Some on Wall Street may be celebrating the Dow hitting a record high on Tuesday, but a new report says New York City now has a record 50,000 people a night sleeping in the city’s homeless shelters.
The Coalition for the Homeless says that, in January, an unprecedented 21,000 children–1% of the city’s youth–slept each night in a homeless shelter, a 22% increase over last year.
“New York is facing a homeless crisis worse than any time since the Great Depression,” says President of the Coalition for the Homeless Mary Brosnahan.
The report says homelessness among families is also on the rise. From 2011 to 2012, family homelessness increased 1.4% nationally. In Boston, family homelessness is up 7.8%. And in “boomtown” Washington, D.C., the nation’s richest city, the number of families without a home has skyrocketed 18%.
The report’s findings offer a stark contrast between the gains made on Wall Street from the Federal Reserve’s $2.5 trillion in so-called stimulus versus the harsh reality America’s jobless recovery.
Indeed, even as today’s Dow rally marks the third-best stock-market leap in the post-World War II era, Americans now find themselves struggling in the worst labor-market recovery since World War II.
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