Preventing Homelessness In America

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Pages: 3

About 600,000 people in America are experiencing homelessness. About 37% of those people are parents with their children. About 17% are veterans (Grant). Many more are people with disabilities who can’t pick themselves back up. They live on the streets, in shelters and sometimes tents. Homelessness has been a rising problem for the past thirty-five years. Despite this, attention to the issue has dropped. In this paper I will attempt to find what has been done to prevent homelessness and what actually works. A homeless person can typically fall under three categories, people without accommodation, people living in temporary or crisis accommodation (such as in camps, hostels or motels), or people living in severely substandard or highly insecure accommodation (which is harder to identify and often not included) (Busch). A term often used in the study of homelessness is ‘chronic homelessness.’ A chronically …show more content…
A disabling condition, in most cases, refers to a mental illness or substance abuse problems that limit the person’s ability to obtain a job and thus pay for a home. In 2005, about 23% of around 754,000 homeless in America were considered chronically homeless (Moulton). In 2015 the chronically homeless take up closer to 15% of our near 600,000 homeless people (Harvard). So, it is important to note that the majority of homeless are not considered chronically homeless and disabled. The category of homeless people also includes a large number of families,