The sheer terror of what is happening around me has sent me into a state of panic, and I found myself still wide awake at 2.45 am. The cold wind blew all night. It would have been miserable at the best of times. This was not the best of times. I was so stressed I was physically shaking and didn't manage to fall asleep until after 5am.When I did wake up it was very late, after 8 am, and bitterly cold. My body hurt so much someone could have come in and beat me with a 2x4 and I would have felt better. My stomach was tied in knots. I felt so ill.
Follow @DeniseBundyI immediately phoned to see if I could get a t-shirt illustrator/artist without success. Perhaps she is on vacation.
I never read horoscopes, but in the middle of the night I started deleting junk e-mails and I just happened to see a horoscope for today.
You, of all people, know what to do with change -- and it's coming fast! You may find you're the best-equipped to deal with the shake-up that is starting to ripple through your workplace or neighborhood.More changes? Go ahead.. make my day. My ability to handle anything has been depleted. Homelessness and stress does that to you. *Sigh*
Before noon I managed to get hold of the artist friend and she ~ thank the Lord ~ agreed to do the artwork for the t-shirt. My head was literally swimming. Only enough funds to last a few more days, no income, an inevitable relocation and .. no home to go to. And still no responses to my ad or applications.
But by evening my artist friend had looked at the shirt and decided that I was plum nuts to even consider trying such a thing.
15 years ago this artists friend, an internationally renown artist, tried to convince me to learn how to mat and frame. She said that it was a viable home based income should the horse industry roll in a recession. Today I would be kicking myself, but you can't mat and frame as a home based business when you are homeless.
The cold wind decreased to a breeze instead of the violent winds during the night, but we expect it to increase again by nightfall. I was so cold all day. I was really cold. By mid afternoon it had dropped into the 40's with a 39% wind chill.Tonight Robert Huckins will go to a comfortable home.. on MY dime.
Tomorrow Robert Huckins will not worry about where he and Sylve will be sleeping tomorrow night.. because they are living on MY dime.
It is simply infuriating, and it's heartbreaking. This day has been so unproductive, and so depressing I have been reduced to tears all day long.
I am days away from reaching the 20,000th readership of this blog. I am days away from being closer to 60 years old. Yet I feel light years away from having a home. I have begged these people as I never thought I could beg anyone.. and still they smile and ignore my plea's. It is almost like I am not worthy of being regarded as a human being. There again, if they regarded people as human beings the money wouldn't have been stolen at all. Four years of this torture is criminal.
And still the recession is out to seek and destroy all in it's path.
Silicon Valley Homeless Feel The Grip Of Recession's Long Reach
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- The first time Michele arrived at the Maple Street homeless shelter three years ago, she was still driving her BMW 325xi, the final remnant of her Silicon Valley affluence.
Her paper wealth of more than $2 million had evaporated a decade earlier, she says, via a stock options fiasco. She had used the options to buy stock in her high-flying software startup, netting a seven-figure profit by the government's reckoning, but then held the shares until they were nearly worthless. That left her with no cash and a $200,000 tax bill. She had sold nearly everything to cover it: her house, her remaining stocks, her art collection.
Periods of joblessness, punctuated by depression and bouts with alcoholism filled out the ensuing years, with cause and effect blurring into a cohesive whole -- one life, unraveling.
She had used the shelter as a way station, finding a new job at another software company within two months and then moving into a rented apartment. But by last November, just before Thanksgiving, she was out of work again, broke again, and back at the shelter, again. This time, she arrived on foot, carrying a backpack that contained all she had left in the world: some clothes, about ten dollars in cash, her laptop computer and her mother's Omega watch.
She had spent the past four nights inside a Happy Donut, using free Wi-fi to watch "Top Chef" reruns on her laptop. Exhausted, dirty and devoid of a plan, she took refuge at the shelter for single adults, a low-slung building on a dead-end road in an industrial area, across the street from a tire recycling center and next to a prison.
Back when she was traveling regularly for business, she had favored suites at Four Seasons hotels. Now, she checked in to the Maple Street women's dorm, a brown-carpeted room jammed with five bunk beds. She slipped into a top bunk and absorbed the reality that it had come to this.
Her resume, with a degree in electrical engineering from Duke University and stints in senior positions at software companies, including a post in Paris, had once made her an exemplar of Silicon Valley success. A combination of personal troubles, long-term unemployment and bleak economic times had since turned her into an example of something else: the new suburban poor proliferating in nearly every American metropolitan area -- even here, within miles of the shimmering campuses of Google, Apple and other wellsprings of unfathomable wealth.
"It rips you to the core," says Michele, 49, who used to order room service and, on a recent evening, dined on sandwiches donated to the shelter by Google. (She asks that her full name not be disclosed, fearing embarrassment and the loss of job prospects.) "It's devastating to look at the money you had, the freedom that it gives, and to realize that it's gone. For me, money has always been about security, having control. Now, your whole life is out of control and everything is unknown. You're at other people's mercy and you feel useless. You're stuck. It just can be debilitating, if you really focus on that."
Though her plunge from executive-level wealth to street-level homelessness is extreme, it has become a not-unfamiliar story among case workers at the seven shelters and transitional housing facilities operated by Shelter Network here in San Mateo county, where the wait list for space is at an all-time high. Overall, the number of homeless people in San Mateo increased by 17 percent between 2009 and 2011, according to a recent county census.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/01/silicon-valley-poverty-homeless_n_1302348.html
Demographics of Homelessness Series: The Rising Elderly Population
There is some troubling evidence that homelessness is beginning to increase among elderly adults. In addition, there are demographic factors — such as the anticipated growth of the elderly population as baby boomers turn 65 years of age and recent reports of increases in the number of homeless adults ages 50 to 64—that suggest a dramatic increase in the elderly homeless population between 2010 and 2020. While the country’s changing demographics may make this finding unsurprising, it has serious implications for providers of homeless services and should be deeply troubling to the policymakers that aim to prevent poverty and homelessness among the elderly through local and federal social welfare programs.
This paper provides an assessment of the recent and projected changes in homelessness among the elderly and assesses the ability of public affordable housing programs to handle the projected growth in elderly persons at-risk of housing instability and homelessness.
Homelessness Among the Elderly
While there is a fair amount known about elders experiencing poverty and about the general homeless population, there is relatively little known about the elderly homeless population. There are some things, however, that we do know:
Incidence
The elderly population has historically been underrepresented among the homeless population. The limited national homelessness data that have been collected over the past two decades are consistent in revealing that homelessness is much more prevalent among younger adults than among older adults and the elderly. A 1996 national study by the Urban Institute found that, while those over age 55 represented 28 percent of the general adult population, they made up only 8 percent of the homeless population.
Changes
There is very limited national data on the changing demographics of the homeless population, but the data that do exist show that homelessness among the elderly and older adults is modestly increasing. HUD’s first Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress (AHAR), which covered a three-month period ending in April 2005, estimated that 2.4 percent of sheltered homeless adults were older than 62 years of age.3 HUD’s fourth AHAR, which covered the twelve-month period ending September 2008, showed that 2.8 percent of sheltered homeless adults were older than 62 years of age.4 To the extent that the two data points are comparable, they suggest very modestly increasing representation of the elderly among the homeless.
Demographic Changes Among the Elderly
There are two primary demographic factors that contribute to the projected increase in homelessness among the elderly. One is the overall growth in the elderly population, which is expected to more than double in size between now and 2050. The other factor is the relative stability in the proportion of the elderly population facing economic vulnerability. Together, these factors signal an increase in elder economic vulnerability and homelessness.
The Growing Elderly Population
There are more Americans over the age of 65 today than ever before and the number is rapidly increasing. During the past century, the number of elderly people has grown from 3.1 million in 1900 to 37 million in 2008—an increase of over 1,100 percent. The proportion of elderly Americans has also increased since 1900, when adults ages 65 and older made up only 4.1 percent of the population.9 Today, at 37 million, elderly Americans make up 12.6 percent of the population.
Economic Vulnerability among the Elderly
Poverty among elderly Americans has been relatively low since the 1960s. In 1959, the poverty rate for elder Americans was 35 percent. This fell to approximately 15 percent by 1975, due in large part to increases in government programs such as Social Security. Since that time, poverty rates among the elderly have steadily declined, remaining between 9 and 11 percent for the past decade. According to the 2008 American Community Survey, 9.9 percent of people over 65 years of age had annual incomes below the poverty threshold of $10,326 for a single person and $13,030 for a couple. A measure of even greater economic vulnerability is the proportion of elderly persons in deep poverty — earning only half of the poverty threshold. In 2008, there were over 969,925 elderly persons, or 2.6 percent of the elderly population, in deep poverty.
Projected Increase in Homelessness among Elderly
In the most recent AHAR, HUD estimates that there were 43,450 sheltered homeless people over the age of 62 in 2008. Because of anticipated increases in the elderly homeless population as the general population ages, a projection of the elderly homeless population is made in this paper. It is based on the following assumptions:
- The elderly population will increase as projected by the U.S. Census Bureau through 2050.
- The rate of deep poverty in the elderly population will remain constant at 2 percent through 2050, as it has remained since 1975.
- The 2008 ratio of 1 sheltered elderly homeless person to every 22 elderly persons in deep poverty remains constant thorough 2050.
- http://www.endhomelessness.org/content/article/detail/2698
There has to be someone related to Robert & Sylve Huckins must have some means to reach them, if it be Michael Huckins, Dr.Kenneth Ogilvie ( Diana Huckins? Dominic Huckins? Malcolm Huckins? ) or Patricia Ogilvie-Huckins and get them to return ALL of the money they stole from us so that I can buy a home and get our lives back. I am begging anyone in this family for help.I don't believe I have EVER witnessed any none violent crime that can be as devastating as stealing someone's home. I am walking in Dorothy McKeevers footsteps, day by day, month by month, year by year.
Liam Griffin, I sat in your law office with two witnesses as you gave me your promise, your guarantee, that our money would be returned before harm came to us.
Patricia Ogilvie-Huckins you were present the day I signed contract with your son. You walked out of the kitchen with Sylve Huckins and your son introduced me to you. He told you that I was the British horse trainer he had told you about, the one he was going to build the home and barn for. Why didn't you say something? There may be a rational and reasonable explanation but I have spent over 3 years, homeless, not understanding it. I understand it even less knowing that though I was a total stranger, both Dorothy McKeever and Sally Canning you KNEW, and you knew what your son had done to them and others.
Dr. Kenneth Ogilvie, I contacted you and simply asked for a reference, not knowing that Robert Huckins was your cousin. Robert Huckins had just stolen over $30,000 from the domestic violence shelter, HEAL, yet everyone was trying to hide it. There was a history of stealing large amounts of money. $65,000 PLUS from Nancy Canning. $89,000 PLUS from Dorothy McKeever, $45,000 from Francis McKinney. The list just goes on and on and on.
Because of Robert Huckins I ended up paying $140,000 to be homeless.. sat in the cold, emotionally, physically and financially broke. In the middle of a recession, with no way to recover the stolen funds.
Today Robert Huckins has his own home...
He also has OUR home.....
He also has a lot of people's money...
And his freedom.
Women are not banks or loan institutions. Women should not be the source of a retirement fund for people who don't want to do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. Holding women hostage while playing with the judicial system, a horrendous game of cat and mouse extending YEARS, with the victims whose very homes, families and stability are in jeopardy is cruelty, as cruel as a physical beating. It is financial and emotional RAPE. Homelessness is not justice. It is a slow, painful death.
Please, I beg with everything I have within me, please convince Robert Huckins to stop this torture and return the building fund he stole from us so we too, can have a home.
Relevant pages:
http://roberthuckinsvictim.
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http://roberthuckinsvictim.blogspot.com/2011/12/white-nothing-but-white.html
The difference between the successful and the unsuccessful is not the absence of obstacles, but the presence of perseverance. ~Chris Widener
