essay about homelessness cause and effect

• Social Issues

Causes and Effects of Homelessness Essay Example

In this ever-changing world, homelessness is still a major problem that virtually every society suffers from, regardless of its prosperity and development. One way to mitigate the problem is to provide the homeless with shelters. This essay will attempt to discuss the causes and effects of homelessness before thoroughly outlining the solution.

There is a wide range of reasons that lead people to be homeless. First, the amount of affordable places to live and the cost of living is not proportional to the job opportunities or the pay of homeless people. Moreover, the number of people living on the street is far greater than the reasonably priced housing. Another factor that could lead a person to homelessness is personal hardship. It could be natural disasters, toxic relationships, losing a job or a person that their life depends on, etc. These result in their financial status changes. It is undeniable that being homeless has copious negative effects. People can suffer from awfully bad diseases or develop behavioral problems. 

One way to tackle the issue is for government to open more shelters and have people volunteer to work there. Shelters for the homeless should be able to give them a temporary place to live and help them find employment as well as provide them with treatment for their illnesses. By creating a safe accommodation, homeless people can not only have a better quality of life but can also have their mental condition improved. Furthermore, students and other people can engage in volunteering at these shelters and have themselves a certificate as well as gain experiences along with a better knowledge of the negative aspects of society.

To summarize, homelessness is a serious city’s problem that cannot be pinned down to one particular cause, but rather a mix of circumstances that are normally out of our control and can happen in an instant. The government and other people could help with enhancing their quality of life by the solution given above.

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5 Essays About Homelessness

Around the world, people experience homelessness. According to a 2005 survey by the United Nations, 1.6 billion people lack adequate housing. The causes vary depending on the place and person. Common reasons include a lack of affordable housing, poverty, a lack of mental health services, and more. Homelessness is rooted in systemic failures that fail to protect those who are most vulnerable. Here are five essays that shine a light on the issue of homelessness:

What Would ‘Housing as a Human Right’ Look Like in California? (2020) – Molly Solomon

For some time, activists and organizations have proclaimed that housing is a human right. This essay explores what that means and that it isn’t a new idea. Housing as a human right was part of federal policy following the Great Depression. In a 1944 speech introducing what he called the “Second Bill of Rights,” President Roosevelt attempted to address poverty and income equality. The right to have a “decent home” was included in his proposals. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration also recognizes housing as a human right. It describes the right to an “adequate standard of living.” Other countries such as France and Scotland include the right to housing in their constitutions. In the US, small local governments have adopted resolutions on housing. How would it work in California?

At KQED, Molly Solomon covers housing affordability. Her stories have aired on NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and other places. She’s won three national Edward R. Murrow awards.

“What People Get Wrong When They Try To End Homelessness” – James Abro

In his essay, James Abro explains what led up to six weeks of homelessness and his experiences helping people through social services. Following the death of his mother and eviction, Abro found himself unhoused. He describes himself as “fortunate” and feeling motivated to teach people how social services worked. However, he learned that his experience was somewhat unique. The system is complicated and those involved don’t understand homelessness. Abro believes investing in affordable housing is critical to truly ending homelessness.

James Abro is the founder of Advocate for Economic Fairness and 32 Beach Productions. He works as an advocate for homeless rights locally and nationally. Besides TalkPoverty, he contributes to Rebelle Society and is an active member of the New Jersey Coalition to End Homelessness.

“No Shelter For Some: Street-Sleepers” (2019)

This piece (by an unknown author) introduces the reader to homelessness in urban China. In the past decades, a person wouldn’t see many homeless people. This was because of strict rules on internal migration and government-supplied housing. Now, the rules have changed. People from rural areas can travel more and most urban housing is privatized. People who are homeless – known as “street-sleepers” are more visible. This essay is a good summary of the system (which includes a shift from police management of homelessness to the Ministry of Civil Affairs) and how street-sleepers are treated.

“A Window Onto An American Nightmare” (2020) – Nathan Heller

This essay from the New Yorker focuses on San Francisco’s history with homelessness, the issue’s complexities, and various efforts to address it. It also touches on how the pandemic has affected homelessness. One of the most intriguing parts of this essay is Heller’s description of becoming homeless. He says people “slide” into it, as opposed to plunging. As an example, someone could be staying with friends while looking for a job, but then the friends decide to stop helping. Maybe someone is jumping in and out of Airbnbs, looking for an apartment. Heller’s point is that the line between only needing a place to stay for a night or two and true “homelessness” is very thin.

Nathan Heller joined the New Yorker’s writing staff in 2013. He writes about technology, higher education, the Bay Area, socioeconomics, and more. He’s also a contributing editor at Vogue, a former columnist for Slate, and contributor to other publications.

“Homelessness in Ireland is at crisis point, and the vitriol shown towards homeless people is just as shocking” (2020)#- Megan Nolan

In Ireland, the housing crisis has been a big issue for years. Recently, it’s come to a head in part due to a few high-profile incidents, such as the death of a young woman in emergency accommodation. The number of children experiencing homelessness (around 4,000) has also shone a light on the severity of the issue. In this essay, Megan Nolan explores homelessness in Ireland as well as the contempt that society has for those who are unhoused.

Megan Nolan writes a column for the New Statesman. She also writes essays, criticism, and fiction. She’s from Ireland but based in London.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

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Why it’s so hard to end homelessness in america.

City of Boston workers clear encampments in the area known as Mass and Cass.

Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Alvin Powell

Harvard Staff Writer

Experts cite complexity of problem, which is rooted in poverty, lack of affordable housing but includes medical, psychiatric, substance-use issues

It took seven years for Abigail Judge to see what success looked like for one Boston homeless woman.

The woman had been sex trafficked since she was young, was a drug user, and had been abused, neglected, or exploited in just about every relationship she’d had. If Judge was going to help her, trust had to come first. Everything else — recovery, healing, employment, rejoining society’s mainstream — might be impossible without it. That meant patience despite the daily urgency of the woman’s situation.

“It’s nonlinear. She gets better, stops, gets re-engaged with the trafficker and pulled back into the lifestyle. She does time because she was literally holding the bag of fentanyl for these guys,” said Judge, a psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School whose outreach program, Boston Human Exploitation and Sex Trafficking (HEAT), is supported by Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston Police Department. “This is someone who’d been initially trafficked as a kid and when I met her was 23 or 24. She turned 30 last year, and now she’s housed, she’s abstinent, she’s on suboxone. And she’s super involved in her community.”

It’s a success story, but one that illustrates some of the difficulties of finding solutions to the nation’s homeless problem. And it’s not a small problem. A  December 2023 report  by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said 653,104 Americans experienced homelessness, tallied on a single night in January last year. That figure was the highest since HUD began reporting on the issue to Congress in 2007 .

Abigail Judge of the Medical School (from left) and Sandra Andrade of Massachusetts General Hospital run the outreach program Boston HEAT (Human Exploitation and Sex Trafficking).

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Scholars, healthcare workers, and homeless advocates agree that two major contributing factors are poverty and a lack of affordable housing, both stubbornly intractable societal challenges. But they add that hard-to-treat psychiatric issues and substance-use disorders also often underlie chronic homelessness. All of which explains why those who work with the unhoused refer to what they do as “the long game,” “the long walk,” or “the five-year-plan” as they seek to address the traumas underlying life on the street.

“As a society, we’re looking for a quick fix, but there’s no quick fix for this,” said Stephen Wood, a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics and a nurse practitioner in the emergency room at Carney Hospital in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. “It takes a lot of time to fix this. There will be relapses; there’ll be problems. It requires an interdisciplinary effort for success.”

A recent study of 60,000 homeless people in Boston found the average age of death was decades earlier than the nation’s 2017 life expectancy of 78.8 years.

Illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Katherine Koh, an assistant professor of psychiatry at HMS and psychiatrist at MGH on the street team for Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, traced the rise of homelessness in recent decades to a combination of factors, including funding cuts for community-based care, affordable housing, and social services in the 1980s as well as deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals.

“Though we have grown anesthetized to seeing people living on the street in the U.S., homelessness is not inevitable,” said Koh, who sees patients where they feel most comfortable — on the street, in church basements, public libraries. “For most of U.S. history, it has not been nearly as visible as it is now. There are a number of countries with more robust social services but similar prevalence of mental illness, for example, where homelessness rates are significantly lower. We do not have to accept current rates of homelessness as the way it has to be.”

“As a society, we’re looking for a quick fix, but there’s no quick fix for this.” Stephen Wood, visiting fellow, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics

Success stories exist and illustrate that strong leadership, multidisciplinary collaboration, and adequate resources can significantly reduce the problem. Prevention, meanwhile, in the form of interventions focused on transition periods like military discharge, aging out of foster care, and release from prison, has the potential to vastly reduce the numbers of the newly homeless.

Recognition is also growing — at Harvard and elsewhere — that homelessness is not merely a byproduct of other issues, like drug use or high housing costs, but is itself one of the most difficult problems facing the nation’s cities. Experts say that means interventions have to be multidisciplinary yet focused on the problem; funding for research has to rise; and education of the next generation of leaders on the issue must improve.

“This is an extremely complex problem that is really the physical and most visible embodiment of a lot of the public health challenges that have been happening in this country,” said Carmel Shachar, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation. “The public health infrastructure has always been the poor Cinderella, compared to the healthcare system, in terms of funding. We need increased investment in public health services, in the public health workforce, such that, for people who are unhoused, are unsheltered, who are struggling with substance use, we have a meaningful answer for them.”

“You can either be admitted to a hospital with a substance-use disorder, or you can be admitted with a psychiatric disorder, but very, very rarely will you be admitted to what’s called a dual-diagnosis bed,” said Wood, a nurse practitioner in the emergency room at Carney Hospital.

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Experts say that the nation’s unhoused population not only experiences poverty and exposure to the elements, but also suffers from a lack of basic health care, and so tend to get hit earlier and harder than the general population by various ills — from the flu to opioid dependency to COVID-19.

A recent study of 60,000 homeless people in Boston recorded 7,130 deaths over the 14-year study period. The average age of death was 53.7, decades earlier than the nation’s 2017 life expectancy of 78.8 years. The leading cause of death was drug overdose, which increased 9.35 percent annually, reflecting the track of the nation’s opioid epidemic, though rising more quickly than in the general population.

A closer look at the data shows that impacts vary depending on age, sex, race, and ethnicity. All-cause mortality was highest among white men, age 65 to 79, while suicide was a particular problem among the young. HIV infection and homicide, meanwhile, disproportionately affected Black and Latinx individuals. Together, those results highlight the importance of tailoring interventions to background and circumstances, according to Danielle Fine, instructor in medicine at HMS and MGH and an author of two analyses of the study’s data.

“The takeaway is that the mortality gap between the homeless population and the general population is widening over time,” Fine said. “And this is likely driven in part by a disproportionate number of drug-related overdose deaths in the homeless population compared to the general population.”

Inadequate supplies of housing

Though homelessness has roots in poverty and a lack of affordable housing, it also can be traced to early life issues, Koh said. The journey to the streets often starts in childhood, when neglect and abuse leave their marks, interfering with education, acquisition of work skills, and the ability to maintain healthy relationships.

“A major unaddressed pathway to homelessness, from my vantage point, is childhood trauma. It can ravage people’s lives and minds, until old age,” Koh said. “For example, some of my patients in their 70s still talk about the trauma that their parents inflicted on them. The lack of affordable housing is a key factor, though there are other drivers of homelessness we must also tackle.”

The number was the highest since the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began reporting on the issue to Congress in 2007 .

Most advocates embrace a “housing first” approach, prioritizing it as a first step to obtaining other vital services. But they say the type of housing also matters. Temporary shelters are a key part of the response, but many of the unhoused avoid them because of fears of theft, assault, and sexual assault. Instead, long-term beds, including those designated for people struggling with substance use and mental health issues, are needed.

“You can either be admitted to a hospital with a substance-use disorder, or you can be admitted with a psychiatric disorder, but very, very rarely will you be admitted to what’s called a dual-diagnosis bed,” said Petrie-Flom’s Wood. “The data is pretty solid on this issue: If you have a substance-use disorder there’s likely some underlying, severe trauma. Yet, when we go to treat them, we address one but not the other. You’re never going to find success in the system that we currently have if you don’t recognize that dual diagnosis.”

Services offered to those in housing should avoid what Koh describes as a “one-size-fits-none” approach. Some might need monthly visits from a caseworker to ensure they’re getting the support they need, she said. But others struggle once off the streets. They need weekly — even daily — support from counselors, caseworkers, and other service providers.

“I have seen, sadly, people who get housed and move very quickly back out on the streets or, even more tragically, lose their life from an unwitnessed overdose in housing,” Koh said. “There’s a community that’s formed on the street so if you overdose, somebody can give you Narcan or call 911. If you don’t have the safety of peers around, people can die. We had a patient who literally died just a few days after being housed, from an overdose. We really cannot just house people and expect their problems to be solved. We need to continue to provide the best care we can to help people succeed once in housing.”

“We really cannot just house people and expect their problems to be solved.”  Katherine Koh, Mass. General psychiatrist

Koh works on the street team for Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program.

Photo by Dylan Goodman

The nation’s failure to address the causes of homelessness has led to the rise of informal encampments from Portland, Maine, to the large cities of the West Coast. In Boston, an informal settlement of tents and tarps near the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard was a point of controversy before it was cleared in November.

In the aftermath, more than 100 former “Mass and Cass” residents have been moved into housing, according to media reports. But experts were cautious in their assessment of the city’s plans. They gave positive marks for features such as a guaranteed place to sleep, “low threshold” shelters that don’t require sobriety, and increased outreach to connect people with services. But they also said it’s clear that unintended consequences have arisen. and the city’s homelessness problem is far from solved.

Examples abound. Judge, who leads Boston HEAT in collaboration with Sandra Andrade of MGH, said that a woman she’d been working with for two years, who had been making positive strides despite fragile health, ongoing sexual exploitation, and severe substance use disorder, disappeared after Mass and Cass was cleared.

Mike Jellison, a peer counselor who works on Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program’s street team, said dismantling the encampment dispersed people around the city and set his team scrambling to find and reconnect people who had been receiving medical care with providers. It’s also clear, he said, that Boston Police are taking a hard line to prevent new encampments from popping up in other neighborhoods, quickly clearing tents and other structures.

“We were out there Wednesday morning on our usual route in Charlesgate,” Jellison said in early December. “And there was a really young couple who had all their stuff packed. And [the police] just told them, ‘You’ve got to leave, you can’t stay here.’ She was crying, ‘Where am I going to go?’ This was a couple who works; they’re employed and work out of a tent. It was like 20 degrees out there. It was heartbreaking.”

Prevention as cure?

Successes in reducing homelessness in the U.S. are scarce, but not unknown. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, has reduced veteran homelessness nationally by more than 50 percent since 2010.

Experts point out, however, that the agency has advantages in dealing with the problem. It is a single, nationwide, administrative entity so medical records follow patients when they move, offering continuity of care often absent for those without insurance or dealing with multiple private providers. Another advantage is that the VA’s push, begun during the Obama administration, benefited from both political will on the part of the White House and Congress and received support and resources from other federal agencies.

The city of Houston is another example. In 2011, Houston had the nation’s fifth-largest homeless population. Then-Mayor Annise Parker began a program that coordinated 100 regional nonprofits to provide needed services and boost the construction of low-cost housing in the relatively inexpensive Houston market.

Neither the VA nor Houston was able to eliminate homelessness, however.

To Koh, that highlights the importance of prevention. In 2022, she published research in which she and a team used an artificial-intelligence-driven model to identify those who could benefit from early intervention before they wound up on the streets. The researchers examined a group of U.S. service members and found that self-reported histories of depression, trauma due to a loved one’s murder, and post-traumatic stress disorder were the three strongest predictors of homelessness after discharge.

In April 2023, Koh, with co-author Benjamin Land Gorman, suggested in the Journal of the American Medical Association that using “Critical Time Intervention,” where help is focused on key transitions, such as military discharge or release from prison or the hospital, has the potential to head off homelessness.

“So much of the clinical research and policy focus is on housing those who are already homeless,” Koh said. “But even if we were to house everybody who’s homeless today, there are many more people coming down the line. We need sustainable policies that address these upstream determinants of homelessness, in order to truly solve this problem.”

The education imperative

Despite the obvious presence of people living and sleeping on city sidewalks, the topic of homelessness has been largely absent from the nation’s colleges and universities. Howard Koh, former Massachusetts commissioner of public health and former U.S. assistant secretary for Health and Human Services, is working to change that.

In 2019, Koh, who is also the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of the Practice of Public Health Leadership, founded the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health’s pilot Initiative on Health and Homelessness. The program seeks to educate tomorrow’s leaders about homelessness and support research and interdisciplinary collaboration to create new knowledge on the topic. The Chan School’s course “Homelessness and Health: Lessons from Health Care, Public Health, and Research” is one of just a handful focused on homelessness offered by schools of public health nationwide.

“The topic remains an orphan,” said Koh. The national public health leader (who also happens to be Katherine’s father) traced his interest in the topic to a bitter winter while he was Massachusetts public health commissioner when 13 homeless people froze to death on Boston’s streets. “I’ve been haunted by this issue for several decades as a public health professional. We now want to motivate courageous and compassionate young leaders to step up and address the crisis, educate students, motivate researchers, and better inform policymakers about evidence-based studies. We want every student who walks through Harvard Yard and sees vulnerable people lying in Harvard Square to not accept their suffering as normal.”

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Causes and Effects of Homelessness, Essay Example

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No subject as broad and socially meaningful as homelessness may be successfully addressed briefly, but a few basic components of the issue stand out as essentially worthy of analysis. Not unexpectedly, cause and effect play into each other within these elements.

The most evident cause of homelessness is unemployment, and the recent economic crises within the United States have only served to underscore this connection. Homelessness first began to command wide interest in the US in the 1980’s, yet the circumstances of it have altered. Despite shifting unemployment rates, standards of living for even low-income families or individual were typically better in the 1970’s because housing was more affordable. Thus the extreme rise in housing prices of the 1980’s and 1990’s, coupled with the recent and massive job market losses, combined to create an exponential boom in American homelessness: “Because the poor of 2008 were poorer than the poor of the early 1970’s and the real cost of housing was higher, there was a growing population that was vulnerable to homelessness” (Gilbert 216).

Similarly, the dissolution of many higher-paying, “career” jobs brought about a completely unanticipated development, in that homelessness was no longer the province of the traditionally poor. The homes being foreclosed upon were affluent dwellings and the people forced out of them were and are utterly unfamiliar with the basic survival techniques long known to those with experience in poverty. As this includes knowledge of how and where to seek assistance when homelessness is imminent, that population on the streets expanded when, in many cases, alternatives could have been exercised.

With this unemployment factor do we see the cycle of cause and effect. The individual without the job and incomes is deprived of shelter. They seek to regain employment but find that the homelessness is a potent detriment in finding work because of the attached stigma, and only the lowest paying jobs are available. Unable to accumulate sufficient housing money, then, even the employed homeless person is often trapped by these circumstances.

There is no social dysfunction which does not impact and/or fuel homelessness, and  one important cause and consequent effect of it lies within the nature of traditional homes to begin with. As women are increasingly encouraged to abandon domestic situations wherein they are abused, they typically have no recourse except that of the shelter. Motivated, and correctly so, to protect themselves from danger, they nonetheless are reduced to another state of extreme vulnerability. “According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, approximately half of all women and children experiencing homelessness are fleeing domestic violence” (Bringle 8).

This is a scenario of homelessness frequently self-perpetuating, for it incorporates factors beyond that of relatively simple unemployment issues. In cases of abused women being homeless, a host of further dilemmas must be confronted. Such women are dealing with the multiple issues of psychological and physical abuse, feelings of utter displacement, and are typically not equipped to even enter the job market. The cause in this situation creates the ongoing effect because the variety of problems leading to the homeless state are complex and not easily or quickly dealt with.

So too are addiction and alcoholism common reasons for homelessness and effects of it simultaneously. The addict who loses his job and subsequently his home obviously does not merely have a housing problem, and temporary shelter will do nothing to remedy the issue which will most certainly render him homeless again. In this cycle of uncertainty and despair, the addiction usually thrives.

This serves to illustrate, as do the other scenarios behind the homeless state, why there can be no real and effective analysis of homelessness as a condition unto itself. It is, always, a result of other social and/or personal conditions.  A substantive means of responsibly addressing homelessness can only be achieved through treating with its sources, as homelessness is intrinsically both cause and effect of the actual symptom that it is.

Works Cited

Bringle, J. Homelessness in America Today. New York, NY: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2010. Print.

Gilbert, D. The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2010. Print.

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Homelessness: cause and effects

Juan j. canoso.

1 American British Cowdray Medical Center, Mexico City, Mexico

2 Division of Rheumatology, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA USA

Associated Data

Not applicable.

In today’s world, wealth accumulates in ever fewer hands. People who live at the margin of the socioeconomic system and are infirm are most prone to become homeless. Many medical and psychiatric problems beset this population. Among them, rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases are, at the same time, illnesses and barriers to care. Healthcare innovations may decrease the lot of these unfortunate. To correct the root of the problem, we should also set our moral compass to a more egalitarian society.

We are living sad times. The COVID-19 slow-brewing, lethal pandemics, has no end in sight. Simultaneously, solidarity, which is inherent to most living species, seems to be on the way out from Homo sapiens . Values, understanding, and tolerance are being replaced by an insatiable need for material success, covering up remorse with the idea that, by overflow, some spare change will filter down into the rest of society. However, material success does not trickle down. On the contrary, it works as a suction pump.

In today’s world, wealth tends to accumulate in ever fewer, ever more predatory, and ever more resourceful hands, both at the global and individual levels [ 1 , 2 ]. The blanket is continuously being pulled away from those at the margins. Therefore, it is not surprising that despair, anxiety, depression, layoffs, and evictions have escalated over the past two decades, irrespective of medical and psychiatric ailments, in the dispossessed. Of course, malnutrition, mental disability, alcoholism, drug addiction, tuberculosis, HIV, and now COVID-19 are most prevalent among the homeless, who are the weakest of our brethren. Some degree of anesthesia may make their jump to the open space less painful. Street, crevices, parks, and enclosed public areas in cold weather are the only welcoming place for those expelled. There are also shelters that often homeless avoid for fear of violence and acquiring a disease.

There is a difference between the cause and the symptoms of homelessness. In 1993 [ 3 ], Mathieu commented that changes in the global economy, namely, deindustrialization in the 1980s, led to discontinuing federal programs, which resulted in the increment of homeless of which only a minority were mentally disabled. To reiterate, mental disease, etc. are not the etiology of homelessness. They are symptoms of the shameful social system we live in today. These conditions have been named diseases of poverty, in which “the most elementary requirements for health are that people must have enough to eat and they must not be poisoned”; “poverty is not a direct cause of disease, but it is the main determinant of influences that lead to disease” [ 4 ]. We are at the crest of an oscillation of history that could indistinctly be called: greed crest, poverty crest, or homelessness crest.

Dr. Richard Panush and his team [ 5 ], as expected from their profound humanity, social concern, and enlightenment, once again touched my heart and made me think with an essay on rheumatic and musculoskeletal disease care for the homeless. The clinical vignette that opens the discussion describes Mr. C, a homeless man with severe, active rheumatoid arthritis who uses a wheelchair and is out of medications. He was admitted to the hospital for parenteral corticosteroids and methotrexate, physical therapy, and occupational therapy. He improved remarkably to the point of discharge, leaving everyone wonder about his fate. Almost 2 years later, Mr. C returned to the clinic. He arrived with his wife and was no longer using a wheelchair. His rheumatoid arthritis was expertly treated in another clinic and lived in subsidized housing. This story has much to teach from a medical viewpoint, but it teaches more from a social perspective. Medically, his admission to the hospital was probably life-saving. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with fewer barriers, with some frequency, we admitted to the hospital rheumatoid arthritis patients for a “tune-up” with the limited available medications and working closely with a dedicated support team. In Mr. C’s case, his improvement initiated a virtuous cycle that moved him from the street to public housing, where he found his home. Of course, this happy ending occurs in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Mr. C’s clinical vignette leads the authors to review the health issues that beset the homeless. Shockingly, their life expectancy is almost halved. Homeless people are not spared from conditions such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, polymyalgia rheumatica, systemic lupus erythematosus, plus the miscellany of less common ailments that rheumatologists treat. Given the street situation, diagnosis may be late or never done, and treatment may lack supervision, leading to worse outcomes. The small case-controlled study that follows, centered on rheumatoid arthritis, is revealing. As compared with non-homeless patients, fewer homeless patients kept appointments, fewer had controlled disease, fewer took disease-modifying medications, and almost half were on corticosteroids vs. none of the non-homeless. Based on these data and the literature, Dr. Panush and co-workers make a series of innovative recommendations, particularly developing a rheumatology-aware clinical track devoted to homeless patients’ care.

Lucky of Mr. C that lives in an affluent society! In 2018, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, or CEPAL) in Mexico, 41.5 and 10.6% out of 127.6 million people lived in poverty and extreme poverty, respectively; in Brazil, 19.4%and 5.4% out of 211.0 million people, and in Argentina 24.4 and 3.3% out of 45.0 million people, respectively [ 6 ]. Add to this the migrants that flow north from Mexico and Central America. Although not technically homeless, as most of them have their modest home in their countries, perhaps never to see it again, they live homelessly. The crowds at southern Mexico that limit with Guatemala and on the Mexican side of the USA-Mexican border are egregious local versions of migrants’ overflow everywhere that extreme poverty causes.

I believe that Dr. Panush and co-workers’ thesis of mitigating homelessness, and the thesis that I espouse, that its cause must be defused, are not mutually exclusive. Their view is realistic, and mine is ideal and perhaps unattainable. But we could not cure tuberculosis with pneumothoraxes, Lucite balls, and sun and clean air. Ultimately, we needed streptomycin.

Acknowledgments

When Dr. Carlos Pineda invited me to write this Editorial, I felt at a loss because the subject was out of my field. However, having lived for prolonged periods in Argentina, Uruguay, the USA, and Mexico, I hazily perceived that today’s socio-economic order was the ultimate cause, or etiology, of homelessness. Thus, I asked Dr. Hernán E. Gómez, Professor of Anthropology, DCAS, ITR at the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to help me in this task. He felt that his input was not sufficient to share the authorship, and I respected his decision. I much appreciate his generous help.

Authors’ contributions

Data availability, compliance with ethical standards.

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Criminalizing Homelessness Won’t Make It Go Away

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By Mark Horvath ,  Adam Westbrook and Lindsay Crouse

Mr. Horvath started the YouTube channel Invisible People. Mr. Westbrook is a producer and editor with Opinion Video. Ms. Crouse is a producer with Opinion Video.

If you live in one of America’s cities, you probably see homeless people all the time. You might pass them on your way to work. Maybe you avoid eye contact. If they ask you for money, maybe you pretend you didn’t hear, and walk on by.

But what if you stopped and listened to what they have to say?

As you’ll see in the Opinion video above, you might find their stories of landing on the streets strikingly relatable. Such accounts reveal a hard truth about our country: Amid an affordable housing crisis, where 70 percent of all extremely low-income families today pay more than half their income on rent, becoming homeless is easier than we’d like to think.

That’s what Mark Horvath discovered firsthand in 1995, when he lost his job and wound up homeless for eight years. He started interviewing people on the street in 2008, and began sharing those stories on his YouTube channel, Invisible People . He wanted to try to help viewers who might ignore their homeless neighbors see them not with scorn, or indifference, but empathy.

These stories are even more important today, as a record number of people experience homelessness and face increasing threats from the law. On April 22, the Supreme Court is set to hear the case of Johnson v. Grants Pass, the most significant case in decades about homeless people’s rights. The case will determine whether cities can arrest or fine the homeless — even if there’s no other shelter. As the homeless plaintiffs wrote, this would be “punishing the city’s involuntarily homeless residents for their existence.”

Every homeless person’s path is complicated, and in this video, we haven’t remotely captured anyone’s whole story. Yes, some are addicts, some are mentally ill, some have made unwise choices, and some are simply unlucky. Some are many of those things. But all of them argue that in the hardest moment of their lives, they have been largely abandoned, and even punished, by the rest of us. So we hope you’ll do more than dismiss, or judge, the people in this video, and instead listen to them.

Mark Horvath is the creator behind the Invisible People YouTube channel. Lindsay Crouse ( @lindsaycrouse ) is a writer and producer in Opinion. Adam Westbrook is a producer and editor with Opinion Video.

Opinion Video combines original reporting with creative storytelling to produce visually transformative commentary. Pitch a video Guest Essay here.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Homeless Veterans Causes and Effects Essay

Today, there are significant numbers of veterans who are homeless in the United States. The National Coalition for the Homeless estimates that homeless veterans are between “130,000 and 200,000 on any given night, which represent between one-fourth and one-fifth of all homeless people” (National Coalition for the Homeless 1). Also, many veterans still struggle with high rates of rents. This situation increases veterans’ risks of becoming homeless.

Further, there might be possible concerns for veterans in other related areas. For instance, women veterans, veterans with disabilities, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and traumatic brain injuries face high risks of becoming homeless in the future. It is important to note that many veterans from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan already indicate such symptoms (National Coalition for the Homeless 1).

At any given night, over 131,000 veterans are homeless while a significantly higher number may experience homelessness within the year (National Coalition for the Homeless 1). There is at least one homeless veteran among three homeless persons. In short, nearly 40 percent of homeless people are veterans.

However, this figure fluctuates as different organizations provide different figures. Overall, the fact remains that the number of veterans is on the increase, and it is imperative to understand how heroic, daring, strong soldiers slip into retirement of homelessness. Therefore, this essay explores the underlying causes of homelessness among veterans.

Veterans have to endure adverse impacts of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In some cases, they may experience traumatic brain injuries alongside sexual trauma. War experiences drive veterans to lives of exclusion and isolation.

Consequently, they are prone to outdoor and unsheltered lives. The drive to live outdoor lives could result in long-term, chronic homelessness among many veterans (Leatham 1). In addition to stress disorders and brain injuries, many veterans could also experience other mental conditions. Mental problems are partially responsible for homelessness among many veterans.

In some cases, the need for seclusion may drive veterans away from home or any support. This results from traumatic war experiences. Also, veterans may fail to get any support from psychologists. Such mental conditions may also result in joblessness among veterans with the outcome of homelessness.

A closely related risk to mental condition is substance abuse among veterans. The National Health Care for the Homeless Council notes that several veterans struggle with challenges of substance abuse and alcoholism. Such problems are common during and after the periods in the military service.

Studies conducted by various organizations among veterans have shown that substance abuse was a major risk factor for homelessness (Copeland and Zoroya 1). Substance abuse challenges have facilitated veterans’ risks of becoming homeless because many veterans would like to remain secluded when struggling with substance abuse challenges.

Consequently, they end up in the streets. While there are homeless veterans who have found shelters in rescue agencies, their problems are complicated because of chronic drug and alcohol abuse (Copeland and Zoroya 1). Still, homeless veterans who are still on the streets present the toughest challenges because they might have multiple related issues, including substance abuse, chronic diseases, alcoholism, schizophrenia, and other related behavioral challenges.

On the same note, women veterans are at high risks of becoming homeless because of co-occurring disorder associated with negative life outcomes (Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration 1). According to SAMHSA (Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration), women veterans’ rate of becoming homeless is four times higher than other non-veteran populations (Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration 1).

Whereas many services target male veterans, homeless women veterans have received limited support. They also experience high risks of exposure to homelessness because of rampant drug abuse and lack of medical support. Further, economic burdens related to child support, legal issues, fines, and warrants could force them into homelessness.

Veterans could also lack long-term permanent housing solutions and family support. One must recognize that as the number of US soldiers increases with both genders, veterans will consist of a significant number of homeless populations, particularly after wars. Also, co-occurring disorder and inadequate medical attentions could further complicate the problems.

Backlogged disability claims have also contributed to homelessness among veterans (Kuykendall 1). The inability of the Department of Veterans Affairs to fast track compensation and funding for disabled veterans is linked to homelessness among many veterans. Disabled veterans wait for a long period to receive their disability benefits. One must recognize that many disabled veterans may not find employment or have homes after the war. Consequently, they end up in the streets as homeless individuals.

When veterans return from war zones, they encounter bureaucracy and lengthy procedures, which result in delays when processing their disability claims with Veterans Affairs. After the submission, the process should take 125 days, but this may fail, and the claim becomes backlogged (Kuykendall 1). Backlogged claims could result from poor funding.

Therefore, additional funding could prevent homelessness among veterans, particularly among young soldiers who are still at wars. Increased funding could eliminate challenges that Vietnam War veterans experienced. Failure to target Veterans when they returned from wars because of inadequate funding could have contributed to their homelessness status.

Finally, a possible cause of homelessness among veterans could be the poor economy. In most cases, veterans are mainly high school graduates. In this context, they did not join colleges to acquire skills to use after their military services. Consequently, veterans are not able to get employment or engage in self-employment. The situation has deteriorated with the poor economic growth in the US. Moreover, veterans with co-occurring conditions may experience severe economic impacts, which could force them to homelessness.

One must recognize that it is difficult to identify specific causes of homelessness among veterans. In this sense, this essay has highlighted possible, specific risk factors that are linked to homelessness among veterans in the US. By understanding risks factors associated with homelessness, intervention programs could offer effective services and support, which veterans require to avoid homelessness.

Overall, the most effective interventions would be to target veterans before they slip into homelessness. Alternative intervention programs should target veterans when they are at high risks of becoming homeless, rather than when they are already homeless and experiencing multiple challenges.

In conclusion, the essay has covered several risk factors related to homelessness among veterans, which include alcohol and substance abuse, poor economy, backlogged disability claims and adverse impacts of post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, sexual trauma, and other mental conditions.

Several studies have supported these risks factor related to homelessness among veterans. For instance, the National Coalition for the Homeless, SAMHSA, and individual researchers have explored factors related to homelessness among veterans to provide various accounts of causes and impacts on society. They have all concluded that veterans do not deserve to live on the streets after years of dedication to the country.

Works Cited

Copeland, Larry and Gregg Zoroya. Time is short for audacious goal: End vet homelessness . 2014. Web.

Kuykendall, Mark. FY15 proposed budget takes aim at VA disability claim backlog. 2014. Web.

Leatham, Elizabeth. The Great American Tragedy: Homelessness Among Our Veterans . 2012. Web.

National Coalition for the Homeless. Homeless Veterans. 2009. Web.

Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration. Co-Occurring Disorders and Military Justice: Women Veterans with Co-Occurring Disorders. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2024, February 21). Homeless Veterans Causes and Effects. https://ivypanda.com/essays/homeless-veterans-causes-and-effects/

"Homeless Veterans Causes and Effects." IvyPanda , 21 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/homeless-veterans-causes-and-effects/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Homeless Veterans Causes and Effects'. 21 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Homeless Veterans Causes and Effects." February 21, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/homeless-veterans-causes-and-effects/.

1. IvyPanda . "Homeless Veterans Causes and Effects." February 21, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/homeless-veterans-causes-and-effects/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Homeless Veterans Causes and Effects." February 21, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/homeless-veterans-causes-and-effects/.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Homelessness — Argumentative About Homelessness

Argumentative About Homelessness

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Published: Mar 19, 2024

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