and day cares specified by the council.

The meeting was recessed before the vote when dozens of demonstrators shouted their opposition to the measure and police officers cleared the council chamber. One person was arrested, said Los Angeles Police Department Officer Annie Hernandez said.

Protesters also gathered outside City Hall, chanting “Abolish 41.18,” a reference to the law prohibiting encampments on freeway overpasses, around railroad tracks, near loading docks, at libraries and other locations.

The 26-year-old New Orleans resident was finally making a steady income cleaning houses during the pandemic to afford a $700-a-month, one-bedroom apartment. But she lost nearly all her clients after Hurricane Ida hit last year. Then she was fired from a grocery store job in February after taking time off to help a relative.

Two months behind on rent, she made the difficult decision last month to leave her apartment rather than risk an eviction judgment on her record. Now, she's living in her car with her 6-year-old son, sometimes spending nights at the apartments of friends or her son's father.

“I've slept outside for a whole year before. It's very depressing, I'm not going to lie,” said Riley, who often doesn't have enough money to buy gas or afford food every day.

“I don't want to have my son experience any struggles that I went through.”

Eviction filings nationwide have steadily risen in recent months and are approaching or exceeding pre-pandemic levels in many cities and states. That's in stark contrast to the pandemic, when state and federal moratoriums on evictions, combined with $46.5 billion in f ederal Emergency Rental Assistance, kept millions of families housed.

It’s early in the morning and commuter traffic is just starting to stream past the camp Tiffany and about half a dozen other people share a few feet away from Spring Street in Macon. 

On one side of the tents squished together in an ad hoc compound is a fast food restaurant. On other sides are a gas station, the four-lane road with a turn lane and, just feet away, the empty lot which, until the week before, had been home to the campsite. 

Tiffany (she only wanted to give a first name) was one of a number of unhoused people who had been forced to move her home when Macon-Bibb County came to one of these camps strung like beads up and down the riverfront just off of downtown days before with a bulldozer and an ultimatum: Move it or lose it. 

Representatives from the Salvation Army shelter and the Brookdale Warming Center (a kind of wraparound service center for the housing insecure) had offered brick-and-mortar shelter space for a week. In fact, the groups were still cajoling people to use the shelters right up to the moment the tent sites that didn’t move were scooped up and crushed. 

No one said "yes" to a shelter. In fact, most hardly moved at all, including Tiffany. Her new tent site is literally feet from where she’d been staying before the demolition. 

Tiffany said of course there are places she and her neighbors would rather be. 

Churches across the U.S. are tackling the big question of how to address homelessness in their communities with a small solution: tiny homes.

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Lending new meaning to the phrase “love thy neighbor,” Bay Area churches are turning their parking lots, backyards and other bits of unused land into tiny homes for the homeless members of their communities. And one local nonprofit has made it its mission to help.

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The race largely focused on homelessness and crime. More than 40,000 people live in trash-strewn homeless encampments and rusty RVs, and widely publicized smash-and-grab robberies and home invasions have unsettled residents.

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TAMPA, Fla. — On any given night there are thousands of men, women and children who don't have a place to call home in the Tampa Bay area.  The housing crisis is making it extremely difficult for people to find a place to live, but leaders with the city of Tampa and the Tampa Hope Catholic Charities are working to change that with more homeless shelters.

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This pandemic has been hell.

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Yep, this pandemic really has been something....

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This is a nice move for those people that who happen to be homeless.

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This is a complicated problem.  But it is solvable with dedication to understanding the cause.  It's different for everybody but the roots are the same.

It's unfortunately not a places to "throw" money at, without knowing what the goal is.

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One step that could lead to a more equitable solution in one-part to the housing crisis.

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But this is still a multifaceted problem as these tent community's are still growing.   From extreme poverty - drug use (for some people), mental health for others.

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The mayor, who made improving public safety a theme of his campaign, is dealing with the fallout from a high-profile death in Times Square.

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This is very nice.

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At least three unsheltered people attempting to stay warm during last week's frigid weather were injured from fires in Portland, Oregon.  

Organizers say they plan to open an emergency overnight shelter in Wyandotte County despite being told this week that the mayor would not allow it.