Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives.

And I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. Today's program will cover a variety of things.

We're going to be talking about homelessness and the growing debts of American households,

how Washington is conducting economic warfare against China and the over two million Americans

who still live in homes without running water.

An extraordinary story.

And after that, we'll have an interview about the loneliness problem here in the United States

with Dr. Harriet Fraud.

So let's jump right in.

The New York City Committee to End Homelessness has issued a report, and the report was chaired by the public advocate, that's an elected

position in New York City, by the name of Jermaine Williams. And this report, a really good job, I might say, as a piece of

analytic writing, gives us some data about homelessness in New York that I think we all,

whether we're in New York or not, need to confront. As of December 2020, the latest date for the kind of comprehensive statistics that we need,

80,000 people were homeless in New York City alone.

That is the highest record of homelessness in the history of the city of New York.

Shelter in which many of these homeless folks live, public shelters were supposed to be temporary,

a way station to deal with the problem immediately, but on the way to a permanent solution.

The average time that a family, and many of the homeless are families, the average time now

spent by a family in the New York City shelter system is 500 days. In other words, better than a year and a half.

The key to solving this problem is, of course, to do what was originally intended,

namely to have the shelters be a temporary way station, but in order for that to happen, there have to be

permanent solutions. And I want to close with one comment on one statistic. In the year 2021,

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