To the Editor:

I am pleased with the attention you gave to the poor among us in your Sept. 5 article on homelessness.

A statement that I started the Ames homeless shelter should have stated that the shelter was started by a group, however.

I have been involved with the shelter the past eight of the shelter’s ten year’s of operation.

Also stated was that mental illness is the most common problem we see among our shelter’s homeless population.

This could be misleading without further elaboration.

While mental illness may be one of the most vexing problems we deal with at our shelter, we find that the mentally ill are a minority of the homeless population.

The most underlying problem is poverty, the inability to afford housing.

Another comment in the article concerned the concentration of wealth in our county.

While the figures I gave may be true for our county, the study upon which I based my comments was for the entire country.

This study merits further attention, I believe.

It was one of the most alarming things I have ever read. It is by Reo Christensen, a Political Science professor at Miami University in Ohio.

In 1990 there were approximately 100 million households in the United States.

Christensen found that one million of these households had average incomes of $549,000 a year, which yielded a combined income equal to that of the lower 40 percent or 40 million households in our nation.

This was most disturbing because the concentration of wealth had doubled from ten years earlier when the bottom 40% had roughly double the income of the top one percent.

It is the narrowing of the middle class, and the power such concentrated wealth has over the housing market and other areas that I fear the most.

Poverty among the working poor (a significant majority of all the poor) could be eliminated if we just had the will to do so.

Poverty’s faces — homelessness, hunger, the lack of medical care — would diminish if we so chose.

Our present tax system perpetuates the inequities. It results from the notion that wealth is due to one’s individual effort, which should not be penalized.

Ignored is the fact that it would not be possible to have wealth without living in society with all its interpendencies and that with priviledge should come responsibility.

A small part of the wealth in this country, still leaving incomes far in excess of any imaginable need, could do so much.

Making earned income credits, already a part of our tax structure, significant is one way many of the poor could be helped.

During the present presidential campaign it is unlikely that the responsibility of the wealthy, who wield so much power, will be an issue.

We can expect to hear a lot about the irresponsibility of the poor, however, while the most irresponisible sector in our society is ignored.

Vic Moss

Director

Emergency Residence Project