Homeless - a life-crusher worldwide
To live a normal life requires having a home to live in. Yet homeless people can be found in every country, in smaller numbers or in larger numbers, with no home and unable to afford any - and often only because they cannot get the housing loans or welfare available to others.
The causes of homelessness may have been family breakdown or tragedy (maybe via orphanage or prison), or perhaps a natural disaster or war - but in developed countries it can largely be the socially less competent or disabled failing to get the welfare help that is in principle available (as often some otherwise good welfare systems are very bad at handling homeless people). While a few governments do expend great effort to try to deal with homelessness, though generally failing to find adequate solutions, many governments are doing little or nothing to try to tackle it.
Having no home can make it extremely hard for adults to get or keep work, being one of the causes of poverty which in addition to helping to maintain homelessness also helps turn households trying to be useful prospering citizens into victimised anti-social problem households breeding further poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction and crime and problem children. Democratic governments generally help worsen the social exclusion of the homeless by also robbing them of their voting rights - often on a bogus 'impracticality' basis (but often too for pre-trial criminal defendants who have been found guilty of nothing and for whom no voting impracticality can be remotely claimed).
Solutions offered to the homeless can often be unacceptable fearful hostels or orphanages. Families who find themselves homeless for whatever reason can find themselves split up, with the children put into orphanages and the parents into single person hostels. Or being desperate they may have to accept housing that nobody else wants, often said to be temporary when it is actually indefinite. Much of this site is about these poor housing alternatives that can help to destroy lives and intensify social exclusion of the less fortunate in societies. Of course those with better incomes may be offered much better options, as with the UK government funded HomeBuy schemes for England. There are also often homeless street children whose extreme problems may be more a social care issue than just a housing issue but who are also often largely ignored or handled badly.
One cause of homelessness may be a need to escape a domestic violence, more often involving a woman with maybe children. There will even be cases of homelessness causing the death of younger people, more often women, as when a woman fleeing a domestic violence falls ill in a strange town. If only doctors can legally prescribe an antibiotic then a person not registered with any local doctor may easily die of pneumonia because a pharmacist could not give tham an antibiotic. Their death will be registered as being due to pneumonia and not as due to the law or their homelessness wrongly preventing them getting the needed antibiotic.
Generally the homeless may often need only affordable housing being available, or that plus housing loans that are available to others, but some can afford nothing and need welfare to pay housing costs for them. In developing countries without welfare, and with simpler housing systems, the homeless can often themselves best advise on the cheapest solutions locally possible. This is likely to be much less useful in developed countries with complex welfare and housing systems. see Shack or Squat. Or read about one homeless problem in one US city detailed below ;
Homeless Families in New York
The New York Times on 11 October 2007 reported that, from the following day, New York City officials would treat homeless families with children less kindly. While they had been giving one-night emergency shelter to families reapplying for housing after being ruled ineligible, if they reapplied after 5pm, this would be stopped. In future homeless families who apply for housing but are turned down - usually because officials claim they can stay with a friend or a relative - will be left homeless if they reapply.
It seems that New York officials found that their earlier rules led to too many homeless families reapplying for housing at night time. And also homeless-family night housing applications increased sharply in 2007 - seemingly because entering even one-night shelter was widely thought to help entry to regular subsidised housing, even by many non-homeless poor.
But there has been claims that New York homeless applying for housing are often being ruled ineligible wrongly, with the process involving many errors. New York official are seemingly trying to reduce their error rate, but may be leaving some poor New York families with young children homeless.
* Every city should have its own drug and alcohol treatment center that focuses on helping those who can't afford treatment at a regular rehab facility.
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Some homeless websites you may wish to visit:- Homeless International . Homeless USA . Homeless UK
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