Homeless Headline

Every now and then, faced with copy that describes the undescribable, a hapless headline writer simply will give up and quote from some desperate remark in the body of the story. It happened today in the Miami Herald, with the following headline:

'This Is Really Depressing'Here's the intro:

The catastrophic collection of hurricanes that bullied the South over the last two seasons and rang up nearly $28 billion in damage threatens to create a new class of homeless -- a diaspora of already-struggling people who were displaced by the storm, then displaced in the effort to rebuild.

These are people made homeless by the madness of seven hurricanes in 15 months, people who had houses and apartments and condos before the first storm made landfall last August.

Faced with a punishing real estate market, the bulldozing of already-limited affordable housing and a complicated disaster-aid network that is overwhelmed by the massive scope of the storms, they may never return to a home. And about three weeks into rebuilding after Hurricane Wilma, South Florida becomes the newest region faced with the uncertainty of losing some of its poorest residents to homelessness.

''By the winter, we expect to see a new population of homeless. These are low-wage workers, the people who are suffering the most that somehow slip though the cracks,'' said Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. ``We are worried the numbers will grow.''

There's more. Individual stories of the working poor who are now but a step away from living in a cardboard box.

The newspaper is right: It's really depressing. Click the headline.