Poverty, Hunger, And Homelessness

The current poverty rate in America is 13.5 percent (US Census Bureau). That measures out to roughly 43.1 million Americans. What exactly is poverty? Poverty means not having enough money to meet basic needs including food, clothing and shelter. However, poverty is so much more than just not having enough money. Poverty is not having access to a doctor or medications you may need, poverty is not having access to a good education. Poverty can be the people who are barely able to pay for food and shelter and simply can’t afford other expenses such as car repairs, field trips with their children and any other extracurricular activity.

The Coalition of Evidence-Based Practice has conducted research to test the effectiveness implemented interventions in various settings. Homelessness has been observed as a result of mentally ill clients being discharged from institutional settings (e.g. hospitals, prisons, and more). Although studies continue to change it has been found that Americans homeless rate in 2008 for individuals was around 740,000 (Fazel, Kohsla, Doll, and Geddes, 2008). This paper will explore the outcomes of this evidence based research and whether the intervention implemented proved to be effective or ineffective.

Seeing homelessness develop is a process that the older generation can say they have been apart of. The young generation, on the other hand, cannot say they have seen the development of homelessness. People who are thirty years old or younger have grown up believing that homelessness was always part of the landscape. The younger generation has come to believe that there have always been homeless people sitting on park benches. When an individual is asked what they see most in a large city like Chicago or New York, ‘homeless people’ is a common response. According to the United States Census Bureau, 320.8 million individuals currently live in the United States of America. Imagine the proportion of individuals that do not own a car or even a house to live in. The National Law Center on Homelessness and poverty did studied to conclude that in America more than 3.5 million people experience homelessness each year. Those concerned with the issue of homelessness are curious as to what events had to have happened that lead to the individuals living on the streets. The reasons are different for each and every person. Some of the more major issues that contribute to this are lack of affordable housing, declining welfare assistance, and most importantly, mental illness. Resolving the issue of homelessness is very possible with new ways of housing and treatment for the mentally ill. The relation between the homeless and the mental illness has risen, and the United States as a whole

Poverty and homelessness are caused by racism, lack of education, alcohol, drug abuse, and individuals who have been born into poverty and are not able to afford the means to get ahead, such as going to college. Homelessness is defined as the lack of a regular, fixed nighttime residence, no matter whether the homeless live with relatives or sleep in parks, shelters or vehicles. About four million people experience homelessness at

3) Poverty is a condition in which people are unable to meet their basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, education, or health.

Over the past years poverty has become more common in America, affecting millions of Americans. There are two types of poverty: absolute poverty and relative poverty. According to  Merriam-Webster (2017), Absolute poverty is not having any basic human needs to survive, in the other hand, relative poverty is not having enough money or resources like others in society do. Poverty is caused by lack of money, jobs, and education.

Poverty is a big problem in the United States. According to Charles Zastrow, “in 2012 over forty-six million people, about fifteen percent of our population was living below the poverty line” (p. 117). In other words, there were a great amount of people living below the poverty line the poverty line. The poverty line is the minimum level of income needed for secured needs of life according to the government. Poverty causes malnutrition, homelessness, School dropout’s drug abuse, and much more.

Poverty is not only an individual problem, but a societal problem. Harrell R. Rodgers wrote an article, “Why are People Poor in America?” Rodgers gives two categories of theories that are used when cultural /behavioral or structural/economic. Behavior/culture theorists look at the behavior, culture and values of the poor as the reason for poverty. While structural /ecIn western culture statistics are an excessively used tool in describing social issues. Numbers help explain a situation, but in excesses, can dehumanize a population. A serious social issue that suffers from desensitization is poverty. Poverty, as it is defined by Webster, is the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of supporting; the condition of being poor. The condition of poverty plagues many American families. According to the Census bureau, 15.1 percent of the United States population falls below the poverty threshold. 15.1 percent does not draw the same effect as the actual 46.6 million individuals living in those circumstances. In the United States, poverty has become a growing problem. There are 15 million more people living in poverty today than in the year 2000 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2013). The poverty threshold, developed by Molly Orshansky, is a tool used to help indicate how many Americans are in poverty. According to the census, 46.6 million of America’s total population makes less than the poverty threshold for a family of four. The condition of being

What is hunger? According to dictionary.com, hunger is feeling of discomfort or weakness caused by lack of food. A person that has no shelter, love and food is considering being homeless. This makes their demand for food and shelter high. Poverty, for centuries has been look over in the United States of America, and for America to have one of highest poverty rates, it is a disgrace. It is a disgrace because America is one of the wealthiest countries, therefore; the government has the resource, in order for poverty not exists at this caliber. By going to St. James Food Pantry, it showed me that poverty in

The most severe form of poverty is homelessness, which is living without a permanent residence. Homelessness refers to people who are using emergency/transitional housing and people who live in unsheltered homes, those living on the streets or in parks, abandoned buildings, cars, subway tunnels or other places that are not meant for human habitation. The homeless population has always been around in the United States. It is a social phenomenon that can be traced back from the colonial era through the present day.

In the documentary “Poverty in America: Born with a Wooden Spoon” we get an in depth look about what it is like to live in poverty in America. In the early moments of the documentary we are informed that the poor people of America are a diverse group of people. These people can be put into sub group and each of them has certain different characteristics. The first and most obvious group is the homeless or otherwise known as the urban poverty. These people are scattered around inner cities and it is very easy to see how hard their life is and what kind of struggle they are going through. The next group is the group of situational poverty. Situational poverty comes about when something abrupt occurs in someone’s life that causes him or her to be forced into poverty. Examples of this can be divorce, losing ones jobs, or sudden illness. Another different kind of poverty is the working class poverty. These are the people that have jobs but make so little that they cannot get themselves above the poverty line. Next are immigrants they provide cheap necessary labor for the country to flourish but yet they are still consider to be apart of poverty. They often do not even work for themselves, they leave their homelands and live on their own just so they can get jobs to send back money home to their families. The middle class can also have people in poverty. They try to cover it up by getting themselves into loads of credit card debt and eventually fall below the poverty line to the

The severity of homelessness and poverty has been a much-debated topic in America. Some people believe that homelessness is one of the most serious issues in our country, while others think that the percentage is not high enough to qualify homelessness as a massive problem. In, reality, however, the subject of homelessness cannot be confined to simply “existent” and “non-existent”.

Poverty is a complex societal issue, which includes social, economic and political elements. It is a lack of necessary means to fulfil basic human needs including food, shelter, clothing etc. The U.S. Census Bureau defines poverty as living in a household with a total cash income below 50 percent of its poverty threshold. Official poverty rates in the US as estimated by the Bureau is 12.7 percent for 2016. Official measures concluded that 43.1 million Americans lived in poverty that year, nearly 1 in every 6 people. The measure is based on information provided from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement. The survey is sent to U.S. households, so the poverty estimates do not include those who are homeless. (Semega,

Imagine a world where it is illegal to sit down. Could you survive if there were no place you were allowed to fall asleep, to store your belongings, or to stand still? For most of us, these scenarios seem unrealistic to the point of being ludicrous. But, for homeless people across America, these circumstances are an ordinary part of life. (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty 7)

Many reasons for worsening situation of homelessness in the country have been reported but none has gathered as much support as poverty. Poverty alone accounts for major increase in homeless households while other possible reasons include loss of job, eroding job opportunities, lack of public assistance and lack of affordable housing facilities. Despite these being powerful reasons, they are all linked to one major reason i.e. poverty.