Homelessness Is The Growing Number Of The Biggest And Most...

One of the biggest and most complex issues facing the United States right now is the growing number of homelessness. There are so many people from so many different backgrounds and demographics that it is a truly overwhelming task to keep track. Most of them will go without the base level of needs for a human, including food, clean water, and shelter. In almost every case, with homelessness comes poverty. Dreisbach (2013) says, homelessness in America is a persistent, complex, and widely-occurring problem that incorporates many economic, social, and psychological dimensions. To try and understand such a complex social issue, the correlation between poverty, crime and homelessness should be found. There is a strong correlation†¦show more content†¦Homelessness is also the product of individual difficulties such as legal issues stemming from past offenses and mental disabilities like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for our veterans returning from foreign wars. When one is attempting to address and/or fix the issue of homelessness, it is important to understand the types of classifications, or different groups, of homeless. The first and largest group of homeless that needs to be addressed is the chronically homeless. The chronically homeless represent 10% of the single homeless population, and itself represents approximately 50% of homeless people, over time. The next group is the episodically homeless group, who use shelter repeatedly, and should probably be dealt with first. This group makes up around 9% of the single homeless population and carries a high cost when housed in shelters. The high cost comes from the member’s constant interaction with other very costly public systems, like jails and prisons and hospitals. All of this cost is then passed on to the tax payers and not the members themselves, which is why it is so important to deal here first. Lastly is the transitionally homeless, who are the relatively short stays in the homeless assistance systems, who exit it and return infrequently, if at all (Homelessness in America: Statistics and