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03/10/2006:

"US has 727,304 homeless people nationwide: report"

Last year, the United States found 727,304 homeless people nationwide, meaning about one in every 400 Americans were without a home, according to the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2005 issued by the Information Office of China's State Council Thursday.

The figures came from The USA Today published on Oct. 12, 2005.
"The Los Angeles County has become 'the homeless capital of America,' with the average number of vagabonds or people in shelters hitting 90,000 a day, including 35,000 people chronically homeless," the report quotes an article of The Los Angeles Times on June 16, 2005 as saying.
"The United States dubs the world's richest country, however, it maintains the highest poverty rate among developed countries," the report says, given a study of eight advanced countries by London School of Economics in 2005, which found that the United States had the worst social inequality.

On the one hand, the report says, in recent years the fortunes of the rich have continued to rise in the United States. According to two new studies by Spectrem Group, a Chicago-based wealth-research firm, and the Boston Consulting Group, millionaire households (excluding the value of primary residences) in the United States controlled more than 11 trillion in assets in 2004, up more than 8 percent from 2003.
Meanwhile, the income of ordinary employees in the United States has seen a sharp decline, causing the increase of poor population. The data issued by the U.S. Census Bureau said that the nation's official poverty rate rose from 12.5 percent in 2003 to 12.7 percent in 2004, with the number of people in poverty rising by 1.1 million from 35.9 million to 37 million, which means one in every eight Americans live in poverty. Poverty rates in cities such as Detroit, Miami and Newark exceeded 28 percent.

These problems indicate that poverty, hunger and homelessness are quite serious in America, worker's economic, social and cultural rights are not guaranteed, the report says.
english.people.com.cn