This paper explores the problem of homelessness in the United States, estimated to affect between three and four million Americans. It begins by identifying the primary causes of homelessness, including unemployment, mental illness, the 2008 housing market collapse, systemic economic inequality, and the rising cost of health care. The paper then evaluates potential solutions at multiple levels: broad structural reforms addressing political and economic inequities, public agency outreach to at-risk individuals and families, private business community programs, and grassroots individual efforts. Together, these approaches are presented as necessary and complementary responses to a complex social problem rooted in both personal circumstances and systemic failures.
The paper demonstrates the use of multi-causal analysis — rather than attributing homelessness to a single factor, it systematically examines structural economic forces, individual circumstances, policy failures, and health care costs as interlocking contributors. This layered causal framework strengthens the argument that solutions must also be multi-pronged.
The paper opens with a scoped introduction establishing the problem's magnitude, then devotes a substantial middle section to causes (economic hardship, mental illness, the housing bubble, systemic inequality, health care costs). The second half mirrors the first by addressing solutions at three levels: public institutions, private businesses, and individual citizens. A brief conclusion ties the three solution domains together. This symmetrical problem-solution structure is characteristic of undergraduate social-issues essays.
Homelessness is defined as the lack of permanent night-time shelter, and it is a problem that affects between three and four million Americans, of whom almost half are children. Those numbers probably underestimate the true extent of the problem because they do not include people who depend on the generosity of friends and family who allow them to sleep in their homes during periods when they would otherwise join the ranks of the homeless. Even before the recent economic recession, families with children were the fastest-growing group of homeless people, and that rate has only increased since the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 and the economic crisis that followed closely thereafter.
Homelessness is more prevalent in large cities, which account for more than two-thirds of all homeless people, with approximately one quarter living in suburbs and fewer than ten percent living in rural areas. However, the homeless in rural America may suffer the most because they have access to fewer public resources — such as homeless shelters and other support networks — that are comparatively available in big cities.
Solving the problem of homelessness is not easy because every homeless person and family represents the need for a good job, and unemployment in the United States is currently at its highest rate since the Great Depression. Still, both public and private organizations can play important roles in helping homeless individuals improve their lives and in preventing homelessness in the first place. To a large degree, that means helping families avoid some of the common secondary effects and problems typically associated with homelessness. More generally, social movements such as the "Occupy Wall Street" effort have also played an important role in promoting the economic reforms necessary to reduce poverty, unemployment, and homelessness in America.
In principle, homelessness is not a difficult problem to understand: typically, individuals and families simply find themselves unable to earn enough money to pay for all of the necessities of ordinary life. Almost nobody becomes homeless overnight, except for those whose homes are destroyed by severe weather events such as floods and hurricanes in circumstances where they do not have the benefit of insurance to reimburse them for their losses and enable them to repair or replace their homes. Usually, homelessness is the last step of a much more gradual process of quality-of-life reduction caused by economic hardship (Toporek, Gerstein, Fouad, et al., 2006).
In many cases, people who lose their jobs or other sources of income gradually reduce their expenditures more and more until all that remains is food and rent or mortgage payments. Continued inability to earn enough money then develops into homelessness as soon as landlords evict them for nonpayment of rent or lending institutions begin foreclosure proceedings on their homes. Unfortunately, many people do not seek help until that stage, largely because they are simply unaware of what resources may be available to them. Sometimes, people who have never before required any form of public assistance are too proud or ashamed to take advantage of available resources to help them avoid homelessness.
Mental illness is another contributing factor to homelessness in America (Markowitz, 2006; Rush & Koegl, 2008), partly because those suffering from mental illness sometimes lack any effective support networks and cannot maintain long-term gainful employment. Many mentally ill individuals do not receive the necessary medical care and treatment for their conditions, and those who are not eligible for government assistance may be unable to afford the cost of their medications (Markowitz, 2006). Once on the streets, they are even more vulnerable to the many dangers of living outside and even less likely to receive the treatment they need.
The high rate of unemployment and the large numbers of individuals and families who have lost their homes since the 2008 collapse of the housing market have significantly worsened the problem of homelessness in America. So many families took on sub-prime mortgage debts that they did not fully understand, or they assumed that the value of their homes would continue to increase indefinitely and borrowed money for living expenses using home equity as collateral. When the housing market crashed, they were left with debts they could not repay, no possibility of refinancing, and mortgage obligations that greatly exceeded the actual value of their homes.
Homelessness is also partly the result of a skewed economic system that underlies the protests that have emerged across the nation. For several decades, top income earners have continually increased their wealth while those in the middle class and below have seen little growth in income or wealth during the same period. To make matters worse, the wealthiest sectors of the financial industry earned their profits at the expense of those less fortunate — for example, by creating and trading securitized junk mortgage bonds that first artificially inflated the housing market and then destroyed it. Meanwhile, many of the stable manufacturing jobs that had been the backbone of middle-class America since the end of World War II have disappeared, replaced by automated processes or outsourced to countries where labor costs are far lower. As a result, the middle class has shrunk considerably while the number of those living in poverty and near-poverty continues to grow. In fact, many homeless people are actually employed but in jobs that pay too little to afford permanent shelter; they are known as the working poor and often sleep in homeless shelters at night while working minimum-wage jobs during the day (Carey, 2007).
The ever-increasing cost of health care is yet another significant contributor to homelessness. In the United States, medical bills are one of the most common reasons that people slip into bankruptcy and poverty for the first time (Grogan & Gusmano, 2007; Wronka, 2008). Health insurance companies have historically been free to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions and even to drop patients who were covered when they first contracted a serious illness. At the same time, the dominance of private, for-profit health insurance companies has directly contributed to the inflated cost of health care services. Today, it is virtually impossible, even for working middle-class families, to afford the costs of a major illness without private health insurance or public program reimbursement (Wronka, 2008).
The most significant systemic change needed to reduce homelessness in the broadest and longest-term sense would be to address the structural problems in American society — those at the heart of movements like "Occupy Wall Street." In principle, that will require confronting the fact that large, well-financed industries (such as banks, financial institutions, and health care organizations) have enjoyed the freedom to lobby legislators in Washington for decisions favorable to their profit margins, while much of that profit has come at the expense of the middle class and the poor, who lack equivalent political access or influence. A minority of elected officials have been vocal about this problem, but they remain substantially outnumbered by colleagues who have little interest in changing the status quo.
Existing public agencies and administrators of public assistance programs could help reduce homelessness by devoting more resources to publicizing and expanding access to their programs so that individuals and families living at or near the poverty line receive the maximum assistance for which they are eligible before their financial problems become unmanageable. This effort should include public school systems, since homeless children are at far greater risk of dropping out and experiencing numerous serious problems in childhood and adolescence than their non-homeless peers. While schools may not be able to prevent homelessness or help families recover financially, they are well-positioned to ensure that homelessness does not cause more damage to students than it must.
Ultimately, the solution to homelessness in America will require efforts in all three major areas: meaningful political and economic reforms, private sector organizational support, and grassroots assistance within the community on a more personal level.
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.