Is Homelessness Our “Malnutrition & Starvation” Applied to Housing?

Thom Hartmann
6 min readDec 22, 2022

As America’s housing & homelessness problems reach crisis levels — the housing equivalent of malnutrition & starvation — Sen. Merkley has submitted legislation to stop the corporate feeding frenzy…

Image by jorono from Pixabay

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This week’s brutal winter storm’s impact on homeless people across the nation — it will certainly kill many — reminds us how essential safe housing is for us human beings.

There are commodities and there are necessities. Sometimes, they’re the same. Food, for example, is both a commodity and a necessity.

Imagine, then, if a group of giant companies were to buy up a third of America’s food and then begin steeply raising its price. It would produce the same situation I’ve seen both war and drought create when I did international relief work in multiple third-world countries: hunger, malnutrition, and — among the poorest and least able to work — starvation.

Housing is only slightly less a necessity than food (it varies with climate) but the scenario I just described with that food metaphor is very much what is happening in America today. Homelessness, it turns out, is our “malnutrition and starvation”…

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Thom Hartmann

America’s #1 progressive talk show host & NY Times bestselling author. Thom’s writings also appear at HartmannReport.com.