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Here is a Web site that allows you to use the Thanksgiving calorie calculator to total your Thanksgiving-feast calories and see how far you must walk in steps or miles to walk it off. Check as many Thanksgiving dinner menu items as you wish.

I did the calculation for what I think I would eat, and it said it would have to walk 28 MILES. I am rethinking my strategy.

I'll bet gyms and health clubs will be busy this afternoon. 

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Katrina and Homelessness

 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced this week that it has extended its deadline for the termination of its hotel housing program for victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Across the country, the agency shifted the deadline from Dec. 1 to Dec. 15.

 

The FEMA Web site says:

To accommodate efforts to move all evacuees out of hotels and into apartments and longer-term homes, FEMA has extended the previously announced end of the federally-reimbursed hotel program which had been Dec. 1. With 29 states lodging fewer than 100 families each, the task of locating housing before the holidays is an attainable goal. For example, the state of New York is hosting 273 households, which means they need to place roughly 12 families a day in order to have everyone in homes by Dec. 15.

 

The 10 states with the highest concentration of evacuees in hotel rooms will have the ability to extend until Jan. 7 to help evacuees find longer-term housing on the condition that they provide FEMA with a plan to reach the Jan. 7 deadline. The 10 states eligible to request the additional extension are Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Texas. The request and transition plan must be submitted to FEMA for expedited review. More than 92 percent of the approximately 50,000 families still living in hotel rooms are located in these 10 states.

ReligionLink, a Web site from the Religion Newswriters Association, has an interesting take on homelessness and the holiday season. It may be a hook that can take the place of the tired "feeding the homeless for Thanksgiving" story that too many newsrooms turn to. It may be that your homeless population is about to grow, thanks to Hurricane Katrina.

Before the FEMA annoucement was made, ReligionLink said:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency recently announced that 150,000 people left homeless by Hurricane Katrina have until Dec. 1, [a deadline that has, since the publication of this article, been extended to Dec. 15,] to find housing other than government-subsidized apartments. Some will find other housing, but many may become homeless.

They join the estimated 800,000 Americans who are homeless on any given day. As many as 3.5 million people may be homeless at some point in a given year. The plight of Katrina's victims can help illuminate the plight of the increasing number of homeless people in America and myths about them. Many families are homeless for only a short time because of job loss or other circumstances, but studies show one episode of homelessness can have long-term negative consequences.

Consider profiling a family left homeless by Katrina, a family experiencing what will likely be short-term homelessness and another family experiencing long-term homelessness. Explore the reasons for their homelessness with the backdrop of being "home" for the holidays. Religious organizations are prime providers of food and shelter for the homeless; how are they responding to hurricane victims as well as other homeless?

• Homelessness and poverty are increasing in the United States, and most state budgets have experienced deep cuts in social services. Will this new homeless population stretch scarce resources even further?
• Read a Nov. 15, 2005, Washington Post story posted by StarTribune.com about FEMA's announcement that 150,000 Katrina evacuees could lose housing.
• Read a transcript of the Urban Institute's Oct. 4, 2005, panel on homelessness after Hurricane Katrina.
• Read "What will it take to end homelessness?" an Oct. 1, 2001, report from the Urban Institute that includes facts and causes of homelessness.
• More cities and states are enacting laws that target homeless people. Read "Illegal to be Homeless: The Criminalization of Homelessness in the United States," a November 2004 report by the National Coalition for the Homeless.
• Religious organizations are critical in providing shelter and food for the homeless in most cities. How are they responding to increased needs?
• The mission of the National Coalition for the Homeless is to end homelessness. It links to state and local organizations for the homeless.
• Read an August 2005 report from the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, which describes recent studies that found significant increases in requests for shelter and food assistance in states across the country.
• The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the U.S. poverty level rose to 12.7 percent in 2004 and the percentage of the U.S. population without health insurance stayed steady at 15.7 percent. Read the Aug. 30, 2005, news release.

Disaster News Network says the looming deadlines and the moves that follow will uproot more families, especially those with kids who have recently enrolled in new schools:

• Most people staying in hotels are in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and Mississippi.
• Evacuees in hotels in Louisiana and Mississippi have until Jan. 7 to vacate hotel rooms.
• Some 9,000 families remain in hotel rooms in Louisiana, with another 2,500 housed in hotels in Mississippi.
• In Texas, some 20,000 hotel rooms now house about 51,000 evacuees from hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
• Hurricane survivors in most states must leave by Jan. 7 but at least 3,500 families live in hotel rooms in states that have a Dec. 15 deadline. FEMA officials said they planned to deliver notices about the action directly to hotel dwellers this week.

After the ... deadlines, hurricane evacuees who aren't ready to leave hotels will have to pay the costs themselves -- either with FEMA rental housing aid or from their own funds.

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Credit-Card Use -- and Debt

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, here are new findings from "The Plastic Safety Net," a report from a survey conducted by Demos and the Center for Responsible Lending. (For information on the survey's methodology, see Page 6 of the PDF version of the report.)

Demos said:

The survey consisted of 1,150 phone interviews with low- and middle-income households whose incomes fell between 50 percent and 120 percent of local median income. In order to participate in the survey, a household had to have credit card debt for three months or longer at the time of the survey.

The Center for Responsible Lending pulled this data from survey results:

• $8,650 is the average credit card debt of a low- and middle-income indebted household in America.
• Fifty-nine percent of respondents were in credit debt for longer than one year.
• Seven out of 10 low- and middle-income households reported using their credit cards as a safety net -- relying on credit to pay for basic living expenses, medical expenses or essential repairs.
• One out of three households reported using credit cards to cover basic living expenses on average four out of the last 12 months; households that reported a recent job loss or unemployment, and those without health insurance in the last three years, were almost twice as likely to use credit cards for basic living expenses.
• 20 percent of survey homeowners paid off some credit card debt with a mortgage refinance in the last three years, reducing their home equity $12,000 on average. Further, these households still had average credit card debt over $14,000. As a result, they were carrying 18 percent more debt than homeowners who had refinanced a mortgage but not paid down credit card debt -- even though their incomes were almost identical. In other words, they were trading unsecured credit card debt for higher mortgage debt secured by their home.

Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible.

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