Homelessness

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Homelessness

        Things that humans want are unlimited, but the fundamental things that they need to live are undebatable. When the humans lose their rights to have decent life, this is undeniable problem. Food, drink, healthcare, clothes, and home are their basic rights that they should have. If some of them do not have one of these things, all humans should stop to look carefully and closely to this catastrophe. Unfortunately, this is what humans should solve because the number of people who do not have these basic rights to live has been increasing. For this reason, many researchers have done thousands of studies to figure out why people become homeless. Some of the main reasons of becoming homeless are poor economy, health problems, and social conditions.

        A poor economy is one of the most important reasons of homelessness. Minimum wages, cost of housing, unemployment rate, average temperature, mental health spending, and housing assistance provided play significant roles in homelessness rate (Braiterman, Jacobs, & Murray, 2017 P.3,4,6). For example, increasing the minimum wages seem to be effective solution to reduce homelessness rate, but that is not true. That leads to increase the homelessness rate because most of the companies reduce the number of job opportunity that they provide for young and low skills workers who are replaced by high skills workers and automations. When that happens, the number of jobs that family members have decreases which impacts the average income of this family. Consequently, this family becomes homeless because it is unable to pay the rent for its house (Braiterman, Jacobs, & Murray, 2017 P.12,13). Furthermore, approximately between $35,000 to $150,000 is what United States spends to take care of a homeless person. If the United States spends these moneys efficiently such as spending them to provide food and healthcare, increase funding for public workers, and build low cost housing, that will help homeless people to be independent, and will reduce the homelessness rates (Braiterman, Jacobs, & Murray, 2017 P.2).        Health problems such as mental illness is one of the most important reasons of becoming homeless. Between 20 to 25 percent of the homeless people in the United States are mentally ill, and their number is about three million people, and 36% of them have attend the collage (Sullivan, Burnam, Koegel, 2000 P.444,446). The reasons behind their mental issue are the problems that they have faced during their childhood. Sullivan, Burnam, & Koegel (2000) reported in their study that 40 percent of the homeless sample that they took have lived in the place where violence was constantly happening while 33 % of them were subjected to physical assault, and 5 % of them were sexually assaulted (P. 446, 448). More than 60% of mentally ill homeless became homeless at age 31 after they had had mental ill at age 19 while 35% of them had become homeless at age 20 before they became mental ill at age 28 (Sullivan, Burnam, Koegel, 2000 P.447).