Community Indicators for Your Community

Real, lasting community change is built around knowing where you are, where you want to be, and whether your efforts are making a difference. Indicators are a necessary ingredient for sustainable change. And the process of selecting community indicators -- who chooses, how they choose, what they choose -- is as important as the data you select.

This is an archive of thoughts I had about indicators and the community indicators movement. Some of the thinking is outdated, and many of the links may have broken over time.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Orange County Indicators and Homelessness

The 2008 Orange County Community Indicators (pdf) report has been released, and there's some interesting information in it. (I like the display titles at the top of each page/section -- great way to get to the point quickly!)

Here's an interesting update from the Poverty in the OC blog. Looking at the 2008 Orange County Community Indicators (pdf) report, Keith Giles writes:

Orange County is second only to Los Angeles for the largest number of homeless people in the State of California.

The difference is that homelessness in LA County is caused by drug addiction, mental illness or substance abuse related factors.

In Orange County, out of our 35,000 homeless, 80% of them were forced into this lifestyle because of the lack of affordable housing and rent controls.

Think about that. 80% of the people in Orange County who are currently homeless could be living in an apartment anywhere else in the Nation. It's only because of the cost of housing here that they remain homeless.

We make our own homeless.

This means we can also un-make them.

What follows is a further discussion of the data to make the point. Check it out!

2 comments:

  1. Guess you right seems to be a real hardwork, it's almost like to work on human resources, you need to make the best selection, not for the company in this, just for no lose your job haha
    Thanks for sharing, excellent post.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am homeless, i have worked for 39 years of my life and this was the last place i would be but this is reality wake up people and smell the coffee you my be one check away from being homeless act now Write letters to your local goverment 13.7 million dollars was given to community centers whom dont accept single men couples and have strict policies there should no person left behind !!!!!!!

    ReplyDelete