Homelessness In America Essay

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Homelessness has been on a constant rise in America since 2016 with chronic homelessness rising at a much more rapid rate over these past years. With things getting more expensive it is becoming a bigger issue and it needs to be addressed. There are celery major problems in our system if we are having this many people living out on the streets. Modern homelessness originated around the 1970s when single-room housing began to become regulated and made it nearly impossible to build new or keep existing complexes running. Homelessness has been an issue in America since the beginning but to let it get this bad is unacceptable and changes clearly need to be made in order to help these people since it is not right to have people living out in the …show more content…

For example some homeless people will suffer with schizophrenia, depression or post traumatic stress disorder from serving in the army and this is just a few of the things they could be going through. In the Article published by Dr. E. Fuller “Homeless Mentally Ill Facts and Figures” Fuller address the issue of the amount of homeless people in America who suffer from some sort of mental illness and provides this qutoe “25 percent of the American homeless—140,000 individuals—were seriously mentally ill at any given point in time. Forty-five percent of the homeless—250,000 individuals—had any mental illness. More would be labeled homeless if these were annual counts rather than point-in-time counts'' (Fuller 1). This quote shows how bad the problem is with nearly half of the entire homeless population suffering from a mental illness with a decent amount of these people suffering from a serious mental illness. There is simply not enough support in place to help out all the hundreds and thousands of homeless people suffering from a mental illness. It is already hard enough for a homeless person to be able to support themselves and be able to find a way to afford a place to stay and for a vast of amount of them it is made even more difficult with them having to go through these mental illness while already being homeless and not being able to purchase medicine or …show more content…

They believe that they should be able to help themselves and should not require help from others. While some homeless people are able to lift themselves up, not all homeless people go through the same struggles and some may have just been lucky and given better opportunities to escape the poverty they are in. Due to certain policies and the way some cities were built most of the land used for housing is for single family homes. We can see examples of this from an article written by Lopez, German named “Homeless in America.” he discuss the reasons why its so bad and how it got to this point and states that “California. Los Angeles County allocates 76 percent of its residential land to single-family housing, while the San Francisco Bay Area allocates 85 percent. Historically, this has made it difficult to build more housing: Most plots are reserved for only one family, instead of duplexes or apartment buildings that can house many more” (German 1). With so much of the residential land being used for single family homing it is made difficult to find a complex to stay in and with not enough complexes it is made more expensive to afford one and to live in

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