Bill Clinton: “I think there are two or three things we should do. And I asked her this question because over one-third of the homeless…”

“I think there are two or three things we should do. And I asked her this question because over one-third of the homeless people in America now are families with children. And a lot of them are people who moved from one town to another, and they have no savings; they have no money in the bank. I met a homeless couple in my hometown about a year ago. It was kind of like you. They had come down from Chicago. And they actually had jobs, but they hadn't drawn a paycheck yet and they had no place to live. So here are the things that we're going to try to do. First of all, we're going to try to build more housing for low-income working people. We haven't had much of a housing program for a long time. Secondly, I'm going to have an inventory done--an inventory means a list done--of all the housing in America which exists today that belongs to the Government which is boarded up or closed down, and see whether or not we can't give a lot of that housing back to churches or community groups or other groups and let people work on repairing it. And if they do work on repairing it, they should be able to live in it. I met a woman and her children in Philadelphia who were doing a lot of their own work on a home, an old home that had been boarded up. And they were going to get to move in it and live there because of the work they had done to do it. The third thing we have to do is to create more jobs because a lot of the homeless people wouldn't be homeless if they had jobs. Mr. Jennings. One of the things about all your answers, Mr. President--and I don't want to take time away from them--is that they all seem to be long-term. And Venus has a short-term problem, and Pernell has a short-term problem, and Shannon has a short-term problem.”